Summary
Joe and Brett explore why people don’t feel joy all the time despite it being the ultimate goal behind most pursuits. Joe defines joy as “happiness experienced with pleasure”—an embodied, whole-body experience that integrates head, heart, and gut. He introduces the metaphor that “joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome,” meaning that suppressing any emotion blocks access to joy.
The conversation explores how joy is actually the natural state—like water underneath the boats in a harbor—requiring no effort to access. The resistance we apply to emotions creates friction in the system, and joy is simply energy flowing through the circuit with minimal resistance. Trying to feel joy is itself a form of resistance, because it implies joy is something to achieve rather than something already present.
They discuss the relationship between joy and identity dissolution: fully allowing joy is scary because the felt sense of self begins to dissolve, and we can no longer predict our behavior. This connects to the relationship between joyful living and principled living—principles create a portfolio of aligned decisions even when individual outcomes are unpredictable. The episode also explores joy’s role in leadership and productivity, arguing that enjoyment makes teams more effective even though it appears slower in the moment.
Key Concepts
- Joy is the matriarch of the emotional family
- Joy dissolves identity and that’s what makes it scary
- Pleasure is the awareness of sensation moving through the body
- Trying to feel joy is the resistance that pushes it away
- Equanimity without emotional fluidity doesn’t produce joy
- Enjoyment looks slower but gets you there faster
Key Quotes
“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.”
“Joy is energy running through the circuit with minimal resistance. The more resistance, the less it feels like joy.”
“If you really feel the joy of breathing for five or ten minutes you’ll notice that the sense of self becomes more and more universal and less and less contained as like this thing that’s against this thing.”
“I know people who have equanimity and are depressed.”
“Mind is wide as the sky and action as fine as barley flour.”
“You can’t get there by trying the whole time… at some point you have to give up and just be like oh it’s just what I am.”
Transcript
it’s actually I find more challenging for people to feel Joy than it is for them to feel anger or sadness or fear if you really allow that joy in it’s so expansive that it becomes quite scary because it starts to dissolve our identity Joe hey Brett what’s up uh I’m just feeling so much joy after after the weeklong retreat we just ran yeah and you know the question just comes up like why the fuck don’t we just feel Joy all the time yeah that’s a great question yeah and is that what you want to do an episode on you want to do an episode on why the fuck we don’t feel Joy all the time yeah well I mean I don’t want to assume that somebody listening isn’t feeling Joy all the time cuz if so great or talking yeah yeah but it’s just I noticed this thing where so much of work that we do points towards feeling Joy points towards bringing more joy allowing more joy recognizing more joy in life and also so much of you know the Consulting work that we do in business or in relationships or coaching the things that people think they want are the things that they think are going to get them Joy so it’s it’s the end goal everywhere you know it may be about the kpis or the money or the level of conflict in my relationship or the the level of you know cohesion in my team or the politics in my family whatever all of those things are really meant to if if everything is aligned I would hope to have more joy so right we’ve done an entire emotions series we haven’t yet talked about joy and I’d love to talk about Joy this time let’s do it let’s do it great so let’s start what is it what is Joy so I actually looked it up once and and usually I have my own definitions for for words you know that that’s how we often start an episode but this one is actually I just love the I can’t remember Websters or whatever dictionary it was the the the the answer was like an a lot of happiness and pleasure and and the way that I work you know that I’ll just do the experiment so I literally when I did that I was like okay so I’m going to feel happiness I’m going to like close my eyes remember a time that I felt happiness what I would call happiness and and I invite everybody listening to do this just like feel close your eyes take a moment feel that moment where you had then take pleasure in it and and that’s Joy like that as soon as I did that I’m like oh wow that’s a like an incredibly accurate description of Joy it is happiness with pleasure yeah like a whole head heart there’s like a head heart gut thing going on there too it’s like I can have intellectually the idea that I have what I want and that means nothing to me emotionally or physically and I can have happiness which is you know an emotional experience but the pleasure is when it really lands in the body that’s right yeah and that’s what it does it’s like it’s like happiness experienced in the whole body that’s another way you could explain it but it is it’s like an embodied level of happiness and and there’s a lot of pleasure in it huh and so that that I just love that definition because as soon as I read it I’m like let’s see if that’s true and I was like oh shit that’s a great description yeah wow okay so so how how would we make there be more joy in our life what is the what makes the Spectrum from less joy to more joy let’s map that out a little bit it’s it’s really counterintuitive so I’m sure people in the podcast have heard me say it Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome so what I’m saying there is that if you don’t feel your emotions all the way through then there’s no room for Joy so the other way to think about it is like you’re you’re a you’re a like a a a a yard for boats and you have one Dock and if if you don’t move the other boats in and out there’s no room for Joy the only thing is that Joy is really not a boat that comes in it’s the water underneath it’s like that’s the natural state of being alive it’s the it’s the state that requires no effort um it’s like pleasure is available every minute of every day Joy is available just you know a good deep breath in can be incredibly joyful um can be incredibly pleasurable similarly just watching the sensations in your body move is the definition of pleasure by a guy named Lowen like like that’s the that is it’s just always available to us it’s just if we haven’t felt the other stuff all the way through then we just can’t seem to find it though it’s always there yeah you just mentioned but didn’t actually say the definition of pleasure according to Lowen what would that be yeah I love this definition of pleasure I I use it myself which is the awareness of well he says energy I just say sensation so the awareness of sensation moving through the body exact like if you just do that it’s immediately pleasurable yeah and so when you when you say that and you speak to the allowing of emotions the family of emotions being welcome what that seems to point to for me is resistance like the level of resistance in the system almost like an electrical circuit the presence or lack of resistance allows the sensations electricity the energy whatever it is to be moving so you can be aware of it moving which would yeah kind of bring in that counterintuitive correlation with the emotions that we don’t associate with joy the being able to feel those fully makes us gives us more capacity to feel Joy yeah that’s one way to describe it and it’s and it’s absolutely accurate the other way is to say if you feel anger all the way through it you find out it’s like Joy yeah like like or or like the the anger felt all the way through without any resistance is a different sensation than the anger that we we call anger that we normally resist same with fear same with anxiety same with you know all the those emotions it’s there’s something that happens when you feel it all the way through where the sensation actually changes and it’s just like a current I love that metaphor which is joy is energy running through the circuit with minimal resistance the more resistance the less the less it feels like Joy yeah yeah so Joy is the natural state and then the ways we try to manage our Natural State the ways we try to resist it the ways that we the ways that it’s not enough the ways that it’s too much yeah all become the that those become the ways that we create separation from our joy yeah and it’s interesting because what typically if you take that metaphor to the next conclusion it’s like when we have resistance in the line what most humans do in the emotional line is they go oh that’s uncomfortable I’m going to resist more to try to make it stop and then Joy becomes further and further away when the actual more productive thing is to say oh I am going to feel into that emotional place because that’ll reduce the amount of friction resistance yeah yeah the second question being like what is what is the joy that I could find in this experience in this feeling can be that up and you got to watch out for that one a little bit right like we all met that person in college who was like great everything’s great it’s like they’re pretending happiness so that they might one day actually be happy like it that doesn’t work like unfortunately that doesn’t work there there is like a a practicing that you have like that you can do to like oh wow I can take pleasure in this moment I can take I can take joy from this experience whatever this flower for this conversation that I’m having with you like oh I can take joy and all that that’s amazing and wonderful and trying to force yourself into that without feeling the other emotions is just another form of resistance so there’s like gets a little tricky yeah yeah like an example that I’m that comes up for me right now is when you told me about your daughter saying wow I didn’t know Harper could feel so good right yeah exactly yeah and and we saw it at our Retreat this week it’s like the more people just felt whatever they emotion was the more they were just like hanging out in joy and love and pleasure like it was just like and by the end of it they’re like how is this possible like that’s I mean that’s what we got to see and that answers your question at the top which is like what makes us not like that all the time is because we are managing you know for those of us that are less and less we’re managing our emotional experience our reality all the time yeah and while they were in their Joy they were also more fluid they were also speaking and acting more intuitively more naturally more in flow and so this kind of relates back to what we’re kind of pointing to about the head heart gut thing here about this being really embodied how does how does joy in your in your view relate to being in our head yeah I mean like I said before I think there’s an embodied feeling of of of Joy like Joy can’t be done without pleasure pleasure can’t be done without the body so I think that there’s a a part of it I I do also notice that when I’m in a state of Joy like all three of those things are in alignment or online it’s not I’m not coming from one place to the other place um happiness seems to be more can be more in the head you can be happy and be cut off but you can’t really have joy and be cut off so that that that’s the main piece yeah yeah along the lines of something else you had just said about forcing it like I’m imagining some people listening and they’re like well I’m I want to feel Joy I try to feel Joy all the time and I’m I’m just not finding it uh I’m trying to feel it not resist it what’s going on right right right yeah that’s like I hear that that one all the time I mean the main thing is if you’re trying to feel it then you’re making some then you’re creating resistance the trying is in itself the resistance that prevents it and and it also assumes that it’s hard to get like to try means that that it’s something that isn’t your natural state it’s not like the current flowing freely and so you put more constriction in the line and it drives it further and further away but there is also another Nuance there which is you know I hear it in a slightly different way which is I want to feel Joy why like wait Joy isn’t like a difficult thing like why wouldn’t I feel it like I want want to feel it but the but actually it’s actually I find more challenging for people to feel Joy than it is for them to feel anger or sadness fear and and just as a like a great way to experience this is like do this experiment when you go when you go home or when you when you have like an extra five minutes and just notice the immense amount of joy you can have just taking deep breaths or just feeling the sensation in your body you’ll notice it’s expansive you’ll notice you kind of relax into it and you’ll notice you can’t even maintain it for five minutes like you’ll notice that like your mind goes to do something else find some sort of problem because to feel Joy is it brings up a lot of fear in people if you really allow that joy in that expansiveness brings a lot of fear into people and so we say we want it but just by saying we want it or just by saying we’re trying to get it we’re actually that’s our way to push it away because it’s scary because you don’t say like oh I want to breathe I have to try to breathe if you say that if you’re like oh I want to breathe I have to try to breathe you can feel your you know you start constricting the air and you know breathing is just something we assume happens it’s natural Joy is the same way and but if we fully allow it it’s so identity yeah yeah I’m imagining right now just closing my eyes and picturing everything I ever wanted happening manifesting whatever whatever word may be and then immediately there’s something something that goes wrong something that’s like no it couldn’t quite be like that because either I couldn’t I couldn’t Envision something so beautiful without missing something important or right that’s just not how reality works or all these stories would come in and would you know that that’s I think that’s something that you were just speaking to it brings up other feelings because Joy feels safe this is something we’ve said before is when it feels safe all the unloved Parts come up to be loved when there is love the unloved Parts come up to be loved so if there’s joy there’s safety and you know the the other feelings will come up we’ll be like okay great but there’s joy but what about what about this pain what about this hurt what about this heartbreak what about this fear what about this anxiety yeah can I have that too right I think there’s two things that you’re speaking to there the first one is you know I don’t know how many people highly successful people I’ve worked with who were like I’ve got everything I wanted but I’m not happy I’m not I don’t experience Joy um and there there’s that aspect the other aspect is this this idea of when it’s safe when we feel safe when we feel love the other stuff comes up so on on the second piece which is really easy to speak to if you have kids if you have like young kids or when you were a young kid and let’s say you were like away from home and you had to deal with a whole bunch of stuff when you came home and you felt safe is when the temper tantrum happened like I used to come home and I’d be like why do I get all the shit temper it’s because the kids felt safe and with me and like oh here’s the place that I get to let go right it’s like bottling it up the rest of the time say it again it’s like you’re bottling it up the rest of the time until until the you’re out of the pressure cooker and you have space to release yeah yeah so somatically two things actually happen that I think are scary about Joy the first one is it becomes so expansive that the felt sense of self dissipates like if you really feel the joy of breathing for five or 10 minutes you’ll notice that the sense of self is like becomes more and more Universal and less and less like contained as like this thing that’s against this thing and for this thing and thinks this thing and does this thing it’s like and that’s scary the other thing that’s scary is when you’re feeling that sense of safety and pleasure then the stuff that hasn’t been dealt with starts coming up to be dealt with just like a just like it would with a kid and so both of those two things make it scary yeah to allow ourselves to feel Joy and it’s what makes people push it away all the time and they do it by like thinking they have to earn it they do it by thinking once I’ve quit smoking once I do this great habit once I I make this much money once I date this kind of person then but it never happens right and and because that the it’s just the experience of Joy that’s scary as shit for for many many many people and which is why I say like to practice pleasure and joy take is great because it actually teaches you to feel that experience and it also brings a whole bunch of emotions undal with up to the surface so it’s great and it’s not something that you can fake it’s something that has to be felt you have to feel everything to get there consistently where you’re just like actually living a really joyful life on a regular basis yeah I feel like there’s another level of what makes Joy scary and it’s it’s maybe a subset of the one you talk to about with identity but yeah like as you as your sense of identity starts to dissolve also your ability to predict your actions and the results dissolves so I think that’s like one of the things that makes that so scary is that if I fully allow my joy I lose the sense of who I am which means I can’t predict my behavior and their reactions and that leads to like oh I can feel Joy under certain controlled circumstances you know I can go to a retreat and my phone is away and I can feel Joy there if I know that I’m not going to accidentally leak that joy out into my company or my family and then all a sudden have the consequences of being authentic come back to me and and I think that also shows up a lot of times when people end up kind of man their transformation where they’re like okay yeah I want to you know let’s let’s kill the old ego let’s let’s transform but also I want to make sure that I do it into a certain particular new larger shaped box that I you know Define in advance so I know I’ll be safe there too yeah yeah I I yeah I think that that’s true I think it what like the the way that that moves typically is there’s a moment of like oh shit I have no idea who I’d be what I would do like you know we saw it at the retreat oh my gosh I’m like scared if I let this all in I’m gonna divorce my wife or quit my job or blah blah blah like all those fears come up because you don’t you can’t predict it I think that the what happens eventually is that there’s this great phrase and I think I’ve used it before but it’s I think it’s Tibetan and they talk about mind is wide as the sky and action as fine as barley flour what you start to notice when you’re living that way is there’s actually like just this like very clear truth of what you want to do in that moment you can’t predict what it’s going to be but the outcomes are far more predictable because you’re like oh when I react in my truth when I act in my truth then my world reflects that alignment and so I know what world I’m going to be living in even if I can’t this what I’m going to do or what this exact result will be the long-term result is yeah is very predictable it’s like investing in an index fund in a stock market right which is like you can’t tell the ups and downs but you know over 10 years where it’s headed and and it and so pretty soon that fear dies off but there is a very palpable couple moments days weeks maybe even a year where you’re like I don’t even know how to like I don’t even know what I’m going to go buy at the supermarket yeah yeah this is something we talked about with principles as well where it’s you might lose your capacity to or you might lose this the story that you can predict outcomes right on a individual basis but across a portfolio of decisions you know far more like far more about where you’re going to end up and so that’s that kind of brings up an interesting symmetry here of living a joyful life and living a principled life how synergistic those concepts are and how they really serve each other I it’s a great question I I what I notice is I know people who live principled Lives who are pretty happy I’m not sure joyful but I don’t know anybody who lives a joyful life who doesn’t live principled so I think that principles can get you closer to Joy but they can’t ensure it but joy ensures principles that just from my noticing of people yeah I can’t that are not aligned with you and that would lead away from Joy correct absolutely or if the principles are say built around how to be most productive right right instead of oh living the life that you want to live so I think that but even that like the people that I know who like run businesses based on principle they’re they’re the happier leaders that I know so there is something about the ease of principles and about the I would say the the because almost everybody who lives principle at some point also has the lean in principle right like because what a principle does is it makes you feel into the shit that you don’t want to feel into when it’s inconvenient which is really the same thing that we’re saying gets Joy which is leaning into the shit that you don’t particularly want to lean into feeling it allowing for it so most principles most sets of principles do the same thing where there’s some principle that says hey I I I’m going to lean into I’m going to open the drawer in the kitchen that nobody wants to look in or I’m going to you know embrace the intensity or I’m going to you know say the problem when it’s there and you like there’s always some principle that that helps you do something that you don’t want to particularly do because you know it’s beneficial so I think that that’s another place where they have overlap yeah yeah and so so both of these bring up this the idea of like fake it till we make it where you addressed this earlier of like forcing Joy is not the same as allowing your experience so fully that the joy emerges um but also when we’re talking about principles we’re talking about living a joyful life those could be something that easily gets forced or becomes a way that we manage ourselves and I’m curious to like to what extent the that can be helpful or useful in some way or if there’s a Nuance here that we can share about faking it till you’re making it with regards to Joy there’s lots of there’s lots of ways that discipline can kind of get the engine running the management can get the engine running um but at some point you have to do the downhill slide like you have to let gravity take care of stuff so um trying to force yourself to feel Joy not very effective but um like having discipline of reading living a principled life can be helpful um having the discipline of of practicing pleasure allowing yourself to feel pleasure and learn to allow that to expand you and stretch you like a yoga class can be helpful um so there are like saying oh I’m going to like feel my emotions every day for 20 30 minutes I’m going to let my body move and I’m going to say what I got to say yell what I got to yell Shake where I have to shake that’s also going to be incredibly helpful and that can be a disciplined approach but as soon as you start using it all to you try you’re you’re pushing like the inner energetic is I have to get there rather than I am already there like oh I don’t all I have to do is like like take off the layers of shit and like then there that’s an attitude of like it’s already there within me that is going to be necessary you can’t get there by trying the whole time and and you see this in Zen and meditation too where particularly Zen meditation they’ll literally just like keep on adjusting the way you sit no sit more like this sit like that so you try try try try try try try try try get so intense you just I can’t do it anymore and then you have that moment of Awakening then you have that moment of understanding and so you can go that way too where you just like try so hard that you finally give up I’ve seen that work as well but at some point you have to give up and just be like oh it’s just what I am and I just if I just allow it all happens if I just receive it all happens literally take a deep breath and enjoy it it requires nothing yeah I’m just feeling the difference in my body when I use the words it’s what I am versus it’s what I feel which makes me come back to like the difference between happiness and joy or even equanimity and joy contentment and joy and on that axis of like embodied versus you know just an emotional or in the head experience what yeah what do you have to say about those distinctions yeah contentment equanimity they are different things like I I know that there’s a you know through like nondual or or Awakening practices or meditation practices you can get to an equanimity where there’s just a there’s a Stillness that never leaves there’s like the eye of the storm that you always have accessible and I know people who have that and are depressed there’s a famous monk meditation teacher who talks openly about his depression um and typically that’s because the my experience of the people that I’ve met like that is they have learned the equanimity but they haven’t actually allowed the emotions to be without resistance the meditation has become an emotional management tool as well as a tool for equanimity and so so there is a distinction between that peace and equanimity which is a wonderful beautiful amazing thing and allowing all the emotions to move which some people in meditation actually that’s what happens like you know I had a person I studied with a lot his name was Adyashanti his teacher talked about like showing up at Meditation Retreat with tears streaming down like the Water Works turned on I had many meditation Retreats where a huge amount of emotion moved through me um so so it can be that way too so but the but the it’s that that creates the joy it’s something else that creates the equanimity the the recognition that you are awareness that you are not this ego that recognition creates a huge amount of equanimity in the system but it doesn’t create Joy particularly not without the emotional movement without the emotional fluidity yeah I love that thanks for that distinction yeah so we’ve often talked about how you know enjoyment when we’re when we’re enjoying something when we’re in enjoyment we’re learning faster we’re more creative we’re more productive we’re more Innovative we’re getting along better with our peers we’re sharing ourselves more vulnerably or more likely to speak Our Truth all of these things that are really effective towards say productivity and I notice that we don’t really measure joy in a company very often you know it’s not like one of the major kpis that are being measured and I wonder why not and I’d love to talk a little bit about how Joy affects productivity yeah um yeah so I think there’s a couple reasons why people don’t I think most people who are deeply ambitious or ambitious because not all but many people are deeply ambitious or deeply ambitious because they’re striving to get to Joy they’re thinking like oh if I do X Y and Z this and this and this will happen at least that’s how they get started sometimes they just fall I think some of the greats actually more just are in love with the game of it all the like the building the Legos like the the coolness of like oh I’m just in my thing doing my thing um but so for that reason I think a lot of people don’t see the joy though if you ask them and you say oh tell me about the best team that you’ve ever been a part of they’ll tell you they enjoyed it so you know so there there’s definitely like you you can’t be in a great team ah this team was excellent and I hated it like that’s yeah like so so they’ll know that I think that the the other piece is that enjoyment looks slower like if I’m really going to stop and I’m going to enjoy writing my emails I’m going to feel the sensation and and allow it and like allow the pleasure of writing the email and what it feels like in my body and how I want to say the thing and express the joy in in the email it’s slower it like I can write an email much quicker than that however I probably am going to write a lot less emails my relationships are going to be a lot better there’s going to be a lot less problems to handle so like anything that takes discipline you know it’s a long-term result that you’re getting it’s not the short-term result that you’re getting like exercise doesn’t feel quite as good up front but makes you feel great through the day yeah it’s like I’ve heard said in the Navy Seals slow is smooth and smooth is fast yeah exactly yeah yeah so so it’s a little bit slower but it definitely gets you where you want to be quicker and um so that’s interesting that I think that’s one of the that’s one of the other reasons that it it isn’t like thought about as much um it might even be slower because you’re actually there you’re actually processing it you’re not skipping from thing to thing to thing and then later on like where was I what balls did I set in motion and why total loss of context right just lost in the to-do list I’ll give you a great example of this like working with somebody who’s an executive at um one of the big companies one of the big Silicon Valley companies and um talking about their meetings and how all the executives are multitasking through their meetings so everybody feels more productive but it like so many emails afterwards nobody’s enjoying it no if they were all sitting down and said okay we the number one thing is that we are going to learn to have a meeting that we all enjoy having that meeting would be super effective so it’s a really great mechanism to figure out how to make great decisions to figure out how to run great meetings so it’s lovely it’s just not particularly thought about and I think it’s often because most people in business most people in general potentially feel like they’re to have joy it has to be earned it like you have to be a value to have joy even though they’ve been of value for 20 years and still don’t have a deep life of Joy yeah which which makes it possible to question whether somebody actually wants Joy or whether they actually want to recreate their emotional background of seeking Joy exactly that’s that’s that’s the thing is like the seeking of joy is the way that we push it away and the joy itself is scary yeah exactly because it’s scary that’s right which I think is the other reason why people don’t use it as a thing I also don’t think most people think it’s possible to create a joyful life yeah I can also Imagine a whole bunch of collective eye rolls from you know a whole bunch of new employees coming on a team and they’re like okay we’re going to be tracking your joy like oh great we’re gonna track your joy okay yeah see that would be I would love that if I was like oh we’re gonna track your joy and they’re like oh great I’d be like okay let’s start there yeah exactly what makes you say that what makes you not happy that this company wants you to have a joyous work experience yeah which segways into into another question is like how how does Joy relate to leadership you’re you’re the one running these meetings and you want to have a meeting that’s a joyful meeting you have a team yeah and you want to see what would be in the way of the team valuing Joy it’s really good but it’s not necessary meaning like if you I like if you are really focused on how do you enjoy your job as a manager then it’s really good if you’re asking your team how do we enjoy ourselves better I think that’s really good I think all of that is really really useful however you can be a leader who’s driven by like we’re just going to be the best in the world and that can also inspire people or we’re gonna you know so there I think there’s other ways to do it where the joy is like the second level like oh we really enjoy winning so let’s win or we you know where enjoyment is like the second level if you are like just about getting it done and oh my God we’re scared and we have to avoid this bad thing and there’s no joy whatsoever in your management like then you’re going to have neurotic a neurotic organization that makes a lot of mistakes and Spins often without yeah you know without Direction well it sounds sort of like a second order effect like if if you have a company where the the value is we like to win and hire people who enjoy winning then you’re going to have joy and a culture aligned in winning correct that’s if you hire a bunch of people who don’t enjoy winning because they feel guilty or something there’s something else going on there or they enjoy something entirely different and winning doesn’t matter to them then you might have less joy in the team correct what’s interesting is like when you think about our team in our business like enjoyment is a huge important part winning is not yet we win so like we’re you know we’re constantly growing and touching more people and but for us it’s like we would cut off an entire part of our business if we weren’t enjoying it even if it was profitable so it’s an interesting it’s an interesting aspect of like there is an alignment with it and but joy can be a first or a second order effect both both of them are possible and still have great be a great leader I don’t think it’s possible to be a great leader if you’re not considering Joy at all yeah yeah great so I’d love to close this episode out with just some some little nugget that listeners can do after they’ve heard this something they can do in their day some little reminder some practice some exercise enjoy your breath for five minutes straight or if it doesn’t have to be your breath make it be doing the dishes or make it be just watching the sensations of your body move like see what it is to or a flower just take something and see what it is to just allow the enjoyment to persist in your system to stay focused on the enjoyment of being alive like just aliveness is joyful and so allow that to just stretch your capacity to feel it notice how the sense of self starts to kind of evaporate somatically when you feel it when you really allow that Joy yeah yeah and what resistance comes up what kind of pleasure anxiety or foreboding Joy what is what is at the edges of that boundary for you yeah and feel that then feel that because that’s the stuff that feels safe enough to show up and and be felt beautiful and joyful and joyful thank you Joe thanks yeah thanks for bringing up this topic how fun I I really appreciate I I’m hoping maybe one day we’ll also do one on excitement which is yeah a whole another yeah let’s that okay awesome all right and thank you everybody for listening check us out on X I got it right this time I didn’t say the t word Joe is fu Joe Hudson I am at Brett Kistler and we are at Art of Accomplishment see you next time all right take care