Joyology, The Art Of Recovering Your Lost Joy

Excerpt Two:

We lie to make up for the truths we can not face yet. Dream of mine, 2004

We dare not devote ourselves to welcoming rivers of joy, (and many times without drugs inducing this pseudo joyous state.) We dare not choose joy. I wonder if we even know what the word JOY means. Joy is defined as :

a. Intense and especially ecstatic or exultant happiness.

b. The expression or manifestation of such feeling.
c. To take great pleasure; rejoice.

We are vessels, we can fill ourselves with the fresh waters of joy, or be apathetic and leave room for pain and suffering that will overstay it’s welcome if we let it.
What is the difference in Joy and happiness? We can feel joy and not be able to manifest it. We need to feel and manifest it in our daily lives. It is not reserved for some future event. What else do we have if not our days? This is our time. Now.

Joy is more than happiness. Joy exists on an astral plane above happiness. Joy is the ocean feeding the rivers. Joy is transcendent. Joy is not grandiose.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are in adequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous. Actually, who are you Not to be? You are a child of God.”
Marriane Williamson
I can hear the negative people now, discounting this because they have been brainwashed to believe it is egocentric to think this way.
When we feel trauma and sadness, we need to pay attention, get inside that pain and heal it as a path in our lives. Balance is the key.
“People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong…why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom.”
I have been afraid to stop focusing on my faults. I have been afraid to stop. If I stop, what if I let one thing go and I am suddenly swallowed up by my wickedness? Where does this come from? Abuse, religious brainwashing, perfectionism. It’s ok, we are not produce, taking a break and focusing on our strengths will not lead to us rotting.

We can work on ourselves without focusing too much on how much fixing we need. There is an undercurrent when a woman expresses true confidence and joy. She is arrogant, conceited, grandiose. It is no wonder we are starving for joy. We are searching like lost children, in relationships, in religion, in food, in drugs, not a coincidentally that many of the younger generations have tired to ECSTASY to experience this. Our searching can lead us to dangerous places, in the barren wasteland of drugs, empty dogma, denigrating un-reciprocal relationships. Mothers need to reciprocate in their relationships with their children. Children deserve this. It enrages me that I even have to say this, but I do because I know my own mother. It is not ok to make promises that you won’t keep, to not show up for a visit, even when she is an adult, to be an absent adult parent and an absent grandparent.

Create space for joy. There is room in you. Open your mind, and your heart to joy. Create a welcoming space for joy. Start in your home if it is hard to access internally. Make a vision board about joy, a collage. Find images that resonate and make something artful, hang it up. Joy is healing, it heals and it is healing. It is about freedom, the freedom to feel, to be yourself, you be anything, to BE. Just BE.
We deserve joy, we have suffered enough, our children have suffered for the sins of their parents, for abusers, for the pain of something that is not theirs to own. We need to look within and heal. Our relationships are suffering, we are projecting pain from the past onto our partners. The earth is suffering. Animals suffer. Enough.
But joy can not be fully felt when we can not and have not fully felt our suffering, our losses, our grief. Again, depression gets pathologized and many people end up repressing their pain even more because to be ‘depressed’ is considered weak and taboo. Sometimes we just need to give our love to depression. Depression is repression. Maybe we need to sit and feel it.

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” Henry Miller


Welcome joy, feel the fear and welcome her anyway. That tidal wave we fear may be exactly what we need.

“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit. Helen Keller
I hope I am opening a new heaven to human beings who have suffered from sexual abuse. I want my relationship and mothering to do this for others. If we dare embrace our right to a joyous life, if we dare speak our truth in any form, we risk devaluation. My uncle called me an eccentric weirdo. He chose not to see my creativity growing up. When I was old enough, he became threatened by it. The fact that I ate organic really pissed him off, and he dismissed my newfound union with my soul as “back to nature stuff..” The underlying threat of violence in his tone threw me for a loop. I sensed what was coming. Martin [Luther King Jr.] attempted to define violence as the language of the unheard. I heard the unheard, I realized this incest stuff was infecting everyone unconsciously in that family, the perfect uncle was turning from me, and i could see in his silhouette colors of truth.
We have absorbed spiritual pessimism long enough, let’s attune to the beatific. Let’s own it.
“And the say came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom” Anais Nin
This is exactly why I spoke out. No matter how betrayed I have been by my “family”, and I have been, by every family member linked to me by original blood, I dared speak, fight, live. It hurt worse to be stifled, quite, complicit.
The truth of our abuse. The abuse that was dumped on us, it is not actually OURS.
Calling the rape what it was, rape, to my grandmother was an abomination! Oh she recoiled in horror that I would dare use the word! “Rape?! How can you say that??” I once wrote Pops a letter and said “I know we have had our differences(amazing how I am apologizing for his violence!!), but I love you. I am sorry your son raped me.” She lit up on me like the 4th of July. “How dare you say that to your grandfather, ‘I’m sorry your son raped me? What a horrible thing to say!!”
"Oh please, what a horrible thing to DO!!"
And so it went, just like always.
What enrages and flabbergasts me is that out of 6 adults, I was the ONLY one who was sorry that I was raped. The only one. The next person in my life who was truly profoundly enraged, sorrowful, and hell-bent on validating my very soul was my husband. He modeled this for me.
There are people who will support us, we have to know that.