When was the last time you felt joy?
I think of joy as happiness with carbonation added. Joy feels effervescent, bubbly.
It reminds me of this scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Grandpa Joe & Charlie drink Wonka’s Fizzy Lifting Drink.
Grandpa Joe, cantankerous from the start, experiences a lifting of his spirit as well as his body.
Charlie encourages him to swim in the air and he does, although he hasn’t swum in 20 years. Grandpa plays in the air, imagining himself as a rocket.
But they float too high and are in danger of hitting the fan. They must release some of their bubbles to come back down.
It’s not subtle, is it? But I think it’s familiar to many of us. We sometimes stop ourselves from feeling too much joy. We don’t want to get our hopes up. We wait for the other shoe to drop. We're worried the joy will end and we'll fall harder than if we never floated.
We don’t trust joy.
Grandpa and Charlie burped to bring themselves down. For us, sometimes it looks like:
• doing something that brings us joy (eg, art, dancing, singing) but then criticizing ourselves ("I'm not very good")
• doing something that brings us joy but minimizing it ("It's just a little thing")
• worrying that we don't deserve our joy ("I feel bad feeling happy when so many are struggling")
This week, look for ways to invite more joy into your life – and ask yourself how you can build greater trust with it. Choose the smallest thing that gives you joy and nurture it. The safer joy feels, the more it will want to visit.
Sometimes it's not that we're floating too high in the air, it's that we feel stuck, unable to move forward. If you've ever experienced this (and who hasn't?), this week's episode is for you.
Episode #40: When you feel stuck
Ep #40
This episode is a love note for the stuck. It’s for when you don’t know what to do, when you want a change but don’t believe it’s possible.
Sometimes we don’t like our job but feel stuck because the money is good; or we have a job we love but feel stuck because the money isn’t good; or maybe we aren’t happy in our marriage, but feel stuck because have we have children at home; or we’re happy in our marriage but feel stuck because the thrill is gone.
Sometimes we feel like the time for us to share our gifts with the world is passing, and we feel stuck because we haven’t found “our thing”.
In today's episode, I offer four parts to getting unstuck. Learn
⭐ How feeling stuck is different from being stuck
⭐ Why stuck feels so terrible, by turning us against our previous selves
⭐ How owning our own stories moves us out of stuckness
⭐ How a 1% action can change everything
Love, Rachel
P.S. Thanks for sharing this love note & the podcast with friends who can use some midlife magic. I so appreciate it!
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