“What Brings You Joy?” is by far the most difficult question for me to answer when I started out on this journey. How the heck should I know? I hadn’t given myself much space to think about that for over 25 years, maybe not ever. I was wired for what was “practical” and “responsible”. What did joy have to do with anything?
Little did I realize at the time, that joy is the key to everything. It is the key to health, and happiness, and connection, and being authentic. It is the guiding star of our inner guidance system. It is the thing that lets us know if we are on the right track or not. And yet who is taught to pay attention to that as an indicator of anything, much less everything?
I was asked this question enough times that it frustrated me that I didn’t have an answer for it, nor did I know how to develop one. So I gave myself a couple of gifts. Most notably, the gifts of time and experimentation. I had been on my own for a while – about a year or so, and I realized that I was still holding myself accountable to the structure and expectations that I had adhered to in the corporate world. I felt guilty going to the grocery store or doing anything “personal” during “business hours”. And yet I finally had what I’d always wanted – time freedom. No one telling me where to be or when to be there. No one placing expectations on me. And yet, I was still holding myself to those old standards that I’d wanted so badly to be free from.
So I began to try new things, and to push myself out of my comfort zone from what I had known to what I wanted to experience. At one point, I signed up for a pottery class at 10am on Monday mornings for 8 weeks to force myself out of my routine and what was “acceptable”. I would start my week doing something “non-productive” and creative, using my hands not my brain, and I would do something “fun” and “personal” during “business hours”. And I LOVED it! I had a blast learning to make pottery, regardless of the outcome of how “good” or not it was. And it set my week off on a better note.
I have always loved to travel, and from a very early age I have had the opportunity to travel to many places. I love experiencing new cultures and meeting people and eating new foods and seeing all of the beauty there is in the world. That brings me tremendous joy. So I started embracing that love and joy that I feel when I travel, and started dreaming of, planning, and taking some trips I’d always wanted to take.
I also realized that I love being in nature, and working in my garden, and creating beautiful outdoor spaces. So I started experimenting with that.
And fast forward a few years, and I learned that I loved creating art. I abandoned it many years ago because I didn’t think I was good enough or talented enough to be a real artist, but I realized that it brings me much joy to create. Finding mixed media artists that I could learn from really helped me to reconnect to creating art. Beautiful, messy, colorful, full-of-texture, and meaningful art.
The flipside is also true – those things that do NOT bring you joy, the things that cause you stress and anxiety and negative emotions, are giving you information about what you do NOT want more of in your life. It gives you information about where you might need to make a different choice, no matter how “hard” that seems. That there is a more loving choice you can make for yourself that is in greater alignment with who you are and what you need in your life. You want to give less energy to these things and do these things less often, if at all.
If you don’t know what brings you joy, maybe try giving yourself the gifts of time and experimentation to figure it out. Let yourself play. Think about what you really enjoyed doing as a child before you started censoring yourself or choosing your activities to please other people. Reconnect to those things that you naturally gravitated toward and really enjoyed doing – drawing, painting, singing, riding a bike, horse-back riding, swimming, etc. Suspend judgement about how “good you are at it”, and just do it. Experience it. Show up and play. If it feels good to engage in the activity (suspending judgment about the outcome), do more of it. If it doesn’t then try something else.
What is one thing that you might want to reconnect to that you may have abandoned many years ago? What brings you joy? Let me know in the comments to this post.