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Embracing Life
Tantra is about truly loving and embracing all of life, and through this love remembering our essence, the divine. Tantra is a life path. How we make love is how we create the life we lead and vice versa.
~ Osho
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Tantric Quote
“The beauty and wisdom of Tantra is that it enhances sexuality as a doorway to the ‘ecstatic mind of great bliss’ “. ~ Margot Anand
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Hatha Yoga
Hatha yoga is a form of yoga that involves holding specific body postures, called asanas, to work on muscle strength and connect your mind with your body.
Hatha is one of the most popular types of yoga practiced in the US and research shows that it has been linked to mental and physical health benefits like stress management and stronger core muscles.
Here’s what you need to know about Hatha yoga and how it can benefit your physical and mental health.
What is hatha yoga?
The word Hatha means “discipline of force” in Sanskrit, and the goal of Hatha yoga is to strengthen your muscles and create a mindful connection to your body. The word yoga means union.
Hatha yoga is actually an umbrella term that refers to any yoga practice that uses the common yoga postures you may have encountered in a yoga class, like downward-facing dog or child’s pose. You can see examples of Hatha yoga poses here.
However, if you go to a yoga class labeled “Hatha” in the US, you will usually find that it emphasizes holding poses for long periods, as opposed to classes like Vinyasa yoga that move more quickly and fluidly through poses.
According to Neha Gothe, PhD, director of the Exercise Psychology Lab at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hatha yoga is made up of three main practices:
In a Hatha yoga class, you may learn about different ways of controlling your breath or how to sit in meditation in addition to doing yoga poses.
“Yoga began as a spiritual practice, but it has become popular as a way of promoting physical and mental well-being,” Gothe says. You may know that yoga can help tone muscles and make you more flexible, but there are many other health benefits you can get from practicing Hatha yoga.
Here are some of the health benefits to your mind and body that you can get from regularly practicing Hatha yoga:
1. Hatha yoga strengthens your core muscles
Doing Hatha yoga poses like plank pose and warrior I pose can help strengthen your core muscles, which include the muscles in your abdomen, sides, pelvis, and back.
Core muscles are important for overall body function since strong core muscles can help prevent lower back pain, improve your balance, and make you less likely to have a muscle injury.
Yoga can also be a good option for people who want to strengthen their core but can’t do higher intensity exercises like running or weight lifting, such as older adults or people with certain disabilities, Gothe says.
2. Hatha yoga helps you get a better night’s sleep
Doing Hatha yoga can reduce your levels of cortisol, a hormone that is tied to your sleep cycle. Low cortisol levels signal to your body that it’s time to sleep, so doing yoga before bed can help you fall asleep more quickly.
Some experts believe that yoga also benefits sleep because it emphasizes mindful breathing and meditation, which can help relax your mind and body before heading to bed.
A review published in 2013 in Frontiers in Psychiatry looked at three small studies on the effect of yoga on sleeping patterns. The studies used different time periods of yoga practices — some yoga classes went on for as little as 7 weeks while others continued for 6 months.
The research found that in all studies, doing yoga helped people fall asleep faster and improved their overall quality of sleep.
3. Hatha yoga may improve depression symptoms
Experts believe that Hatha yoga helps ease depression because it acts on the neurotransmitters in your brain in a similar way to antidepressants.
For example, doing yoga increases the levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in your brain. GABA calms your nervous system and can help soothe anxious feelings brought on by depression, while serotonin helps to regulate your emotions.
The same 2013 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry looked at four small studies on how Hatha yoga affects depression symptoms. Results showed that people who did yoga once a week for as few as 5 weeks reported significantly lower scores on surveys measuring depression.
4. Hatha yoga can help you manage stress
While Hatha yoga can be physically demanding, it can also help you relax and de-stress. This is because doing yoga affects your nervous and endocrine systems, which control bodily functions like the release of hormones and blood pressure changes.
When you become stressed, both your cortisol levels and your blood pressure tend to rise. But a study published in 2017 in Complementary Therapies in Medicine found that people who did a Hatha yoga session before completing a stressful task had lower levels of cortisol and lower blood pressure afterward than people who did not do yoga. Participants who did Hatha yoga also reported feeling more confident about their performance in the stressful task.
Yoga tips for beginners
These 15 yoga tips will help you get a better workout, practice yoga with confidence, and get results quicker. It’s important to have an open mind and be ready to sweat. Even if you’re active and fit, yoga can be very challenging especially for beginners and for men even more so.
1. It’s going to feel weird.
If you’ve never done yoga before, many of the postures are going to feel weird or strange, because it involves movements that your body isn’t accustomed to. You might even feel vulnerable in some positions but fear not! The soreness you’ll feel the day after is a sign that your body is getting stronger as it adapts to these new movements.
2. You’re not going to be good at it.
Many people can bust out a few push-ups or run a mile without training for it, but yoga is another beast entirely. Flexibility and mobility is a strength that you actively have to work on in order to improve it. If you haven’t been doing any flexibility training, then yoga going to be a challenge – regardless of whether or not you can run a mile in 7 minutes or win a push-up contest. Be humble, push yourself outside of your comfort zones, and you’ll notice improvements in just a few weeks.
3. Know the difference between discomfort and pain.
You may get into an unfamiliar posture and immediately think to yourself, “Jeez, this hurts like a [insert expletive here]!” There’s a difference between discomfort and pain, though. Pain is sharp and intense. Pain is your body telling you, “Don’t do that.” Discomfort, on the other hand, is different. Discomfort could be your body getting used to a particular pose, your body stretching in an unfamiliar way, or muscles being activated in a way they’re not used to. Use your intuition, and pay attention what the instructor is saying if you’re unsure of how you’re supposed to be feeling in a particular pose.
4. Focus on yourself; not on other people.
Everyone has different bodies, with varying strength, flexibility, and control. Mirroring what other people do instead of focusing on the posture in a way that works for your body and your fitness level could mean you aren’t getting the benefits of the pose. All beginners especially men shouldn’t try to stretch into an advanced yoga pose, because at worst, it means that you’re going to hurt yourself.
5. Sensation over depth.
It isn’t important how flexible you are, or how deep you can get into a posture. Pushing yourself beyond a level of flexibility that your body isn’t ready for is a great way to get injured – so let’s avoid that. Instead, focus on achieving the correct sensation in your body. This means feeling stretching in certain muscles, while feeling active engagement (flexing or muscle engagement) in others.
6. Use your whole body.
Yoga is different than your typical gym workouts because almost all of the postures and exercises in yoga involve your whole body. That means that in order for you to do the exercises correctly, you have to use the total sum parts of your body, or you could be creating an imbalance, missing out an building strength or flexibility in a particular muscle, or flat out setting yourself up for injury.
7. Control your breath; control your body.
One of the best yoga tips is control your breathing. If you can control your breath, you can control your body. This is especially true in yoga because of the intense focus on breathing. Breathing controls the natural rise and fall of your body. Inhaling lifts and lengthens your body, while exhaling helps you sink deeper into the poses and relax your muscles. Focus on your breath, and the control of your body will follow.
Hatha yoga resources:
Adapted from an article published in Business Insider, 4 benefits of Hatha yoga and how it can improve your physical and mental health
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Tantric Quote
“There is no big mystery to Tantra. It is in the allowance and grace of the breath.
Breathe easy and naturally and you will open the door to a sacred intent. With this sacred intent, loving and lovemaking becomes spiritual and holy.
You open the gateway to total joy and you embrace the divine, erotic impulse. So breathe and relax. This is tantra.” ~ Janet Robertson
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Emotional Fitness
What is emotional fitness?
Emotional fitness is our ability to understand our emotions, feel them, and proactively practice self-awareness and mindfulness. This is especially important in our ability to connect in our relationships, connect with ourselves, and ultimately live a satisfied life that involves healthy communication, healthy coping strategies, healthy relationships, and healthy mindsets.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to understand our emotional triggers and biases. It’s the foundation for emotional fitness, because if we can’t reflect on our own experience and whether or not it’s impacting how we interact with others, the rest of the traits are tough to develop. Self-awareness is a key aspect of emotional fitness.
Research shows 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, but only about 10–15% really are. The truth is, there’s so much we don’t know we don’t know.
Why is emotional fitness important?
Since stress is the number one cause of illness and disease, it’s only logical that any emotional self-regulation techniques practiced regularly is literally preventative medicine.
– Nick Terrone.
Men often learn to push physical and work performance but remain unaware that they are neglecting their emotional wellbeing. The message they get is ‘work hard, play hard and a healthy mind follows’. But emotional wellbeing also works on a different plane. One of slowing down, experiencing your feelings and connecting more deeply with others. That level of experience regulates the body and mind in other ways that ultimately increase wellbeing, health and performance.
– Dan Auerbach.
Building Emotional Fitness
1. Check in with yourself daily
Checking in with yourself every day is a good place to start in strengthening your emotional fitness. Take a few moments each day to observe how you feel, your thoughts and how your body feels. Think about each of these areas, thoughts, feelings and body awareness, because this will help you to identify each types of sensation.
2. Acknowledge your emotions
Acknowledging your emotions is the first step in understanding them. Integrating acknowledgement in your emotional fitness regimen is essential. After checking in with yourself and reflecting how you are feeling, acknowledgment is the step that makes those emotions validated. This is important, in order to work through your emotions, they first must “exist” to you.
3. Show yourself patience and compassion
Showing yourself patience when working through an emotion is the upmost important factor. Don’t make yourself feel wrong for feeling a certain away, simply be present to it and hold space for yourself. This process may be challenging at the beginning of this journey, but with consistency and support, it gets easier. On the journey of emotional fitness there are several steps, take it one step at a time.
4. Let go of judgement
Don’t make yourself “wrong” for feeling a certain way, rather get curious. Ask yourself, what in my life is no longer serving a purpose? What in my life can be contributing to how I am feeling right now? Emotions are how our body communicates with us and its our job to listen.
5. Feel your emotions fully and work towards letting them go
This step in the process is scary. More often than not, when you are experiencing an overwhelming emotion, it’s hard to allow it in, it’s easier to block it out. But in order to work through it, you have to acknowledge it, and work with it head on. This is how you can deal with it, otherwise you are ignoring it, or avoiding it and it lingers in the background. You can only go as deep as you allow yourself to, remember that. Letting go is the final step. Allowing yourself to feel it and then let it go is vitally important because it teaches you how to feel an emotion without becoming it. You learn how to separate yourself from the emotion and simply hold space for it.
Letting go of difficult emotions is not easy, here is a useful framework for letting go, so that you can experience emotional fitness.
Step One: Turn toward your emotions with acceptance
Once you become aware of the emotion you are feeling, notice where it is in your body. You may feel it as a stomachache, a tightening of your throat, the pounding of your heart, or tension somewhere. Sit with this anger, anxiety, depression, grief, guilt, sadness, shame, or whatever emotion you are experiencing. Become aware of it and don’t ignore it. If this is difficult, get up and walk around or get a cup of tea.
The key here is to not push the emotion away. Bottling it up inside will only cause it to bubble up and explode later, resulting in more difficult emotions or even a complete emotional shutdown. Listen to your difficult emotions. They are trying to help you wake up to what is going on before a major crisis occurs.
Step Two: Identify and label the emotion
Instead of saying, “I am angry”, say, “This is anger” or, “This is anxiety.” In this way, you’re acknowledging its presence, while simultaneously empowering you to remain detached from it.
When my husband was in the hospital before he passed, I felt a deep sense of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. I needed to acknowledge and identify the emotions and say to myself, “I know that I am experiencing anxiety and fear right now and I don’t know what will happen, but I am going to just ‘be’ with it.” Although it remained an extremely painful experience to the end, identifying and labelling my emotions in this way allowed me to take some of the pain out of what I was feeling. This, in turn, allowed me to stay in the present, versus catapulting me into the future, or trapping me in the past. Being thrust in either direction would have only caused me to blame myself. I can just imagine how that critical voice would have rung out, “If only you would have done something different, maybe there would have been a different outcome.”
Step Three: Accept your emotions
When you are feeling a certain emotion, don’t deny it. Acknowledge and accept that the emotion is present, whether it is anxiety, grief, sadness, or whatever you are experiencing in that moment. Through mindful acceptance you can embrace difficult feelings with compassion, awareness, and understanding towards yourself and your partner.
Think of a friend or a loved one who might be having a hard time. What would you say to them? Bring the scenario of what you would say to them into your mind’s eye. Now, say the same thing to yourself: “I am ok. I am not to blame. I did the best I could.” Hold these images and phrases within yourself with loving kindness and compassion. Extend this act of kindness toward yourself and become aware of what is going on within you. In this way you will gain the power to not only calm and soothe yourself, but also your partner.
You will soon come to realise that you are not your anger, fear, grief, or any other difficult emotion you are feeling. Instead you will begin to experience these emotions in a more fleeting manner, like clouds that pass by in the sky. Opening yourself up to your emotions allows you to create a space of awareness, curiosity, and expansiveness that you can then apply to your relationship, as well as any other aspect of your life.
Step Four: Realise the impermanence of your emotions
Every one of your emotions is impermanent. They arise and reside within you for a time, and then disappear. It’s easy to forget this when you’re in the midst of dealing with difficult emotions.
Allow yourself to witness and observe your emotions with kind attention and patience, giving them the latitude to morph, and in many cases, completely evaporate. To embrace this process, ask yourself:
Asking these focused questions and responding in turn will go a long way to promote empathy, compassion, and connection within your relationship.
Step Five: Inquire and investigate
After you have calmed and soothed yourself from the impact of your emotions, take a moment to delve deeply and explore what happened. Ask yourself the following questions:
Perhaps you had a hard day at work or difficulty dealing with your family. Maybe you feel unappreciated, lonely, or disconnected as a result of your interactions with someone. Whatever the cause or trigger, look at it closely and ask yourself what is happening here. Consider what was said or done and compare it to your values:
Asking yourself these critical questions and investigating the root of your difficult emotions will help you gain empathy and insight into what you are experiencing.
Taking yourself off autopilot and trusting your deepest, authentic self to answer these questions about your situation will create a space to see things with a different perspective. This will ultimately allow both you and your partner to be more present and connected with each other.
Step Six: Let go of the need to control your emotions
The key to mindfully dealing with your difficult emotions is to let go of your need to control them. Instead, be open to the outcome and what unfolds. Step outside of yourself and really listen to what your partner is feeling and what he or she has to say. Only then will you truly gain an in-depth understanding of your emotions and the interactions surrounding them within your relationship.
Mindfully dealing with emotions is hard, the path to emotional fitness takes time. Be kind, compassionate, and patient with yourself and your partner. You’re in this together! As Dr. John Gottman has said, “In a good relationship people get angry, but in a very different way. The Marriage Masters see a problem a bit like a soccer ball. They kick it around. It’s ‘our’ problem.”
We are fortunate that we live in a world where you and your partner can take the time to explore, discuss, and learn about mindfulness and your emotions. Emotional fitness starts with you taking the first step to check in with your self and consider how you are feeling, what thoughts are you having and how your body feels.
This is adapted from three articles, Why Every Man Should Track Their Emotional Fitness and 6 Steps to Mindfully Deal with Difficult Emotions and The Seven Traits of Emotional Fitness
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Self Massage
Self massage is a great way to ease tension and help you relax at home. Massage has plenty of physical and mental benefits, including pain relief and relaxation.
Luckily, you don’t always need to see a massage therapist to reap the rewards. For some types of ailments or simply for the joy of it, a self massage can be beneficial too.
If you’d like to try self massage for pain relief, here are some of the best and safest self massage techniques to try at home.
Self massage is using your hands, tools, or objects to work on sore muscles and adhesions instead of seeing a licensed massage therapist or bodywork professional.
During a self massage you use your hands or other tools to manipulate your own muscles. This involves kneading the skin and applying pressure in certain spots.
Picking up some self massage techniques can be a useful way to soothe stress and ease pain caused by poor posture or even some chronic conditions.
To get started, you can use one of the common techniques below.
Using your hands is a great way to give yourself a self neck massage, a self foot massage or a self head massage. These areas are all easy to reach and don’t require too much pressure, making them easy to massage with the hands.
A foam roller is a useful tool for easing muscle pain in the:
Simply position the roller on the floor and place the body over top of it. Then, move the body back and forth over the roller.
Using a tennis ball to massage the shoulders, back, and pectoral muscles
A tennis ball or a golf ball is great for accessing harder-to-reach muscle groups like the shoulders, mid-back, or pectoral muscles. Use the floor or a wall and roll your body over the ball.
Be sure to be extra gentle if using a golf ball. You’ll want to use light pressure due to the hard surface.
There are a variety of other self massage tools designed to target specific muscle groups more accurately. These include:
What are the benefits of self massage?
Self massage is a simple, convenient way to enjoy the benefits of massage therapy. As a DIY method, it can be done in the comfort of your own home.
Like massage in general, self-massage may help ease:
When included as part of a comprehensive treatment plan, self-massage might also help manage chronic conditions like fibromyalgia or arthritis. It shouldn’t replace regular medical treatment, though.
Additionally, if you receive professional massages, self massage may prolong the benefits and provide relief in between sessions.
Self massage is a great way to stimulate and rejuvenate the body. Massaging the muscles helps to stimulate blood flow and circulation in the body. It enables you to know your body and feel connected to your body. The best way to keep your body free of tension? Use a mixture of both self massage and professional massage therapy.
What is self care?
Self care has been defined as a multidimensional, multifaceted process of purposeful engagement in strategies that promote healthy functioning and enhance well-being. Essentially, the term describes a conscious act a person takes in order to promote their own physical, mental, and emotional health.
There are many forms self care can take. It could be ensuring you get enough sleep every night or stepping outside for a few minutes for some fresh air.
Self care is vital for building resilience toward those stressors in life that you can’t eliminate. When you’ve taken steps to care for your mind and body, you’ll be better equipped to live your best life.
Unfortunately, however, many people view self care as a luxury, rather than a priority. Consequently, they’re left feeling overwhelmed, tired, and ill equipped to handle life’s inevitable challenges.
It’s important to assess how you’re caring for yourself in several different domains so you can ensure you’re caring for your mind, body, and spirit.
Different types of self care
Self care isn’t just about finding ways to relax. It’s about taking care of yourself mentally, physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. In order to care for your health and well-being, it is important to find a balance that allows you to address each of these areas. Sometimes you might need more self-care in one specific area in order to restore balance or find relief from a stressor in your life.
1 / Physical self care
You need to take care of your body if you want it to run efficiently. Keep in mind that there’s a strong connection between your body and your mind. When you’re caring for your body, through various techniques such as self massage, you’ll think and feel better too.
Physical self care includes how you’re fueling your body, how much sleep you’re getting, how much physical activity you are doing, and how well you’re caring for your physical needs. Self massage can be a great way to take care of your body and physical needs. Attending healthcare appointments, taking medication as prescribed, and managing your health are all part of good physical self care.
When it comes to physical self-care, ask yourself the following questions to assess whether there might be some areas you need to improve:
2 / Social self care
Socialisation is key to self care. But, often, it’s hard to make time for friends and it’s easy to neglect your relationships when life gets busy.
Close connections are important to your well-being. The best way to cultivate and maintain close relationships is to put time and energy into building your relationships with others.
There isn’t a certain number of hours you should devote to your friends or work on your relationships. Everyone has slightly different social needs. The key is to figure out what your social needs are and to build enough time in your schedule to create an optimal social life.
To assess your social self-care, consider:
3 / Mental self care
The way you think and the things that you’re filling your mind with greatly influence your psychological well-being.
Mental self care includes doing things that keep your mind sharp, like puzzles, or learning about a subject that fascinates you. You might find reading books or watching movies that inspire you fuels your mind.
Mental self care also involves doing things that help you stay mentally healthy. Practicing self-compassion and acceptance, for example, helps you maintain a healthier inner dialogue.
Here are a couple of questions to consider when you think about your mental self-care:
4 / Spiritual self care
Research shows that a lifestyle including religion or spirituality is generally a healthier lifestyle.
Nurturing your spirit, however, doesn’t have to involve religion. It can involve anything that helps you develop a deeper sense of meaning, understanding, or connection with the universe.
Whether you enjoy meditation, attending a religious service, or praying, spiritual self-care is important.
As you consider your spiritual life, ask yourself:
5 / Emotional self care
It’s important to have healthy coping skills to deal with uncomfortable emotions, like anger, anxiety, and sadness. Emotional self-care may include activities that help you acknowledge and express your feelings regularly and safely.
Whether you talk to a partner or close friend about how you feel, or you set aside time for leisure activities that help you process your emotions, it’s important to incorporate emotional self-care into your life.
When assessing your emotional self-care strategies, consider these questions:
Why is self care important?
Having an effective self care routine has been shown to have a number of important health benefits. Some of these include:
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), self-care is important because it can help promote health, prevent disease, and help people better cope with illness.
Specific forms of self care have also been linked to different health and wellness benefits, including a longer life. Exercise, finding a sense of purpose in life, and sleep have all been connected to an increased lifespan.
Develop your self care plan
An effective self care plan should be tailored to your life and your needs. It needs to be something created by you, for you. Customising your own self-care plan can act as a preventative measure to make sure that you don’t get overwhelmed, overstressed, and burned out.
Assess which areas of your life need some more attention and self-care. And reassess your life often. As your situation changes, your self-care needs are likely to shift too.
As you are building your self-care plan, the following steps can be helpful:
More self massage resources
This post is adapted from these two articles, How to Ease Stress and Pain with Self-Massage Techniques and 5 Self-Care Practices for Every Area of Your Life
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Regain your sense of wonder
When we ditch our assumptions new ideas can enter our world. In an entertaining talk full of props and surprises, Zach King shows us the trick to regaining our sense of wonder through the power of storytelling.
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Tantric Quote
Tantra is a field that says neither abstain nor be obsessed.
This can be handled by a few, even if you have mastered it.
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4 Techniques to Help Relax
1. Mindful practices
Engage in practices that help to slow your mind and body down such as tai chi, qigong, meditation or walking in nature. Even just 20 long, slow, focused breaths, in and out through your nose, at several intervals across the day can make a difference. There will be times when you need to pick up the pace, but the more you encourage slowness in your day, the more you will realise we can still be busy and mindful at the same time.
2. Flex your “no” muscle
While there are things that all of us need to do whether we want to or not, there are several that you may be doing out of duty or obligation or to people please. Become discerning about why you’re saying yes and practice being honest about those things that really feel like an internal “no”.
3. Create space for what nourishes you
Even if it’s just five minutes each day, take some time to yourself to do something that nourishes your soul. Start small and grow it.
4. Try something new
Trying something new is invigorating and helps you to get out of old ruts. Even if it’s walking a new route, or listening to new music, or trying food that’s new to you, this helps to focus your attention on the here and now, relishing in the new experience.
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Joy is Uplifting
Joy is uplifting, it’s happy moments or great contentment that washes over you. It can be intense, or subtle, brief, or long lasting. It can be found in the present moment, or when you come back to a memory you have. Some find this happiness while losing themselves on the dance floor, others while catching up with friends over a meal, or looking into the eyes of their lover.
In Greek there are eight words for joy, the most prevalent is chara [khar-ah’]. Chara means joy, calm delight, or inner gladness. It is related to chairo [khah’-ee-ro], which means to rejoice and charis [khar’-ece], which means grace.
For each of us there is a diversity of experiences that bring into being the positive thoughts, feelings, and bodily awareness of joy within us.
Joy can be a “response to the goodness of the order of the world” (Thompson, 2015, p. 35). In other words, we experience joy when we believe that our life is being well-lived. This appraisal is difficult if we are living life in a way that is inconsistent with the basic needs of human existence (e.g., trying to live without others). In this sense, joy functions as a barometer of our “attunement with the world” (Thompson, p. 35).
A few studies have examined the connection between joy and subjective well-being. Researchers have developed measures of joy as both a temporary state (feeling happiness in the moment) and as a more enduring personality trait (a tendency to experience joy more or less often than other people).
These measures are moderate to strong predictors of measures of both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Moreover, joy can be related to gratitude and spirituality. In a recent study where we looked at joy over a period of time, gratitude predicted increased future joy. Somewhat surprisingly, happiness also predicted increases in gratitude over time, suggesting an intriguing upward spiral between gratitude and joy. In other words, it looks like gratitude increases joy, but in turn joy also increases gratitude; and this “cycle of goodness” might be important to our happiness. Joy also predicted increases in happiness over time, supporting the idea that joy can be important to subjective well-being. If joy can be important to subjective well-being, how can we encourage it?
Although the study of joy is still in its infancy, several conclusions from research can be drawn.
1 / Joy is caused by a distinct pattern of thinking
People experience joy when they feel (re)connected to someone or something important.
2 / Joy predicts increased happiness over time
3 / Joy and gratitude are linked
Although gratitude and joy are distinct, they support each other in a “cycle of goodness” that enhances your well-being.
4 / Joy seems essential for “the good life,”
Don’t miss the opportunity to pursue this emotion. In the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “For to miss joy, is to miss all.”
Source for the above paragraphs
Through her research, Pamela Ebstyne King, Ph.D., has sought to understand joy. Dr. Pamela says that a helpful way of thinking about happiness is understanding what matters most in human life. She reviewed philosophical, theological, and psychological approaches, and identified three areas that deeply inform this form of happiness.
1 / Growing in authenticity and living more into one’s strengths
2 / Growing in depth of relationships and contributing to others
3 / Living more aligned with your values
Dr. Pamela considers that the more a person is able to live a strength-based life, reciprocate relationships with others, and live in alignment with their values, the more happiness they will experience in life.
This suggests that this form of happiness isn’t just an individual pursuit, but one that deeply involves our connections with others. We can discover and experience this form of happiness in a variety of ways—doing those things we love to do, growing in intimacy or providing for others, and clarifying and coherently pursuing our values. When these domains of the self, others, and values overlap, that is perhaps when we experience the most forms of happiness.
Ways to explore finding more joy …
1 / Let go of the past
Your past is not your future unless you live there – and living there prevents you from learning how to find this form of happiness in the present. If you’ve lost a loved one, ended a relationship or have been struggling financially, these are certainly valid reasons to feel down. Let yourself feel sad or lonely, but never hopeless. Ask yourself what you can learn about yourself from your experiences and emotions. Then let go of the past. You deserve to feel this form of happiness again.
2 / Practice gratitude
One way to move on from the past and feel happiness in your life is to practice gratitude. By choosing to be optimistic and focus on the good things in your life, you can actually train your brain to feel this form of happiness more often. Tony Robbins says, “When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.” That’s how gratitude creates a cycle of positive emotions: The more you practice gratitude, the more positive emotions you will feel.
3 / Use the law of attraction
The more positivity you feel, the more you will attract positivity in your life – that’s the law of attraction. This principle has been around for thousands of years and is used by the world’s most successful people to design the lives of their dreams. It isn’t complicated: What you focus on, you attract. Focus on creating happiness in your own life and sharing it with others, and you’ll naturally attract even more happiness.
4 / Surround yourself with positive people
Surrounding yourself with good people goes hand in hand with the law of attraction and is vital to every area of your life. When you’re surrounded by positive people, it will be nearly impossible to feel pessimistic. They’ll lift your spirits and help you find the good in any situation. Letting go of people who don’t make you feel happy – or who actively work against it – isn’t always easy. However, you cannot learn how to find happiness with their toxic negativity holding you back.
5 / Change your physiology
We’ve all heard the expression “fake it ‘til you make it.” If you’re still having trouble shifting your focus to feel this form of happiness instead of negativity, put on a smile. You’ll tell your brain you’re happy – even if you’re not. Change your posture by standing up tall, throwing your shoulders back or even adopting a power pose. Confident physiology can change your entire demeanor.
All sources, Psychology Today, George Mason University, Greek Meaning, Ways to Explore Finding More Joy