Joy in the driver’s seat;
(This conversation was held between two people both raised in Christian based religions. Please know that God is not a definitive term. It is simply the one we were both raised with. Please in your mind replace God with whatever term for “greater power” fits for you.)
Once again I found myself engaged in the most wonderful conversation with this client. It started with her ah-ha moment of discovering that if God is Love and God is Joy, then if we believe that God is in control and driving our lives, that means that love and joy are driving our lives.
And that perception changes everything.
“It’s like my soul is joyfully choosing this challenge because it is very excited about the upcoming joy. We want to get to the top of the mountain, and we know we have to climb the steep part but we are so excited to see the top, that our Soul is excited to do the hard thing”
She went on:
“When I think of God as being in control, it doesn’t always feel very good. It feels like I have to earn happiness. And even love, love can feel heavy, like a weight”.
I get that. We have been taught to humanize God, and so to find ourselves in a relationship where we have to be pleasing in order to be rewarded with good luck and a good life, the weightedness of LOVE can feel like an expectation to do for others, give to others, and leave us in an experience of self sacrifice.
But what about JOY?
“Joy helps me connect to the adventuresome spirit of my Soul”. She said.
Indeed.
Joy can do hard things, but does them from the place of intrigue, curiosity, and to see what I am learning through this experience. Joy has a central focus, us, as the experiencer. Very often we are encouraged to see life from a place of what and how we are giving, but JOY takes us into the glory of the experience itself and all that it offers. Joy sees everything through the bigger picture and allows us to move beyond our tendency to be near sighted.
When we allow JOY in the driver’s seat of life, we can do hard things from a place of faith that all is unfolding in a great mystery that can only land us in a place of evolution and growth. Through JOY we can learn to “wait and see” in curiosity knowing there is a responsive Universe working WITH us as we create. Joy faces challenges with heart wide open as it recognizes that everything is for us to experience and we are enough for all that is in our path. Joy lets us wonder from a space of intrigue, not fear.
JOY is a practice.
Ask yourself: If the JOY that my Soul holds for this human experience is a constant observer, what am I learning? What am I contributing to? When I am curious, what becomes possible to consider that I could not consider before? What hard thing am I doing that I can bring curiosity to? How am I fulfilling the JOY of my Soul in this time?
Joy does not mean we are always happy. We’re not 5 years old. We will not always get what we want. But JOY lets us be in a place of knowing the view ahead holds more opportunity and possibility and that our focus on curiosity has the ability to change everything.
Forever the journey, Anne