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finding joy

inspiration & influence transcending

Joy and resilience in challenging times

December 27, 2018

For a wise woman once

told Her that Her tears

were the most

healing waters of them all

Rise Sister Rise – Rebecca Campbell

resilience

Can joy be part of resilience in challenging times? This post explores how developing resilience and a kind of joy in small moments can help us through the most difficult times.

Joy as my Word of the Year in 2018

Joy is my Word of the Year for 2018. I’m reflecting on my experience of JOY this past year in a series of posts here. 

I’ve realised that each quarter of the year delivered a new lesson and experience about finding joy:

  1. alongside deep grief
  2. and resilience in challenging times (this post)
  3. in travel and being away from home (to come soon)
  4. in creative work and my calling (to come soon)

I hope you find these reflections valuable for your own journeys with joy, grief, resilience, creativity and wholehearted self-leadership. And I look forward to your thoughts and experiences too on these issues and feelings.

resilience

Joy and resilience in challenging times

In the second quarter of the year, we faced extreme challenges as a family. Circumstances that took us all into unfamiliar territory. Again and on the back of the first quarter’s experiences, I had to work out where any sense of joy and optimism sat alongside all of this.

A book helped me immensely at this time: Rick Hanson’s Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakeable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness. Practical, positive and based in neuroscience, this book focuses on 12 hard-wired inner strengths and how to cultivate them.

I read this book as an audiobook while driving and also an ebook when at home, dipping into its wisdom whenever I could. A toolkit of psychological resources and strategies, it helped me realise the resources I already had for navigating this extreme time. It also provided simple but powerful tips for changing my mind-set as I dealt with significant pain and challenge.

resilience

Resilient practices and joy

The two practices prompted by reading ‘Resilient’ that helped me most were:

  1. Honouring my psychological resources
  2. Feeling the beauty of joy in small ways as well as feeling pain

Honouring my psychological resources

Having been through a fair amount of pain, challenge and loss in my life, I’ve built up psychological resources to be more resilient and strong. We all do this. Everything we go through teaches us if we are open to the lessons.

At times, I have had to dig deep and be reflective, talk to special friends and professionals. I’ve learnt when to spend time alone, when to practice self-care and how to balance my needs with others. Tough lessons all and with more challenges stretching me, I dug deep into my learning this year and I learnt more. I am much better at contacting people and talking when I need it now rather than battling on alone. 

I sought help from a psychologist to check in on my well-being and psychological resources at this time. This was positive and encouraging as someone trained and objective listened to what was happening and how I was dealing with it.

She provided valued feedback that I was doing well at this challenging time considering all that had happened and was happening. This helped me feel more self-compassionate and self-confident even as I felt overwhelmed. Perhaps not a feeling of joy, but it certainly helped me immensely. I was ready for a series of sessions if need be. But I found for this time, one session and conversation was enough to feel stronger and self-reliant, drawing on my personal resources.

Feeling beauty in small everyday joys as well as feeling pain

A big learning this year has been that it is okay to feel the beauty and joy of everyday things even as we feel immense pain. 

Rick Hanson reminds us we can take an approach of gratitude:

Thankfulness is not about minimizing or denying hassles, illness, loss, or injustice. It is simply about appreciating what is also true: such as flowers and sunlight, paper clips and fresh water, the kindness of others, easy access to knowledge and wisdom, and light at the flick of a switch.

This ability to acknowledge and feel concurrent truths helped so much. One helps to balance and provide grounding for the other. I have found special joy in swimming, reading, writing, tarot work, sitting in the sun, cups of tea, coffee and connection with special friends and family at this time. These simple acts were a blessing and wisdom that helped me move through so much.

resilience

Feeling all the feelings

Sometimes we just need to acknowledge and accept that things are terrible and dark and find the points of resilience and strength that will get us through. In this way, we can discover transcendent energies we can tap into. They fuel us and help us strengthen wholeheartedly for life.

As a person with INTJ Jung/Myers-Briggs® personality type preferences, feeling is something I have worked on over time to balance my natural tendency and strength for thinking and logic. I am much better at working with both the head and the heart now. Through this time I learnt to experience feelings more deeply – sadness, anger, exhaustion, helplessness, frustration, fear, worry, pain. There were plenty of feelings moving through me. 

I’m more open to going through feelings as a process step to the next stage rather than going around them. Especially through my intuitive work with Amber Adrian over time and her writings on All the Feelings, I’ve learnt to lean in and really feel my feelings. Crying and physical expression of feelings were part of this too. Amber has reminded me to ask “What next?” with feelings. In this way, we can move on and through, clearing out and moving onto the next stage of what we are dealing with and our response.

resilience

Joy and resilience

So there wasn’t so much joy in this second quarter of the year. It certainly didn’t feel joyful and at times, it was just very dark. In response to my post on joy and grief on Instagram, Cheryl Haezebroeck aka @the_intrepid_goddess shared that:

I love how a word of the year is such a learning experience because not only is the Word featured but the shadow is there too for our awareness and healing.

This is true. We can’t expect it all to be our stereotypical version of a word. Nor can we expect it to be all sunshine and light just because we choose a positive word, as lovely as that would be.

The lessons are often deeper and more long-standing involving shadow work. As I learnt with joy and grief, understanding the ability to live with paradox in challenging circumstances made all the difference. I was able to carve out small spaces of the day to manage self-care and practice resilience as I dealt with the most extreme worry.

And in the smallest moments, joy found a place in my heart and kept me hopeful, optimistic and confident that I knew what to do. These moments sustained me and kept me strong as I drew deeply on my resources to care for both myself and loved ones.

Have you experienced something like this? How have joy and other positive practices helped you with being resilient? What have dark circumstances taught you about the paradox of joy and resilience? Share your thoughts in the comments or on social media – Facebook or Instagram.

Find Your Word process + tools

First though, some information on the process and tools that can help you. If you have never worked on a Word of the Year, it’s a powerful process. Susannah Conway has a fabulous free Word of the Year ecourse available each year that I often dive into. It works really well alongside the Unravel Your Year process and free workbook that Susannah also creates and generously shares each year. I’ve been working through both processes to review my year and plan for the next one since 2014.

I credit these practices with contributing to deep realisations about where I was stuck and needed to make change. For the first few years, I found I was writing the same goals each year and not achieving them. This was mostly about writing books and making space for creativity in my life. Each year was swallowed up by work and my creative goals kept getting lost. 

In 2016, I started doing things differently and began to make my transition and now at the end of 2018, I am two years in to my change journey and life is very different. It’s much more in line with the dreams and visions I had way back in 2014!

Amy Palko also offers My Word Goddess Readings with suggestions for your word for the year linked to a Goddess of the Year. Also a practice I have invested in for a few years now, it provides valuable intuitive insights and suggestions for words that might help drive your year’s energy positively.  

You might also enjoy:

Joy and grief: the paradox and wisdom of finding joy alongside deep grief

Finding JOY in the everyday – reflections on my Word of the Year for 2018

Joy – 18 inspiring quotes on enjoying what you do and love

Grief and pain can be our most important teachers – a wholehearted story

Keep in touch + read the books that shaped my story

You might also find inspiration in my free 94-page ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey. Just pop your email address in the box below

You will receive the ebook straight away! Plus you’ll receive monthly Beach Notes with updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing. This includes writing, personality type, coaching, creativity, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

inspiration & influence love, loss & longing

Joy and grief: the paradox and wisdom of finding joy alongside grief

December 19, 2018

This post explores joy and grief: how I have been able to find joy alongside deep grief, the challenges and what it has it taught me.

joy and grief

When you see joy beside the agony, you have the keen vision of a Soul warrior.

Danielle LaPorte

Joy and grief in 2018

Joy is my word of the year for 2018. I shared the beginning of my story of working with ‘joy’ here. It certainly wasn’t what I expected. Though I knew it was never going to be an easy or straightforward journey. Reflecting on this past year, I’ve found the journey of exploring joy falls into themes or stages around the quarters of the year of finding joy…

  1. alongside deep grief
  2. and resilience in challenge
  3. in travel and being away from home
  4. in creative work and my calling

This post explores finding joy alongside deep grief and how the two can co-exist. A focus of the first quarter of 2018, this theme and learning has continued through-out this year in different ways. It’s been an undercurrent that I continue to work with even now.

The challenge of choosing joy

Choosing joy as my word was always going to be full of challenge. The end of 2016 and all of 2017 were very challenging as I supported my beautiful mother after her diagnosis with metastatic breast cancer in September 2016. After a very tough year, my mother passed away on Christmas Day last year and her funeral was in the first week of 2018.  So as you can imagine, joy was not a feature of life through that time. 

But I chose the word joy because I wanted more of it in my life. It’s a word often associated with Christmas and that time highlighted just how far I felt from feeling joy. Even the concept of ‘enJOYing’ life in any way can seem challenging when you are caring for another with a terminal illness and then supporting them in the final stages of life. A friend described this time as an “agonising privilege” and it is this exactly. So putting in a claim for a year around joy in 2018 always felt somewhat audacious and optimistic. I wondered what it would bring.

joy and greif

Finding joy alongside deep grief

Balancing even the thought of joy with grief was hard in practice especially at the start of the year. I attended the Priestess Business Workshop,  part of The Goddess Roadtrip led by Julie Parker and Sora Surya No in early January. It was the day before my mother’s funeral and being amongst powerful, supportive allies and female energy felt like the best place to be. The wonderful Jade McKenzie ran a session at the workshop on being seen and what we unapologetically wanted to be. We stood up one by one to say this and be witnessed by the room and women there. 

The statement I wrote down, in line with my word of the year, was: “I am unapologetically joyful.” When it came to my turn to stand up, I just froze. I couldn’t get the words out. The tears came and the room, full of female coaches and healers of all kinds, was silent and encouraging. All the women there held powerful, silent space for me as I gathered my strength and dealt with the tsunami of emotions barrelling through me.

Eventually, through tears, I was able to say the words, “I am unapologetically joyful“. I felt immediately stronger claiming joy, if also very fragile. It demonstrated the enormous tension that lies in the juxtaposition of grief and joy. I began to have a deeper sense that day of how challenging this paradox of grief and joy might be.

It’s like we are drawn into a binary view of the world, not allowing ourselves to feel joy in any way when we are in deep sadness and pain. I realised finding joy, playfulness, fun, laughter and happiness again against a backdrop of deep grief was not going to be easy. But it felt central to this year’s journey.

joy and grief

The paradox of joy and grief

A big learning this year is that it’s okay to feel the joy of everyday things at the same time as we feel immense pain. We tend to make it an either/or, saying to ourselves either I feel grief or I feel joy. I cannot feel both. It can feel like a terrible tension and betrayal of our pain if we feel good in any way. And feeling joy or lighter feelings can somehow feel like a betrayal of a particular person and their memory. It as if we feel we need to stay in a certain emotional space to honour that person. In this, we can deny ourselves positive feelings and experiences that can help us move through the grief and loss. Over time, this can set in and become habitual and the mindset of how we live.

Danielle LaPorte in her book White Hot Truth has much to say about the wisdom of paradox and courage to change your beliefs. She deals with a number of paradoxes such as: 

Lead with your heart and… Your head.

Be open-hearted and… Have clear, strong boundaries.

Trust and… Do the work.

From Rock Your Paradoxes 

For me, joy and grief is a kind of paradox and polarity we can work with, one that does rock our beliefs but brings wisdom in its wake.

Difference between joy and happiness

Danielle has something to say about that too in her piece, The difference between joy and happiness. And why it helps to know.

Herein lies the heart of the matter. The key thing is it is not about a mutually exclusive choice between feeling grief or joy. It’s not about the more fleeting feelings of happiness either. Learning to navigate the paradox of feeling joy and grief at the same time is a journey of wisdom. It’s one I’ve spent much of the year on. Danielle’s piece provides powerful insights. Here are a few perspectives that distil my experiential learning about joy and grief:

Consciousness is not an either/or equation. It’s about bothness.
The capacity to expand into bothness — the awareness of your joy in all circumstances — is so much of what it means to evolve…

Happiness is like rising bubbles — delightful and inevitably fleeting. Joy is the oxygen — ever present….

Joy is the fibre of your Soul….

This means that it’s possible to grieve with your whole heart, and still sense your joy. You can feel rage, and be aware of joy waiting patiently for you to return, and take deep comfort in that.

Danielle LaPorte 

 

Lessons from joy and grief

So this year has been full of heart-felt lessons about joy and grief.

It’s been full of learning to live in paradox and seeing joy as a kind of oxygen. This learning set the tone of the first quarter of the year as I moved through the deep grief of losing my mother. As people who have been there will know, it’s a defining moment of your life. At the same time, I also experienced my job being deleted and becoming redundant in February. So there were layers of different kinds of grief I was working through all at the same time.

I learnt it was okay to feel joy – celebrating the joy of my mother’s beautiful life, the strength that lives on in me, my female ancestry and lineage, her loving kindness and knowing she was cheering me on as always as I moved into a new phase of life. All of these qualities and the simple pleasures of water, light, tea, sun, reading, swimming, friends and family helped me navigate much at this time.

Grief and joy can co-exist. By weaving one with the other, the passage through is deeply felt but somehow more sure-footed and grounded. Being able to smile and embrace the full gamut of emotions simultaneously is a wholehearted learning joy has taught me.

This first part of the year set the tone. It taught me that joy is often found in the smallest moments that we allow ourselves to feel even as we feel great sorrow. The light of joy can shine gently into the shadows of our sadness helping us find pockets of positive reflections to sustain us and move us forward.

I learnt more on this on the way through the year – and share further in the next posts to come.

Shared with much love and in memory of my mother, the most truly beautiful person, who taught me how to feel joy alongside deep grief in the most selfless of ways. 

joy and grief

More information: Word of the Year resources

Working on a Word of the Year is a powerful process. Susannah Conway has a fabulous free Word of the Year ecourse available each year that I often dive into. It works really well alongside the Unravel Your Year process and free workbook that Susannah also creates and generously shares each year. I’ve been working through both processes to review my year and plan for the next one since 2014.

I credit these practices with contributing to deep realisations about where I was stuck and needed to make change. In 2016, I started doing things differently and began to make my transition and now at the end of 2018, I am two years in to my change journey and life is very different. It’s much more in line with the dreams and visions I had way back in 2014!

Amy Palko also offers My Word Goddess Readings with suggestions for your word for the year linked to a Goddess of the Year. Also a practice I have invested in for a few years now, it provides valuable intuitive insights and suggestions for words that might help drive your year’s energy positively.  

You might also enjoy:

Finding JOY in the everyday – reflections on my Word of the Year for 2018

Joy – 18 inspiring quotes on enjoying what you do and love

Grief and pain can be our most important teachers – a wholehearted story

Never too old – finding courage and skill to empower your dreams

How I plan to manifest energy joy and intention to make the most of the coming year

Keep in touch + read the books that shaped my story

You might also find inspiration in my free 94-page ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey. Just pop your email address in the box below

You will receive the ebook straight away! Plus you’ll receive monthly Beach Notes with updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing. This includes writing, personality type, coaching, creativity, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

inspiration & influence

Finding JOY in the everyday – reflections on my Word of the Year for 2018

December 13, 2018
finding joy

Joy as my Word of the Year in 2018

Joy is my word of the year for 2018. Have you worked with a word of the year? It’s a powerful way of focusing on what you want to manifest. The journey is not always straightforward though and sometimes we wonder why we chose this word in the first place. But the process of working with these words we choose, or that choose us, is full of rich wisdom if we take the time to reflect on it. Here’s my story of JOY as my word of the year in 2018. It’s a journey of finding joy in challenging times and learning how joy can sit alongside grief and be a source of resilience. I’m going to share this journey over a few days and posts. I hope you will come along and also share your Word of the Year experiences.

Find Your Word process + tools

First though, some information on the process and tools that can help you. Working with a Word of the Year is a powerful process. Susannah Conway has a fabulous free Word of the Year ecourse available each year that I often dive into. It works really well alongside the Unravel Your Year process and free workbook that Susannah also creates and generously shares each year. I’ve been working through both processes to review my year and plan for the next one since 2014.

I credit these practices with contributing to deep realisations about where I was stuck and needed to make change. For the first few years, I found I was writing the same goals each year and not achieving them. This was mostly about writing books and making space for creativity in my life. Each year was swallowed up by work and my creative goals kept getting lost. 

You know that saying: 

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”

attributed to Jessie Potter

 

In 2016, I started doing things differently for different outcomes and began to make my transition. Now at the end of 2018, I am two years in to my change journey and life is very different. It’s much more in line with the dreams and visions I had way back in 2014 and about being in creative action!

Goddess of the Year

Amy Palko also offers My Word Goddess Readings with suggestions for your Word for the Year linked to a Goddess of the Year. Also a practice I have invested in for a few years now, it provides valuable intuitive insights and suggestions for words that might help drive your year’s energy positively.  My Goddess for this year has been Hecate, the Goddess of Compassionate Witnessing and of the crossroads. It certainly has been a year of compassionate witnessing and crossroads. And this knowledge has helped me negotiate my path at a challenging times. This series of reflections will also be an opportunity to reflect on Hecate’s role in this year’s unfolding. 

finding joy

Choosing joy

So my word for 2018 is JOY. Choosing JOY was always going to be full of challenge. My mother passed away on Christmas Day last year after a very tough battle with metastatic breast cancer and her funeral was in the first week of 2018.  Joy had been hard to come by in 2017. I just gave Christmas spirit generally a pretty wide berth last year. This wasn’t too hard being in a palliative care hospital for much of the time in the lead-up to Christmas. 

Choosing joy as my word wasn’t difficult though either despite the contradictions. I didn’t need to work through a workbook or think too much. It just came to me. At the same time, my daughter gave me a hand-painted Egyptian papyrus Christmas card featuring JOY in large letters so that sealed the deal in the most lovely of synchronous ways. This beautiful card, the feature image for this post, has sat beside me all year shining a light as a reminder of my focus in everything I do.

finding joy

Finding joy in stages through the year

In reflecting, I’ve realised each quarter of the year delivered a new lesson and experience about finding joy:

  1. Finding joy alongside deep grief
  2. Finding joy and resilience in challenge
  3. Finding joy in travel and being away from home
  4. Finding joy in creative work and my calling

As I’ve taken time to reflect on my learnings via Joy and Hecate this year, I realise I have much to say about my journey this year. So I’m going to post on these four journeys over the next four days as a way of reflecting deeply on this time. Plus in another post, I’ll reflect on my Goddess of the Year work and working with the energies of Hecate this past year. 

Integrating learning from this year of finding joy

This has all reminded me that this reflection and integration step is so important as we move on and through into the next year and stage of our lives. So I’ll hope you’ll join me in this reflection process! I hope it might inspire your own reflections too and I encourage you to share your journeys of your word for this year. Or the process of coming up with a new one in 2019. I already have an inkling of what mine might be! Do you know? Love to hear. Share your thoughts in the comments or join the discussion on Quiet Writing on social media on Facebook and Instagram .

And if you are looking for a coach to work with you to light the way, I’d love to be that coach for you! I have two more spots for an early January start for a 3 month coaching series so pop over here to book a complimentary chat with me now to plan for a positive, productive and joyful 2019. You can go direct to this link to book a time for this free chat via Zoom video-conferencing.

Inspiring reads

Here are some more inspirational reads to light your way and look forward to sharing more on my journey of finding joy this year!

Joy: 18 inspiring quotes on inspiring what you do and love

I’m a Creativity, & Self-leadership Coach, a Writer & more

Practices and tools to support creative productivity, writing and mind-set

Photo credits from elsewhere – used with permission and thanks:

Wood pathway photo by Amanda Klamrowski from Pexels

Keep in touch + read the books that shaped my story

You might also enjoy my free 94-page ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey. Just pop your email address in the box below

You will receive the ebook straight away! Plus you’ll receive monthly Beach Notes with updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing. This includes writing, personality type, coaching, creativity, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

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