Joy - Emotion Series #15

At some point you have to give up and just be like, oh, it's just what I am. If I just allow, it all happens. If I just receive, it all happens.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. Joe!

Hey, Brett!

What's up? I'm just feeling so much joy after the week-long retreat we just ran.

Yeah.

And 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. 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 because If so, great, roll with it.

Or talking, technically.

Yeah, yeah. But it's just, I noticed this thing where so much of the work that we do points towards feeling joy, points towards bringing more joy, allowing more joy, recognizing more joy in life.

Yeah.

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, right? So 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 level of, you know, cohesion in my team or the politics in my family, whatever. All of those things are really meant to— if everything is aligned, I would hope to have more joy, right? So we've done an entire emotion 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 usually I have my own definitions for words. You know, that's how we often start an episode. But this one is actually, I just love the, I can't remember, Webster's or whatever dictionary it was. The answer was, like, a lot of happiness and pleasure. 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 close my eyes, remember a time that I felt happiness, what I would call happiness. And I invite everybody listening to do this. Just, like, feel, close your eyes, take a moment, feel that moment where you had happiness. And then take pleasure in it. And that's joy like that. As soon as I did that, I'm like, oh wow, that's like an incredibly accurate description of joy. It is. It's so happiness with pleasure.

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. Huh. 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.

Thanks, Merriam-Webster.

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 how would we make there be more joy in our life? What makes the spectrum from less joy to more joy? Let's map that out a little bit.

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. The other way to think about it is like you're a yard for boats and you have one dock. And 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. It's like pleasure is available every minute of every day. Joy is available. Just a good deep breath in can be incredibly joyful, can be incredibly pleasurable. Similarly, just watching the sensations in your body move is the definition of pleasure by a guy named Lowen. Awareness of— well, he says energy, I just say sensation. So the awareness of sensation moving through the body. Mm-hmm. Like that. Like, if you just do that, it's immediately pleasurable. That 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.

And so when you, when you say that and you speak to the allowing of emotions, the family of emotions being welcome.

Yeah.

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. Yeah. Which would kind of bring in that counterintuitive correlation with the emotions that we don't associate with joy, being able to feel those fully gives us more capacity to feel joy.

Yeah, that's one way to describe it, and it's absolutely accurate. The other way is to say, if you feel anger all the way through, you find out it's like joy. Yeah. 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 those emotions. It's— there's something that happens when you feel it all the way through where the sensation actually changes.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

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.

They all become the— 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. The second question being, what is the joy that I could find in this experience? In this feeling can be, can open that up somewhat.

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, that doesn't work. Like, unfortunately, that doesn't work. There is like a practicing that you have, like, that you can do to like, oh, wow, I can take pleasure in this moment. 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 in all of 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— it gets a little tricky.

Yeah. 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 heartbreak could feel so good.

Right? Yeah, exactly. And we saw it at our retreat this week. It's like, the more people just felt whatever their emotion was, the more they were just like hanging out in joy and love and pleasure. Like, it's 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.

Yes.

More in flow. And so this kind of relates back to what we were kind of pointed to about the head, heart, gut thing here, about this being really embodied. How does joy, in your view, relate to being in our head?

Yeah, I mean, like I said before, I think there's an embodied feeling 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 part of it. I do also notice that when I'm in a state of joy, like, all three of those things are in alignment or online. I'm not coming from one place to the other place. 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's the main piece.

Yeah. Yeah. And 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 want to feel joy. I try to feel joy all the time. I'm just not finding it. 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 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's 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 to feel it. But actually, I find more challenging for people to feel joy than it is for them to feel anger or sadness or fear. And just as a great way to experience this is do this experiment when you go home or when you have an extra 5 minutes and just notice the immense amount of joy you can have just taking deep breaths or just feeling the sensations 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 5 minutes. You'll notice that your mind goes to do something else, find some sort of problem. Because to feel joy, 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 you start constricting the air. And breathing is just something we assume happens. It's natural. Joy is the same way. But if we fully allow it, it's so expansive that it becomes quite scary because it starts to dissolve our 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, right? Or 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 other feelings will come up. We'll be like, okay, great, but there's joy. But what about this pain? What about this hurt? What about this heartbreak? What about this fear? What about this anxiety?

Yeah. Yeah. There's—

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 are like, I've got everything I wanted, but I'm not happy. I'm not— I don't experience joy. And there's that aspect. The other aspect is this idea of when it's safe, when we feel safe, when we feel love, the other stuff comes up. So 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 happens. Like, I used to come home and I'd be like, why do I get all the fucking temper tantrums? Because the kids felt safe 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 until you're out of the pressure cooker.

Right.

And you have space to release. 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 5 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 it would with a kid. And so both of those two things make it scary to allow ourselves to feel joy. And it's what makes people push it away all the time. And they do it by thinking they have to earn it. They do it by thinking, once I've quit smoking, once I do this great habit, once I make this much money, once I date this kind of person, then but it never happens, right? And because it's just the experience of joy that's scary as shit for many, many, many people. And which is why I say like to practice pleasure and joy is great because it actually teaches you to feel that experience. And it also brings a whole bunch of emotions undealt 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 talked about with identity. Yeah, but 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 of a sudden have the consequences of being authentic.

Yeah.

Come back to me. And, and I think that also shows up a lot of times when people end up kind of managing 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 that I did define in advance.

Yeah.

So I know I'll be safe there too.

Yeah. Yeah, I, yeah, I think that that's true. I think it— what, like the way that that moves typically is there's a moment of like, oh fuck, 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 going to divorce my wife or quit my job or blah, blah, blah. Like all those fears come up. Because you can't predict it. I think that what happens eventually is that there's this great phrase, and I think I've used it before, but I think it's Tibetan. They talk about mind is wide as the sky and action is fine as barley flour. What you start to notice when you're living that way is there's actually just this 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 predict this, what I'm going to do or what this exact result will be. The long-term result is very predictable. It's like investing in an index fund in a stock market, 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've talked about with principles as well, where it's, you might lose your capacity to, or he might lose this. The story that you can predict, right, outcomes on an individual basis. But across a portfolio of decisions, you know far more, 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.

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. Yeah. I imagine you could live principles 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, instead of living the life that you want to live. So I think that, but even that, like, the people that I know who run businesses based on principle, they're the happier leaders that I know. So there is something about the ease of principles and about the, I would say, the because almost everybody who lives principled at some point also has the lean-in principle, right? 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'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 embrace the intensity, or I'm going to say the problem when it's there. There's always some principle 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 concept, the, the idea of, uh, 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, right? 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 what extent 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 ways that discipline can kind of get the engine running, management can get the engine running. But at some point, you have to do the downhill slide. Like, you have to let gravity take care of stuff. So, trying to force yourself to feel joy, not very effective, but having discipline of reading, living a principled life can be helpful. Having the discipline of practicing pleasure, allowing yourself to feel pleasure and learn to allow that to expand you and stretch you to like a yoga class. Can be helpful. So there are, like, saying, oh, I'm going to 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 try, you're pushing 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 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 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 to get so fucking intense it's just I can't fucking 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 fucking hard that you finally give up. Mm-hmm. 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 fucking 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

Versus in the, you know, just an emotional or in the head experience. What do you have to say about those distinctions?

Yeah, contentment, equanimity, they're different things. Like, I, I know that there's a, you know, through like non-dual or awakening practices or meditation practices, you can get to an equanimity where 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. And typically that's because the, in 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 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. I had a person I studied with a lot, his name was Adyashanti, His teacher talked about showing up at meditation retreat, meditation retreat with tears streaming down, like the waterworks turned on. I had many meditation retreats where a huge amount of emotion moved through me. So it can be that way too. But it's that that creates the joy. It's something else that creates the equanimity, 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, you know, enjoyment. 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, we're more likely to speak our truth. All of these things that are really effective towards, say, productivity. And I noticed that we don't really measure joy in a company very often. It's not like one of the major, you know, 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. So I think there's a couple of reasons why people don't— I think most people who are deeply ambitious are ambitious because— not all, but many people who are deeply ambitious are 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 building the Legos, like the coolness of like, oh, I'm just in my thing doing my thing. 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's definitely like, you can't be in a great team. Ah, this team was excellent and I hated it. Like, that's it. Like, so they'll know that. I think that 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 allow it and 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 the email, it's slower. 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 So that's interesting. I think that's one of the, that's one of the other reasons that it isn't like thought about as much.

It might even be slower because you're actually there, you're actually processing it.

Correct.

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 one of the big companies, one of the big Silicon Valley companies, and talking about their meetings and how all the executives are multitasking through their meetings. So everybody feels more productive, but it's like so many emails afterwards. Nobody's enjoying it. If they were all sitting down and said, okay, 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. Like, you have to be of value to have joy. Even though they've been of value for 20 years and still don't have a deep life of joy, you know what I mean?

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.

Yeah.

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 onto a team and they're like, okay, we're going to be tracking your joy. Like, oh great, there's got to be a Dilbert comic about that.

Yeah. So that would be like the perfect— I would love that if I was like, oh, we're going to track your joy. And they're like, Oh, great. I'd be like, okay, let's start there.

Yeah.

What makes you say that? What makes you not happy that this company wants you to have a joyous work experience?

Yeah. Which segues into another question is like, how does joy relate to leadership? You're the one running these meetings and you want to have a meeting that's a joyful meeting.

Yeah.

You have a team 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 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 going to 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 enjoyment is like the second level. If you are 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, then you're going to have neurotic organization that makes a lot of mistakes and spins often without, you know, without direction.

Well, it sounds sort of like a second-order effect. Like if, if you have a company where the value is we like to win and you hire people who enjoy winning, then you're going to have joy and a culture aligned in winning.

Correct. That's right.

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, right? Then you might have less joy in the team.

Correct. What's interesting is like when you think about our team and 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. 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 aspect of, like, there is an alignment with it, but joy can be a first or a second order effect. 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, great.

So I'd love to close this episode out with just 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 5 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 at the edges of that boundary for you? Yeah.

And feel that. Then feel that, because that's the stuff that feel safe enough to show up and, and be felt.

Beautiful and joyful.

Enjoyful.

Thank you, Jeff.

Yeah, thanks for bringing up this topic. How fun. I, I really appreciate it. I, I'm hoping maybe one day we'll also do one on excitement, which is a whole nother really cool—

Yeah, let's do that.

Okay, awesome.

All right, and thank you everybody for listening. Uh, check us out on X. I got it right this time. I didn't say the T word. Uh, Joe is @fu_joehudson. I am @erikistler, K-I-S-T-L-E-R, and we are @artofacomp. See you next time.

All right, take care.