Why You Can Feel Joy AND Pain (+ Why That’s a Good Thing!)
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Not to sound like a broken record– but whew. Seriously whew. What a year it has been.
From moments of pure “down in the dumps” to moments of…well…pure joy. We have covered the spectrum of emotions, haven’t we?
If there’s one emotion though that remains from the year, I truly hope it is joy.
Continue reading to see what I mean.
We Can Feel Joy and Pain at the Same Time:
One of my favorite books, The Book of Joy, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu (+ Douglas Abrams) truly opened my eyes to why we need to choose joy every single day. In my first post, I started to talk about what joy really is.
Something that I love about the idea of joy is that it allows space for darkness. According to The Book of Joy,
“Discovering joy does not, I’m sorry to say […] save us from the inevitable hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive.”
The Book of Joy
Joy leaves room for the not so fun emotions to be felt. It allows for us to feel the pain that comes in life sometimes. But in feeling that pain, as The Book of Joy suggests, also enables us to experience life a little more.
The Book of Joy
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Why it’s a Good Thing to Feel Joy and Pain:
Memes, videos and skits are out there to add humor to just how crazy life feels sometimes. It can be filled with a lot of difficult stuff, heartbreak and emotions.
However, feeling–and choosing joy–means that we can feel that pain.
If we aim for happiness, I think we would feel like we can’t feel this way–those not-so-fun feelings go against happiness. But with joy, the not-so-fun emotions are part of living in joy.
Something that I have noticed since the COVID pandemic is how people seem to be more authentic.
More people are saying, “This year is hard”. More people are saying, “I’m tired of making it seem like I have it all together because I don’t!”. More people are deciding what really matters to them and changing their life to reflect that.
More people are just being real. And I feel that’s a good thing.
In allowing ourselves to feel the pain that has comes in life sometimes, maybe we are allowing ourselves to feel a little more humanness. In doing so, perhaps we are feeling a deeper sense of joy underneath it all.
Let’s Be Real (+ Joyful!):
We don’t need to force ourselves to be happy. We can choose to be real and say, “This year has been hard” and we can grieve the opportunities, things and relationships that the time drastically has changed.
Instead of seeing that as not being optimistic or “seeing the glass half full”, we can take comfort that we are still aligned with joy.
Joy has room for pain. It has room for the hurt. Because when we feel that way, we’re being human and we’re being joyful.
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