Do you protect your joy?

I wrote this for you, who feels like you're drowning in the seriousness of things...

Protect your joy.

It seems strange. With so many very serious things happening in the world and very serious decisions to make and very serious changes taking place, that joy would be the thing that you need to protect right now. But joy is what will save you; it will get you through this. You must do whatever is within your healthy power to keep joy alive in your life.

The Psalmist wrote:

"The joy of the Lord is my strength." *

And it's not that there are all different kinds of joy, and you need the right kind - God's joy as opposed to other joy - to be strong. It's just that joy gives you strength. Joy fills you up. It's nourishing and holy and good for you. It's medicinal and healing.

Joy is part of the fundamental fabric of the universe. There aren't different kinds of joy, there is only joy, and whenever you are in its flow, you are experiencing the Divine whether you are conscious of it or not.

And isn't that the grace of it? That those who don't even know it are mixing their lives with Divinity by engaging in joy? What a miracle. What a wonder. What vulnerability God has to share God's-self with us this way, to one and all and whoever and always.

Joy isn't happiness; that feeling of being alive and valued that hums beneath the surface of things is not dependant on your happenings and circumstances.

Joy is deeper and truer than that. Joy is tied to you being who you are and doing what you were meant to do in an authentic and true sense, in a way that shows up to life in all its fullness. In a way that stays and lingers even when sorrow and pain arrive.

Joy is found at the centre of your life, not the periphery.

Rumi said:

"When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy."

Neale Donald Walsch said:

"If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment"

And, Audre Lorde said:

"The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference."

I can't fully articulate to you exactly what joy is, but I know what joy does. It wakes you up; it gets you moving, it heals and embraces and warms and cools. Joy connects all the parts in you riven in two by pain and hardship, a constant self reunion. Joy unites souls. Sometimes all enemies need to do to create a bridge between them is experience a moment of wonder together. Joy weaves our hearts into the other.

Joy will heal us if we let it.

How will you protect your joy? It seems that maybe what one must do to keep their joy safe is close down, wall up, keep it locked behind a secure door. But the opposite is true: for joy to be protected, it needs to be free, uncontrolled, wild, released. And as it has its way in and with your life, in all the curiously wondrous ways it does, all you can do to protect it, is join in.

These times are very serious to be sure, and that's why we need joy. That's why whenever you feel that river moving in you, you must let if flow as if your life depends on it.

Because it does.

Mindful Prompt: If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment. (Neale Donald Walsch)

Continued in the series "I Wrote This For You", this week with a subscription in the App.
* Ps 28:7

Written by Liz Milani.
Instagram: @thepracticeco