• Conscious Joy

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    What do you feel

    right now

    experiencing seeing this?

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    Be happy!

    Joy is a mindfuck, because in modern culture "you have to be happy". It’s what you learned at your home, in the advertisements, movies, series, school. Do everything to have success and be happy. Study this college, go to work 10 hours a day in this corporation that it’s killing life on planet earth, get marriage, buy a car, buy a house, go to travel, and then you will be happy.

    Be happy.

     

    It seems to be the biggest goal in modern culture. “At the end of the day I want to be happy, peaceful with each other”. To “make it” happen you might learn to suppress your anger, your sadness, your fear because they are bad feelings. “Good vibes only”.

     

    It’s a mindfuck because at the same time that you grow up listening to the mantra "you should be glad" there is other information that is totally the opposite "no, don't be too glad".

     

    If you investigate a little deeper, you will soon realize that if you’re too joyful, you’re perceived as:

    • childish,

    • not professional, or at least

    • suspicious, naive.

     

    This is the Degenerative Map of Joy.

    Degenerative Map of Joy

    Because you learned to force your feelings, you learned to pretend, to block, they become unconscious. And it’s at this moment that your Gremlin takes place.

     

    Because of the mixed messages that you learned about joy, your system will not be used to the pure archetypal force of joy as a resource. That is why joy is mostly unconscious and serves the hidden purposes of your Gremlin.

     

    The biggest part of the research is about finding and healing the blocks and stories and building up a new inner structure able to hold conscious joy. This goes through practice.

     

    What are the qualities of Joy as a Feeling that serves you?

    What’s in the way for you to use Joy as a resource?

    How can you access your joy of life?

    In the research Team that Julia Neumann and Gabriela held space some of the discoveries relate the Degenerative Map of Joy were: 

    • If you express joy you are childish, suspicious, naive;
    • If you express joy you are not professional, alienated, does not watch news in the newspaper;
    • If you express joy people might react, it’s inappropriate, you offend someone;
    • Humiliation, sarcasm, cinism;
    • “You have to be happy, if it's too much tension, you can just be glad.”
    • “Don’t be too much glad because something worse can happen, there is no place to joy;
    • “It might be rude. I don't want to hurt them and devalidate their way of being and feeling in the world so I block my own feelings to save others first”;
    • Using joy as a strategy to manipulate someone's smile, being nice and charismatic in a way of avoiding your other feelings and your Clarity;
    • Too loud. Joy can not be noise. You might learned to use your anger to suppress it and close your body;
    • Using joy as a passport to be accepted. This can come from when you were child and when you were joyful you were seen and loved and when you expressed any other feelings your parents were repressing, questioning or giving things to you so you stop being angry, scared or sad;
    • “During the first four years of my life I was a very joyful child, so the story goes. Then my life changed and I felt mostly sad and scared. I kept being measured against my happy self afterwards and I noticed I felt anger for that and it did not help me to feel my authentic joy”;
    • Avoiding feeling or expressing joy to not be “broken” by another person. “Researching I found a part of me that goes back to the darkness and protects it at all cost with an old decision of “You will not break me, ever. So I’ll not show you my joy”;
    • “Don't show too much joy because then the other person will get me, might shut me down.i might get disappointed.”
    • “Be cautious, don’t get too silly“;
    • Feeling Joy to num other feelings " I should be grateful.. maybe do compassion meditation. Look around and acknowledge beautiful things of life”;
    • Any feeling other than joy caused concern. 'My daughter is not well, I am to blame'. Not being cheerful is a sign of heaviness;
    • In modern culture being happy is almost a synonym of being numb. How are you? I'm happy, I'm nice, everything it's ok.  

    The Immediate Pleasure

    One of the most efficient strategies to avoid feeling pain is to look for immediate pleasure that brings a high dopamine spike, such as: scrolling on instagram, leaving and entering apps, games, sex, chocolate, drugs, series, binge-watching makeover videos on youtube.

     

    The pitfall of dopamine spikes is that your system becomes addicted. After a dopamine spike your brain is flooded with euphoria and a sense of relief. A while later, this dopamine line drops drastically, beyond the natural line, which generates a feeling of tiredness, drunkenness.

     

    As a result, their bodies gradually lose the possibility of experiencing contentment when doing things that generate dopamine in a more stable and constant way, such as reading a book, spending a day at the pool with friends, enjoying the sunset, and having a deep and intimate conversation with your partner. It's like life loses color, and you're always looking for more and more intensity to feel alive.

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    Your gremlin has clever ways of blackmailing, manipulating and convincing you to get distracted in this cycle so that you can avoid responsibility for your life and become a victim of not having enough possibilities to change. An example is your gremling taking a task, making it bigger than it is, adding layers and layers of complexity, until you have enough reason to be distracted: "oh, I'll just take a look at this message, then I'll finish this." That is the seed for procrastination.

    Discoveries and sharings from the experiments we did

    Yesterday, after holding space for one person, I felt 70% joy. I watched the cells in my body vibrate, like when I take a bath in a waterfall. It was a small gap in which I was present with this feeling of contemplation and appreciation for the extraordinary and archetypal space that was created.

     

    Soon after I observed the movement of my gremlin, almost as if taking this vibration from my cells and eating it and then I observed this pure joy turning into "how amazing, I transformed this person's life, I helped him transform, let's move on to the next task of the day. Transform more people". i noticing the adrenaline in my body, my heart started to beat faster

    Most of the time when I say "I just feel glad" I've realized it's an immediate action from my box, like saying "hi, what's up?".

    I noticed this when my partner sent me an audio sharing about the first space he was going to offer and I automatically wrote "I feel happy that he is going to create this space".

    When I tried to say the information of joy this came out: "I feel joy because I have been following your journey to support spaces and I witnessed your shares of how terrifying this was for you. I celebrate this step towards something that used to be a resistance".

    Wow, how much information filtered through my box.

    I was in an etb training this weekend and I noticed when I first got there I was experiencing emotional joy. I was so excited about being in a new place and meeting new people that I couldn't access any other feeling. I navigated through a mini EHP about it and discovered it was tied to a memory of traveling on a trip with my mom at 5 years old. It was the joy of having one on one connection with her.

     

    At this training while sharing a room with other women I noticed the gremlin joy in the evenings after all the sessions were over and we would come together and share about different fears of the day and then my gremlin would come in and make jokes and I was conscious about what I was doing and it was fun.

     

    I keep noticing the intensity of my bubbly joy that is here also right now, excited about creating, with a slight tendency to be in the future, agitated, restless. I believe it is emotional joy.

     

    I also notice my caution - fear - of feeling joy in the moment as things occur. For example, we put up a bell tent where I live yesterday. It was magical how that came about and how easily we put it up.

     

    From what I recall, my fear was about breaking the tent when jumping around in joy; fear of the carelessness that often comes with joy. I sense how my parent ego sits there watching over my joy in those moments. I sense that this is partly so because what comes up is the child joy, rather than the adult joy. I see it in the others around me, and I feel scared of that. 

    Regenerative Map of Joy

    What are the qualities of Joy as a Feeling that serves you?

    What’s in the way for you to use Joy as a resource?

    How can you access your joy of life?

    The starting point to learn to use your feeling of Joy consciously it’s to go through Gremlin Transformation.

    This is an ongoing research. Here it’s some possibilities we learned in The Research Team how you can use consciously your Joy

    • Joy it’s your compass that indicates what excites you, what it’s nourishing to your bodies.
    • I used the joy of cold wind on my warm body as well as the joy of stretching and re-agilitating my body. I guess those are feelings but have some proove for it being emotions since I have old stories about both of these things being en-joy-able.
    • appeciation
    • gratitude
    • creation

    yesterday I experienced do a kind of “spun” with wood and my hands. I could observe the feeling of joy flowing as I was discovering how to peal the wood, what the best way to use the knife, how to do the hole. I experienced joy as a fuel of discovery and exploration of doing something new. And as the another feelings, I just can feel if I’m present. When I was not present, I was numb and was the moment I broke the wood in the middle and I felt anger that brings me to the presence again. Then I started over and this was the result.

    My joy handworking TPP project turned out to be a soap holder for the shower. I had the idea the other morning. So I got driftwood and pumice rock, a very soft airy stone from the volcanoes here where I live.

    I started carving the stone and the driftwood yesterday and noticed how my joy was there only occasionally. I caught myself thinking I should finish it now. And so I stopped. I did not want it to be a chore.

    This morning I returned to it and I feel joy at the creation.

    I notice that I feel more joy carving wood than pumice.

    For the last days I joined a chocolate maker visiting the producers of the chocolate beans he uses: An indigenous tribe living close to the Panama border in a reserve. With us was a mother who lost her 7 year old child when her house burned down two years ago.

     

    It turned out to be a 3 day culture to culture experiment with a huge language barrier and high intensity fear on my side since I don‘t speak spanish (the Ngäbe only rarely speak english, mostly their own language and the language of their conquerors - spanish) and we slept in the jungle in wooden huts.

     

    They cope with being pushed into this life far of the next city (aprox. 1h by car) with a humbleness. I did not receive any high intensity joy over the two days with different people. Something like an underlying joy of life though was in every move. I twice heard them say: „The spanish sent us here to die and look how good we survive!“

     

    I felt resentment under sadness and something like an old „shock“ (as high intensity fear) that keeps them contained in surviving and not wanting to go anywhere from there.

     

    I felt these joys (mixed and unmixed):

    adrenalin of adventure

    the joy of seeing sunrise and sunset

    the joy of listening to the song of zicades

    the joy of learning about another culture without wanting to show my culture

    joy of cooking on fire

    joy of harvesting food

    adrenalin of searching for tracks of a jaguar in the jungle by night

    joy of tropical rain

    joy of roadtripping

    joy of not understanding any word and being allowed to listen

    joy of tasting strange food (there‘s fear and something else I can not name - maybe fear of disgust)

    joy of meeting a „soulfriend“ - somebody who resonates a lot with what I notice and the conversation just keeps on rolling

    joy of life working out without plan (going non-linear)

    Yesterday we had a family meeting about this new kitchen codex, and my youngest who is 6 years old was there but playing off to the side , I assumed not really listening. This morning after breakfast though I found her doing this in the kitchen.

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    Yesterday while facilitating a PlayFight circle I discovered that conscious joy is a way of accessing the non-linearity of my gremling to make movements in space beyond my box. Conscious joy is the fuel for experimentation and non-linearity.

     

    It was a group of 8 people, all psychologists, with highly intellectual and analytical cases. In a moment, between one exercise and another, many parallel conversations started to happen, trying to analyze all the experiences that were happening (it's just that in froid's theory.... and it started).

     

    In that situation, in a usual way to facilitate I would pause and ask a question or ask you not to go pro mental, make an invitation to experience the physical body. However I felt like exploring "how to use my sword of clarity in a playful and playful way".

     

    The moment I asked myself that question, between one exercise and another, I felt the joy grow in my body and I decided to use it by asking Raissa (my gremling): what game do you propose so that these people can experience reality not verbal.

     

    She brought me something that my box completely fried. I decided to propose a non-verbal game in which from that moment on our communication would only be through the body, including me explaining the exercises. It was really fun the countless ways I could explore my body and how to land communication beyond words.

     

    The shift that happened in space was incredible. People began to surrender to the exercises, they began to access their feelings. In the end, one of the discoveries we made as a group is that unconscious joy can be almost like a euphoria that disconnects us from ourselves and takes us to mind and agitation. One participant said "I found that I've been anesthetizing any and all feelings talking and talking, analyzing, thank you for proposing this game because I could access another dimension of what it is to be human"

     

    I am researching the question: how joy and playfulness can empower my everyday life, What does the energy of conscious joy enable me

     

    I also found that my parental ego state still has many judgments that "gremling is bad, it's wrong", "you can't use her, it's your dark world".

     

    What I was able to experience and recognize in this experience is that I often do not experience ecstasy and do not allow myself to use the energy of joy to get out of the usualness of my box and access non-linearity (which is my gremling) due to the parental ego state .

     

    And in this state of parental ego I found an emotional fear that I'm going to make a process, I feel afraid of using this joy as an inventiveness, of using this joy to access my gremling, and I get attention. Because when I "came attention" I was abused or only received praising

    The Creative Spark

    excerpted from the book Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta

    The creative spark is a process that allows us to solve seemingly impossible problems. The chemical burst of pleasure we feel when genuine knowledge transmission takes place [for example, from your Bright Principles or your Archetypal Lineage] occurs from the creation of new neural pathways. These are connections between two points that were previously unconnected. Jokes are one of the most pure examples of this neural creation event; most humor is based on two ideas coming together in a new way - puns, rhymes, double meanings, etc. are examples of this. The chemical rush we get from sudden neural connections in jokes is so intensely pleasurable that we laugh out loud. This kind of humor and joy in learning is a huge part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. If people are laughing, they are learning. True learning is a joy because it is an act of creation.

     

    But there are two kinds of joy. One is characterized by lightheartedness and the other is marked by fierce engagement and deep concentration. Both give pleasure by increasing connectedness and complexity in the neural systems of learners. There needs to be an interaction between abstract (spirit) and concrete (physical) worlds of knowledge for this kind of complexity to develop fully. Without closing the loop between abstract knowledge and reality, and without making connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge, true learning cannot occur.

     

    A focus on linear, abstract, declarative knowledge alone not only fails to create complex connectivity but damages the mind. We are biologically punished for this destructive behavior with a neurochemical rush of lethargy and discomfort that most people call boredom. Extended periods of this affects a person's mental health, resulting in bouts of rage, depression, and worse. In centralized knowledge institutions today, this illness is called 'misbehavior' or 'misconduct'. Without the spark of creation in your neural system, the mind-body system stagnates and falls apart, affecting no only your ability to learn but also your health and relationships as well, leading to increasingly destructive behaviors.

  • Experiments

    "The question is not whether you practice or not.

    It's about what you practice."

     

    The kown can only create the known.

    Only the unknown can create other results.

     

    But how can I use what I don't know? 

    Become an Experimenter:

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    Which map of joy is in your bodies alive?

    Experiment CONSJOY.01

    Prepare your space so you are undistrubed for 15mins.

    Go into first position with your Gremlin on the leash and your sword in your hand. Now scan your 5 bodies:

     

    Which map of joy is alive in each single body?

     

    Write your findings in your Beep!-Book. This is your starting point for the experiment, your X on the map.

     

    Now repeat this experiment with different people around you (friends, family, collegues, foreigners, ...).

    What do you notice?

     

    Share your findings with your teams.

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    Excitement

    Experiment CONSJOY.02

    When you feel excitement seperate the joy from the fear and look at the informations that fear and joy have for you seperately.

     

    You might need to go through an unmixing process first to untangle the mixed emotions in your heart.

     

    Mixing joy and fear is a decision from when you were very young. This decision is fuel for the creation of the fantasy worlds.

     

    Share your findings, especially

    • the distinction between the sensation of the mixed emotions and the seperated emotions
    • the information from the unmixed emotions
    • your experience from the first time you again feel excitement after the unmixing process

    with your teams.

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    Numbing Joy

    Experiment CONSJOY.03

    When you notice you are unable to access joy, i.e. when people around you laugh about something, when you read a cartoon, when you see a child playing, when you read a joke and so on, switch into the role of an experimenter and research how your mechanism to avoid joy works.

    • How do you numb joy?
    • Which sentences do pop up in your intellectual body?
    • Which emotions are alive in your emotional body?
    • What strategies do you use to switch the space?

    Take notes in your Beep!-Book and ask for emotional healing spaces for your findings.

    Make sure to celebrate each of your strategies in the emotional healing spaces because they worked exquisitly for you until now.

     

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    Joy vs. immediate pleasure

    Experiment CONSJOY.04

    This experiment can only be done when you feel pain in one or more bodies. It works especially good when you feel pain in your physical body, i.e. after hitting your toe, bumping your head, cutting your finger or so.

     

    Notice how you use joy to numb the sensation of pain:

    • How do you create joy?
    • How does the joy work in your bodies?
    • What happens after joy calms down?

    Write an article about it and share it with your circles.

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    Controling Joy

    Experiment CONSJOY.05

    Repeat experiment CONSJOY.03 (Numbing Joy) and focus on your mechanisms and strategies to control joy. The distintinction here is between avoiding joy with replacing it with another feeling and keeping joy in boundaries so it does not overwhelm you.

     

    You will encounter a lever for the amount of joy in your system. Explore it. How does it work?

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    Informations of Joy

    Experiment CONSJOY.06

    For one week commit to asking your joy whenever it arises, even when it's just there at 1%, which information it has for you.

     

    It can look something like this:
    You stand in line at your favorite coffee store and notice you feel joy. In your intellectual body formulate the words:
    "Joy, what do you have for me?"
    Then bring 20% of your attention to the center of your chest and scan your energetic body: Where does your attention go?
    Do you suddenly smell coffee?
    Do you suddenly notice the cozy atmosphere?
    Do you suddenly dance with the music?
    Do you suddenly remember having been here before with a dear friend?
     
    Take notes in your Beep!-Book and share at least three findings with your teams.
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    Uncentered Joy

    Experiment CONSJOY.07

    Explore how your joy works when you get compliments:
    On the first day of this experiment wear clothes that are well accepted and even a bit more stylish than you would normally choose. Notice how people around you react and how the reactions land in you.
    On the second day wear inapprpriate clothes. Notice how people react and how these reactions land in you.
    On the third day wear your clothes from the day before inside out.
     
    Remember the third rule:
    Do not get arrested.