Joy Is Not Self-Indulgent: Why We Struggle to Celebrate Our Lives

Why is it so easy for us to talk about grief, struggle, and healing—but so difficult to sit inside our joy?

In this episode, I reflect on the cultural and spiritual patterns that cause many of us to minimize happiness, rush past our wins, and feel uneasy celebrating our lives when others are suffering.

From workplace culture that equates seriousness with credibility to spiritual traditions that elevate suffering over joy, many of us have quietly learned that happiness should be brief, modest, and quickly followed by the next goal.

But what if joy is not self-indulgent?

What if it is stabilizing?

I explore how joy and compassion can coexist, why suppressing joy does not relieve the suffering of others, and how fully inhabiting moments of happiness can actually expand our capacity to serve the world.

This episode invites listeners to shift the practice from:

Achieve → Move On

to

Achieve → Pause → Feel → Name → Savor

Because joy is not the opposite of seriousness.

Joy is coherence made visible.

Transcript

Noticing How We Minimize Joy

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Have you ever noticed how much we minimize joy? I have been noticing that lately, how we shrink ourselves. We shrink our joy and we shrink our ease. A friend of mine said a couple of weeks ago that she had a win at work, and she noticed how quick she was ready to move on to the next goal, the next project timeline that was on her agenda. And she had to call herself back and say, girl, you worked for this. Let's stay here, let's enjoy this moment. And that's really had me thinking, because it is hard to be fully in your joy, or at least for me it is, and definitely for her, it is. So we've been talking about it and trying to share voice messages, voice notes of joy. This is my joy that I'm noticing today, and start noticing, giving joy as much of our attention as we give our wounds and our grief and our sadness and our boundaries. Everything else can consume us and feels right to sit with. And it is hard to recognize that your joy doesn't erase their discomfort, it doesn't minimize their discomfort, and your joy doesn't reduce your compassion. You can both be incredibly joyful and incredibly compassionate and empathetic. One doesn't erase the other. Light doesn't steal from darkness. I know we have different avenues, both cultural and spiritual, that that really play into minimizing our joy and our happiness. If you show up into a workplace and you are are bounding and you are smiling and you are ecstatic and perhaps even laughing, you would likely not be taken as seriously. We somehow have braided seriousness with intellect, with ability. We have definitely braided it with spirituality, with reverence. We think that suffering has more value than joy, that prayer must be deep and thoughtful and solemn. Have you ever seen those videos of the children dancing and singing in Africa? They figured out how to make some viral TikToks. Viral. And they are singing and dancing, and it's the cutest thing you've ever seen. And I don't know that I have ever witnessed prayer more profound. But we don't think of it that way, do we? We don't think of joy as being the offering. But it should be. Because truthfully, prayer without joy becomes heaviness, and service without joy becomes martyrdom. Leadership without joy becomes control. Joy softens systems. And joy widens possibilities. And joy motivates. You know what will have me living life in the most effective, efficient way. Having a trip coming up, dude, I can get some stuff done. I can knock out stuff that normally would take me so much longer because I have joy scheduled. It is on my calendar and I am about to take off and find it. When we lose that joy, when we lose our ability to find lightness in our days, things on our schedule that we know are going to fill our buckets, the days become harder, nights become longer. The heaviness of our world, the collective experience becomes so hard to bear. It is important for us, those who have regulated nervous systems, those who are not currently struggling to survive. It is our honor and our duty and our privilege to experience joy, to show others that pain is not the only part of the story, to allow children to witness lightness, to see moments that the world is not heavy, to know that there is something else to strive for. And the striving is not towards a paycheck or a title, it is towards laughter and lightness. So I'm trying not to see joy as self-indulgent. I'm trying to see it as stabilizing, as a contribution. It is okay for me to be happy. It is okay for me to express joy. I even struggle sharing on social media sometimes because I hear so much about social media is a highlight reel. And then I'm cautious, like, oh, if I'm sharing this, people would just think it's my highlight reel. But to be quite honest, I shared the other part of me on this podcast, and that's not always a highlight reel. That's me in the grief and in the sadness. And somehow that sometimes feels easier to share. The struggle, the hardship. Why is it so much easier for us to connect there than it is in our joy? I think a lot of it is honestly compassion. You don't want to be elated with your children and your experience if someone else is struggling or thrilled with your pregnancy when others you know are having fertility complications. A lot of times we suppress our experience to make it softer for others. But our joy doesn't erase their pain, it just dims our experience. So it's a reminder that you can be both. You can both be celebratory in your experience and compassionate of others. In fact, the more celebratory you are authentically, not an outward performance, but a genuine joy that results in gratitude, the more in service of others you will find yourself able to be. From that true happiness, we can extend outward. We can offer service from a place of joy. When when we stay in the heaviness, which you know I do, when we stay there, it often does pull us inward, it pulls us in to do that reflective work, to do that contemplative digging. But when we are in joy, it's easier to move out, it's easier to extend ourselves outward from joy. So when you think of yourself now retracting and trying to minimize your experience, your good marriage, your business opportunity, your family, your health. Remember that those are your tools. Your tools to serve the rest. So minimizing that is like, hey, I could help. I have a saw, but before I use it, I'm gonna go dole its edges. I'm gonna go make it not so sharp so that I can go help others. No, we need your full blade, we need the fullest expression of your happiness, your joy, your thrill with the life that you are embodied to live. From there, you can cut. You can cut with love. We're back to the saw. We're not cutting actual people, we are using the tools that we have in their fullest expression to serve others. Joy is coherence made visible. So, how I'm gonna think about this is instead of achieving something, and achievement for everybody feels differently. I don't have big work wins like Maurice does to get excited about. I get to get excited about hers, but my wins look very different. But they're still worthy. They're still worthy of me to be excited about. So my goal is instead of achieve and then move on, to shift the practice. Achieve, pause, feel, name, savor. We have been trading voice notes to share what our joys are, to say this is what happened. And in my sharing this with you, I am recording it. I am giving it voice, I am giving it experience. This is my joy. Find somebody and share your joys. Send them to me. I would love to know your joys. Sometimes my joy is that lingering at the dinner table. It is my favorite time when everybody is getting along and we have finished and we choose to stay. Nobody's required to, but we stay, and that conversation feels like joy to me. And instead of rushing to the next bit, I want to acknowledge it and say, This is my joy. I'm going to savor it. Can I stay here 10 seconds longer and just feel the presence of my family around this table? I recently made a new connection. Somebody reached out to me from a YouTube video, and she and I have been corresponding via email, and I'm talking about proper letter writing correspondence, and it has been nourishing to me. The thoughtfulness of her responses, the engagement, and just meeting your people and finding that connection has felt so aligned and truly joyful. I have felt so much joy reading her messages and also responding and thinking how I want to share part of me or what I'm looking to share about myself with her. And it has been really joyful. It doesn't have to be big things, but can we start giving as much attention to what lights us up as what drags us down? We are so conditioned to do the work. The work, the work, the work, the excavating of all of the stuff instead of sitting with what feels good, with what already feels aligned. This is your success. Your joy is the metric, the barometer that says you've already done so much work. Can you acknowledge this moment? Can you let it feel light? Can you let it feel good? Can you let this moment, this experience of joy and laughter, can this be your win? I'm gonna say yes. And what if your celebration doesn't have to require some big pronouncement? What if it just requires presence, an acknowledgement? This feels good. This moment feels good. Not fireworks, maybe just an exhale. My my hope is that I can put in some really good time practicing joy that when I start skiing and get down to the bottom of the mountain, my reaction is going to be elation and joy, and like, woo-hoo, I did that, instead of tension and my contraction, which is usually like, why am I even doing this? I want to be so well versed in joy that I am able to find it skiing. That's my goal. Not just watching my kids ski because I find that joyful, but I find myself so tense that I'm not even, I'm not even sure I'm enjoying it while I'm out there. But my goal is to be so well versed in joy that I am able to find it on the mountain. I I hear from others that it does exist out there. So here goes. I know people are struggling right now. I know the world is chaotic. Returning to joy does not mean ignoring the world. It is remembering why we care about the world. The collective does not benefit from our depletion. Celebration is not a betrayal, it is participation in life. The world doesn't need more exhausted saints. It needs more embodied light. Thanks for listening. Have a good week.