The practice of joy

TL;DR None yet

One glaring hole in many of our skillsets, at least in my own and many of the people I have encountered in my life, is generating joy at our own goodness, be they our good impulses, our good efforts, or our good results. We often feel like we need to achieve certain goals to avoid damnation, put our nose to the grindstone grimly, and when we finally finish, we move right on to the next looming responsibility that must be addressed. This is not sustainable, so today, let’s examine the topic of joy, how it can be generated, defended, and practiced.

Let’s start with a misconception I encounter often, which is that joy must come naturally and automatically for it to be real. This is simply not the case. Our self-judgement and grimness feel natural because they’re habitual, they’re practiced, they’re customary. When you decide to go against that internal grain and set up an intention to feel some joy at your goodness, part of the mind rebels: “This is artificial, this is awkward, this is weird…” Ok, so what? All new skills are going to feel strange at first, and joy is no exception. Think of toddlers learning to walk. It involves a lot of standing up and falling down, it involves a lot of stumbling around and flapping their arms, but eventually the unnecessary movements subside, the gait gets more regular, and confidence grows. Eventually their walking is habitual, practiced and customary. So too it is with joy.

So, if our metaphor is toddlers and walking, what is our first step in learning to feel joy at our own good actions? Well, we need to find a good action, we want an action that is helping us on our search for genuine happiness. Maybe something comes to mind, you might have tackled a big mess in your house recently, or done a kindness for your neighbor, or kept your temper in difficult circumstances. If nothing at all comes to mind, then consider the fact that you’re currently reading an article about how to develop skills of the heart, and realize that that in and of itself is a good action. Now we should all be set.

Having picked our good action, the next step is to generate some warmth and appreciation inside. This might be genuinely hard, but here are some tips. Simple physical feedback can do wonders. Try to put a warm smile on your face. make encouraging noises out loud, think of how you would encourage a dog: “gooood, well done, good boy”. If it feels a bit embarrassing that’s good, often underneath that embarrassement is the warmth you’re looking for. You can try to breath in a deep and encouraging way. If you’re feeling particularly physically adept today, here’s a fun exercise: start patting your own head with your hand in a gentle, supportive way. Really put all of your mental energy and focus in trying to pat your head really well. Then, after doing that for 6-10 seconds, keep on going but switch your focus to your head. Try to really feel your head being patted, so nice and warm and encouraging.

One common emotional response here is a welling up of sadness. This stems from the fact that we’ve simply been in so many situations where we felt a joy at something good but either got shot down, or also very commonly and probably even more harmfully, shot ourselves down. After a while we started distrusting the joy and pushed away the parts of us that were hungry for it. Now, with an upwelling of simple, physical joy, those sad, repressed voices can come up again. It is really important that you don’t go running with them, don’t get lost in their stories but you also don’t push then down again, simply create room, create space, and keep generating and feeding them joy. They will eventually have their fill and quiet down, and as you get better and more consistent at generating this joy, this upwelling sadness response will become less and less.

Now, the other side of the practice of joy is defending it from doubt. As we already mentioned in the previous paragraph, we often shoot ourselves down when we feel joy at something, and we need to start doing something about that. It is really hard to avoid those self-critical, judgemental voices coming, so instead what we’re going to do is cut those voices down when they come. It is hard to anticipate exactly what arguments the internal doubters might bring to convince you that you suck and that your joy is misplaced, so you are going to have to think on your feet, but lets cover a few common ones and how you might counterattack them.

One common deflationary voice that can come up comes when you finish a subtask or a milestone of a larger project. This doesn’t have to be a work project, it could also be you finished doing the dishes but you still have to tidy the living room. You celebrate your victory, you did a thing that was hard to do, and the voice pipes up: “Yeah, but you’re not there yet”, and the old, automatic, internal response would be “Ugh, yeah.. guess not”. But that response is not necessary, there are other things you can say like “Every little step matters!” or “No goodness too small to celebrate!”. When you then hold that counter-argument, really try to invest it with your heart. There is simple, real truth in the statement “Every little step matters” and that firm conviction, that insistent belief, can protect your joy from your doubts. Note that this is not trying to convince the negative voice that we should all agree to celebrate this little goodness, or that the goodness is large enough to get recognized. You don’t need to convince the deflationary voices, you cut them down with universal statements, “No goodness too small…”, “Every little step matters…”. There is no arguing over size, only certainty in goodness.

Another voice doesn’t necessarily point at things you haven’t done yet, but points at other ways in which you did fall short. “Yeah, you handed in your thesis, but you handed it in 1 year late” . I’m sure many of us can relate. Here too, strike at its root! “Every goodness is independently good!”, “This is good and nothing else matters right now”. This perspective might need some explaining though. Many of us seem to treat our goodness as an average across our actions. We did some bad things, we did some good things, so it all balances out. That’s a very unhelpful way to think of goodness and badness. It is much better to think of it like a garden. You plant some fruit trees, you plant some poison ivy. Eventually you will have fruit and a painful rash. The fact that you planted poison ivy does not remove the goodness of the fruit, in the same way that planting the fruit will not protect you from the poison ivy.

One final insidious voice that I think comes up commonly is the “don’t get too full of yourself” voice. This one can be a little harder to deal with because although it isn’t true, it’s truth adjacent. There is a kind of pride where you exalt yourself above others, and that kind of pride is dangerous and harmful and therefore to be avoided. But taking joy in your goodness does not contain that conceit, you are simply happy over having done something good, not because you are better than others. This is a subtle distinction, but a very important one, and this distiction can help you battle this doubt. Another, funnier way, is simply turning the voice around on itself. If you should not be too full of yourself, then that voice should not be so full of itself that it can tell you what to do. Clearly it is not living up to its own standards.

Having discussed how to start generating joy at your good actions, and how to defend it from some common assailants, all that remains now is to practice. Don’t expect this to feel natural or easy quickly. This resistance to feeling joy goes deep in many of us. Just chalk it up to cultural baggage and keep practicing. One very deliberate practice that can really help is a daily ‘three good things’ exercise. At the end of the day pause for a moment and set the intention that you are going to recall three good things that you did that day. Mind you, three good things that you did, not three good things that happened. Then really try generate some juicy joy for each one in turn, and protect them from any assailing doubts. Again, if you have trouble coming up with any, the first one can always be that you’re doing the “Three good things” exercise right now, and then take it from there.

So, that’s all I really wanted to cover for this topic for now. Since I’ve only just started writing out my thoughts I can’t yet link to other articles to add some clarifying context, so I want to add a bunch of footnotes and addenda, but I will restrain myself to just two short clarifications.

Firstly, joy does not mean contentment. When you practice joy at having done a good thing, that does not mean that you will not take it any further. You really celebrate having done the dishes, and then get on with tidying up the living room.

Secondly, when selecting good things to celebrate, be really careful that what you celebrate is genuinely good, since they’re behaviors that you’re encouraging internally. What you really want to celebrate are harmless, genuinely good actions. Kindness, generosity, maintaining composure, perseverance. Not having gotten one over on someone else, or getting lucky out in the world, or having had a really nice meal.

Very well, I will leave it there for now. As always, may you all learn to look after yourselves well.