I think and talk a lot about pleasure, but a word that has been emerging more insistently as of late in my personal healing practice is joy. I’m inviting joy to be the candle I light first in my heart these days. Joy is teaching me that once pain has taught us all it can in the grief process, that joy can take on the healing mantle to tend to our grief. Joy can lighten the load. Joy can be a gentle, tender, and loving guide.
Maybe this will seem out of nowhere to some, but one place where I observe joy is in the symbiotic connection. The type of relationship where both entities agree, by biological or relational imperative, that all they need in order to connect is the essential gift they offer simply by existing in space alongside one another in reciprocal flow. For example, I am practicing when I take a walk in the woods, affirming that all I need from the plant earthlings is their oxygen, and all they need from me is my CO2. Yes, there are actually many other things we need from one another, but when I start with this essential symbiotic orientation I can breathe in that space with more relaxed joy and ease. And, yes, there is also something intangible that exists between us: an acknowledgement between earthlings of the power source we are connected to between, and among, the many universal realms.
Joy exists in that quality of present awareness.
When I recognize the harmony that simple presence and acceptance offers, I am in a joyful state of flow and allowance for all spirit to exist just as it is. I joyfully love and accept my connection to spirit exactly as it is, now.
But it can be so very challenging to learn how to arrive, again and again, in a state of flow. The work to find ease within oneself requires exceptional bravery and trust, everyday I still catch myself falling back into old behavioral programming. Instead of shaming myself for this habitual tendency, I observe it. Observation brings me back into the present moment, and there is joy there. Joy in the awareness. Joy in the distance between myself and a habit. An old habit.
It has been helpful to learn how to transmute habit into transformational ritual, to invite the sacredness of ritual and connection with spirit to intercede on my behalf. I would like to say more about ritual, but first I want to say a few more things on the sacred. There is a symbiotic connection that exists between the corporeal realm of our human and earthly existence, and that of the sacred.
The sacred is not some clean and pure state of perpetual nirvana. The sacred is being in the present moment. The sacred is awareness of all that is tangible, as well as awareness of all that exists just beyond words and pictures. The sacred exists in the ephemeral and transitory nature of all we experience and encounter. The sacred speaks through us, so that we may sing songs of meaning, purpose, and connection to one another.
The sacred exists for me when I can sit with a vibrant, tall stand of wild nettles, listening for their song. It exists as well in a clean rack of dishes. The glow of a candle flame. Watching plants grow slowly and steadily as Spring progresses here in the Northern Hemisphere, and grieving the rapid shifts in weather that climate crisis carries across the planet. Witnessing myself age. Training my muscles to slowly recover strength after a long period of rest and emotional recovery. The sacred also exists for me in my time on stage performing; I create a container of joy, pleasure, delight, and desire for myself, and a container on stage for the audience to witness me.
Gratitude is sacred. Anger is sacred. Love is sacred. Mystery and fear are sacred. Connection is sacred. Joy is sacred.
To cultivate joy in the sacred of the everyday, engage in ritual. Begin with a ritual that can easily be repeated regularly, in a space where you feel spacious connection with the sacred: drinking a special cup of tea, playing music or singing, dancing along to your favorite song, soaking in a warm salt bath, breathing with intention, reading, journaling, taking a walk or a skip with the land, and so on. Show up there regularly, with devotion, and gratitude. Spirit and the sacred honor regular commitments made by the devoted. The reward I experience is an embodied, relieving realization that this world needs very little from me.
I believe that we are crafted in divinity just as we are. Much of the energy that we have been trained to believe, within a capitalist mindset, wherein we need to expend and produce in perfunctory, exponential growth for the digestible consumption of others is actually meant to be expansive matter just for us: our own private window into the joy of the sacred that is our very essence. There is very little I may actually need from someone else, but there is much I wish to share with those who are able and willing to honor devotion to, and acceptance of, the sacred.