Creating true joy and lasting happiness in your life requires your active participation in your life at all levels.

We are taught to be passive.

In school, we sit and absorb, and then we take tests. Schools were originally created to train workers. Obedience is inherent in the system. First obedience to the teacher, then obedience to the boss. At home, you may also have been taught to be obedient to your parents.

Obedience rests on a few simple rules:

1. Don’t feel.
2. Don’t do what you want.
3. Do what we want.

These rules are supported by other rules that you may recognize more directly like:

1. Don’t cry. (Hide your feelings or suppress them.)
2. Don’t rock the boat. (Your creativity is not welcome.)
3. Don’t speak out of turn. (Self-expression is less important than obedience.)
4. Don’t show off. (Your aliveness hurts others.)
5. Don’t be weird. (Your inherent uniqueness makes you wrong.)

Not Feeling Means Not Knowing What You Want

Let’s examine the first one: “Don’t feel”. Don’t cry. Don’t be angry. Don’t be sad. Don’t express your feelings or talk about them. Don’t be so sensitive. We internalize this so that we end up unaware of what our feelings are at all.

Translated, this is a message that says: disconnect to what is alive in you.

Why does this matter?

Feelings are Roadmaps to Happiness.

Our feelings are the only things that tell us what we need and want, moment by moment.

Without the informational guideposts of our feelings, we have no idea what we, as organisms, as living beings, need, to make our systems run smoothly, and what would most deeply satisfy us.

Our culture has this myth that runs through it that says “Oh, happiness, it’s such a mystery.” We see happiness as luck. Or as temperament - something inborn that can’t be changed.

I call bullshit. Happiness is not luck. It is something you can learn to create.

We have been systematically trained to not be aware of the very things that tell us whether we are happy or not, and in what way, and what we might do about it. This is the function of feelings.

Feelings are a complex system of internal feedback. They are complicated. Not mysterious. Not impossible to understand. They can be sussed out. The idea that emotions are inexplicable or too complex to understand is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It takes time and energy, but most of that is spent unlearning and peeling off the layers of falsehood that we’ve learned about ourselves, and the understandable layers of anger, resignation, frustration, and fatigue that have resulted.

Obedience Rests on Disconnection From Feelings

The second and third rules of our training are to be obedient. This is much easier once you are disconnected from what is alive in you. Living, feeling people get uppity when they are forced to do things. But people who are bewildered about who they truly are will be obedient much more easily.

Without an internal compass, anybody else’s compass seems like a good idea.

We all have needs for purpose and meaning. If we are socialized out of looking inside to what those are for ourselves, we will latch onto things outside ourselves. Then an interesting thing happens.

1. We internalize it.
2. We identify with it.
3. We seek it.
4. We defend it.
5. We socialize others in the same way.

So while you are uncovering your programming, you will likely notice you have been programming other people. Welcome to planet Earth.

Notice when you are socializing other people to obey or not feel or not be where they are at, see if you can shift to acceptance and allowing instead. Do the same thing internally. I guarantee it will lead to more happiness.

Decolonizing Your Brain

Dig around in there, and let go of anything that is not essential and real and meaningful to you. Disregard your programming. Question anything that doesn’t feel like it will lead you to joyful aliveness. Decolonize and reclaim your own mind and heart. Question the assumptions you have about your feelings, your history, your beliefs, the Universe, God, your life, who you are and who you can be. It’s all up for grabs because most of it was fed to you by someone. So it’s yours now. You can do with it what you want to. All of it is up to you.

When you come across a spot where your aliveness was squashed repeatedly in the past, you may need to grieve. Grieving is a process of deeply feeling, breathing, crying, and letting go. It is an organic process and it may take a while to work itself out. Grief feels uncomfortable for most of us, but the results of it are that all the energy wrapped up in trying to keep you from feeling the trauma gets released and is available to you for creating a life you truly enjoy.

When doing this work, I recommend not villianizing your “oppressors”. Don’t bother. They (probably) didn’t realize what they were doing. Feel angry, feel everything. Really! Honor your pain by feeling it. Then get on with changing your mind and your life. Making someone else wrong doesn’t help you create something new. The juicy stuff is in connecting with your own needs, and sometimes stories about what should or shouldn’t have happened keep us from feeling those needs. They protect us from the feelings of grief and loss. But our energy is tied up in those feelings, and dropping from the story into those feelings frees up those energies.

It’s Not All Black and White

For most of us, we got some mix of encouragement to connect to ourselves and being socialized for obedience. We end up with a mishmash of things we do for ourselves and that we really enjoy and things we do because we think it will make us a “good person” or make people like us–a riddled complex of conflicting thoughts and feelings trying to surface. That’s OK. We are all somewhere in that spectrum. What I want to promote is not a new program to create a perfect life. Rather I want to promote an ongoing investigation into the source of our own happiness and inspire a cheery willingness to go to the messy places in ourselves to discover what is really there. And I also want to promote a culture that is aware of these dynamics and supports each other to be our natural, free, authentic selves with each other, whatever that looks like in the moment. Can we allow and support each other to feel, to be real, to be messy and creative and confused and exuberant and alive? That’s the kind of world I want to live in.

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At the Beer and Blog yesterday, Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about how to make your corporate blog more popular. One strategy he suggested was to follow Techmeme and write posts relevant to popular items and thus join the conversation. The theory is that by responding to popular waves of interest in the online conversation in your chosen industry, you get to be part of the conversation while it’s hot.

So here is my experiment and the results, not in terms of traction (I got none so far), but in terms of my internal experience of joyfulness as a result of trying this method of marketing. See, as a joy ninja, I don’t want to just be popular, I want to be happy. I want to do activities that come from authentic aliveness and intrinsic motivation. Including the ways I promote my ideas.

The conversation I responded to was the hubbub around Jason Calacanis’s post about how to save money as a startup by firing people who weren’t workaholics. I read and commented on a few blogs with posts about the conversation, and wrote a post myself.

Then I asked myself the question I often do “Am I happier now than I was before I did this activity?”

The answer came back as “NO”. I feel kind of cheap, like I just contrived interest in something, so I could get the result I wanted.

Then I asked myself “Would I be happier if I had gotten some traction, if my post was up on Techmeme like this guy’s?“

When I checked in with myself, the answer still came back “NO”.

I probably would have felt excited, for a bit, patted myself on the back, maybe squealed a little and twittered “Look at me!”. But happiness? Aliveness? I don’t really think so.

I have blogged before about intrinsic motivation. It’s when you do something because you want to, not because of the result you get. I wrote that post out of extrinsic motivation. The only intrinsic part was the experimental nature of it: ooh, can I really manipulate myself into being on the top of the conversation? The actual piece of writing was more contrived than not. Which is why I think it didn’t bring happiness to write it.

Now I’m not the kind of person who generalizes these discoveries into “Marketing is evil”. I think marketing is fascinating and useful, but what I also think is that when people get attached to the potential extrinsic rewards of marketing they lose touch with the intrinsic rewards of having a conversation they enjoy. They become less happy, their writing becomes more contrived and less alive, and everybody loses. Blogs get filled with “me too” posts and comments, people spend their time and energy trying to get famous instead of trying to understand what is interesting about themselves and the world, and the whole point of life is missed.

So I think it’s important that the world has Marshall Kirkpatrick because I imagine he enjoys this kind of marketing work intrinsically. And it’s important for those of us who might not be motivated thusly to connect to our own motivation and act from that. The result, I posit, will be a net increase of joy on the planet, not to mention a higher signal-to-noise ratio on the web.

Tags: joy by emma
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