Joy and Resilience

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about the relationship between joy and resilience. So I'll just start by saying that I'm a strong proponent of play, joy and laughter as being key to our internal resilience toward the more trying moments of our life. Positive emotions replenish our energy. They make us more creative and they often renew our optimism for the moments of life that are difficult.

And so instead of simply trying to survive difficult times, which we can often get into a pattern of doing, can we also give ourselves permission to experience what is still good, even if it's small? You know, these could be a moments of, you know, during a period of grief where you walk outside and you can feel the sun on your face or the coolness of the breeze on a summer day. The small moments that we can pass by, but we just let ourselves drink them in for a moment. Sometimes it can be hard to take them in fully or to feel a big smile, especially if we're going through something difficult. But these little pockets of letting ourselves feel neutrality, but also then some joy, some ease, some pleasure do replenish us to continue to show back up. And I also want to acknowledge that sometimes during difficult experiences, we're just brought to our knees.

And trying to find the positive can just feel like a subtle form of oppression against the part of us that really just needs to collapse and surrender and feel the fullness of the pain. So I get that as well. This is more of just a long-term approach that we can take in relationship to our resilience, whether it's going through something difficult or just in our day-to-day life of making sure we are staying open to the good experiences and recognizing that those are important to our ability to show up for the more difficult experiences of life. So whatever you're going through, I'm sending you a lot of love. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.