Heal Thyself, But How?

There is an undercurrent when a woman expresses true confidence and joy. She is arrogant, conceited, grandiose. It is no wonder we are starving for joy. We are searching like lost children, in relationships, in religion, in food, in drugs, not a coincidentally that many of the younger generations have tired to ECSTASY to experience this, myself included. Our searching can lead us to dangerous places, in the barren wasteland of drugs, empty dogma, denigrating un-reciprocal relationships. A word about mothers and mothering, fathers and fathering as well: Mothers and fathers need to reciprocate in their relationships with their children. Children deserve this. It enrages me that I even have to say this, but I do because I know my own issues around my mother and father.

Create space for joy. There is room in you. That’s where JOY has to live, inside of you. No amount of material gain or financial security can secure your JOY. Open your mind, and your heart to joy. Create a welcoming space for joy. Get out in nature. Nature is expansive, dilating, and renewing. Start in your home if it is hard to access your JOY space internally. Make a vision board about joy, a collage. Find images that resonate and make something artful, hang it up. Joy is healing, it heals, and it is also the act of healing in and of itself. It is about freedom, the freedom to feel, to be yourself, you be anything, to BE. Just BE. JOY includes some pain. There is great beauty and wonder in the most intense pain.

We deserve joy, we have suffered enough, our children have suffered for the sins of their parents, for abusers, for the pain of something that is not theirs to own. We need to look within and heal. Our relationships are suffering, we are projecting pain from the past onto our partners. The earth is suffering. Animals suffer. Enough.
But joy can not be fully felt when we can not and have not fully felt our suffering, our losses, our grief. Again, depression gets pathologized and many people end up repressing their pain even more because to be ‘depressed’ is considered weak and taboo. Sometimes we just need to give our love to depression. Depression is repression. Maybe we need to sit and feel it.

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” Henry Miller

Welcome joy, feel the fear and welcome her anyway. That tidal wave we fear may be exactly what we need.

“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.—Helen Keller