Joy and Gratitude: Beyond a Puppy Practice

I told myself all week that this last post for May would focus on joy.  But everything over the course of the week kept getting in the way of me actually experiencing joy. So, how can I write about it if I'm not experiencing it?  How can I write about it, not only when I'm not experiencing it, but when I'm feeling an enormous amount of anger and anti-joy?  

Yet, as I was writing this morning, I knew I had to do a gratitude practice. I could feel how much I needed something to ground me in positive and uplifting energy.  But what I wrote was this:  

The whole time I wrote down what I held gratitude for, my mind kept slipping back into the things that stress me out. I kept thinking about how my heart hurts and then I feel disingenuous about the whole gratitude practice.  I sit with thoughts about how I'm lazy and scared and I struggle to get myself back to a place where I really truly feel grateful for my life--and truly feel joyous.  It just seems so false.  Like I'm trying to pretend to be happy.

I write this now with a sweet puppy in my lap and Pearl Jam's "Faithfull" playing in the background. And in these moments, I can feel real joy and gratitude. It comes at the most unexpected of times.

But joy can't be only found in puppy moments.

But what struck me earlier this morning when I was writing about the practice of gratitude was the word practice.  It was a strange moment that was both an epiphany and a feeling of 'duh'...  If I treat it like my practices of meditation and yoga, it starts to make much more sense when it doesn't always feel real. When I sit in meditation my mind frequently wanders. It can be a chore to keep myself from dwelling on a single thought in meditation. But even if I come back to my breath and body only for a moment, I know it was a valuable practice.  In fact, the more difficult the meditation, the more I realize I need to be engaged in the practice.  Until this morning, this point did not resonate at all with my work on gratitude.  What struck me is when the practice feels least genuine and most forced--that is when it is the most important for me to keep practicing. It is not phony or disingenuous; that is the work. Digging past those negative voices that distract me from the actual experience.  It takes work to feel and experience joy.  Sure, sometimes I'm lucky enough to experience it in the sweet softness of a puppy, but for a sustained experience of joy in a life of difference, disagreement, inequality, and suffering, finding joy and gratitude takes real concerted effort.  At least for me.  Do the puppy moments help? Of course they do. They can be important moments of respite, but we can't live in those puppy moments all the time.  We have to emerge in the world and feel joy when we are surrounded with rocky and treacherous terrain that can hurt. Joy has to be accessed when we know we've pissed people off or feel betrayed or have to watch people treat each other in terrible and hurtful ways. Those are the moments in which joy takes on a deeper meaning. For me, it is finding it in those moments that helps me realize how far I have come and that I can find joy within myself.  It reminds me that joy isn't simply about good things happening to me.  

Merriam-Webster defines joy as:  "the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires." What is key for me in that definition is the emotion evoked by well-being.  It is about how healthy I am feeling inside and not so much about what is happening to me from the outside.  Or rather, it is when I have the strength and resiliency to experience joy even when everything around me feels like it is going to shit.


As the song, "Faithfull," continues on in my thoughts, one particular line continues to run through my mind:

M.Y.T.H. is belief in the game controls that keeps us in a box of fear; we never listen; voice inside so drowned out; drowned you are, you are, you are everything; and everything is you; me you, you me, it's all related...  --Pearl Jam

Perhaps joy is not only hearing that drowned out voice, but moving through fear and into a place where joy is not a reaction to the world, but the internal shaping of ourselves in a world that, unfortunately, feeds on fear and negativity. A world that pushes an organic experience of joy deeper and deeper beneath the surface, making it harder and harder to access.  Perhaps that is why Merriam-Webster focuses their definition of joy, not so much on the emotion experienced by well-being, as on the stuff we possess and achieve, and other external measures of ourselves in the world. But I find that limiting and a set up for failure.  The practice of gratitude, at least for me, is a way of trying to move through those superficial experiences and find a deeper experience of joy.  Even if for only a moment.