I have a vivid memory of sitting on the sidewalk in my old Kensington Market neighborhood about 15 years ago, my back against a storefront, watching people stroll past. I knew all the locals then. They’d wave and I’d wave and the sun felt good on my face. I felt easy and grounded and connected.
I still return to this memory. I’ve even given it a name: “Market Sunshine.” Coming back to it is a practice for me, inspired by my training in philosopher Eugene Gendlin’s excellent Focusing psychotherapy modality. Although Focusing isn’t concerned with memory per se, it does deal in the body’s “felt sense” of things, including things that happened in the past. Every time we return to an old field memory, we can deepen our access to it. Our bodies seem able to rehearse and relive any state, including states of joy and contentment. And we can learn to tap into these states on the fly, at least to a degree.
This has definitely been true for me. In times of low-level distress or aimlessness, I have booted up Market Sunshine and felt some of that settledness flow back into my experience. Imperfectly so, but still there as a direction. It’s not unlike how I feel after a short meditation. Maybe both practices – going back to a memory with Focusing, and staying in the present with meditation – move us towards something similar, just from different directions.
I’m thinking about joy today – at the edge of my seat, at the edge of maybe the most important American election of my lifetime – because joy is a resource we need, as much now as ever. My friend, the journalist
, knows all about this. He just published a fine book – The Joy You Make – about how to find joy in difficult times. I met Steven a few years ago when he joined my Sunday night Do Nothing Project community. In his book, he shares a meditation I wrote about connecting to a memory of joy. I’ve recorded a version of that here, and also included an excerpt from Steven’s book. Thank you Steven for your timely words, and thanks to everyone for reading. Good luck these next few days. Really listen to what the Resistance Revival Chorus have to say - “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me”. Find support where you can, and don’t be shy about leaning on your community.Jeff
Excerpt from The Joy You Make by Steven Petrow
I often joke that there’s a “happiness-industrial complex” in twenty-first century America. Happiness has been dissected and unpacked, analyzed and quantified—and, no surprise, monetized. That’s a lot of happiness.
Joy has gotten so much less attention than its shinier and brighter first cousin. But joy, I believe, is more sustaining and gratifying than happiness. One way I like to describe this difference is to think of happiness as a sugary Twinkie, with joy more like a whole wheat muffin. The Twinkie boosts your glucose levels, resulting in a sugar high, and then you crash. The healthier muffin is metabolized more slowly, with no big high or low, leaving you satisfied for a longer time.
“Joy is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not.” -Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Book of Joy
The Dalai Lama explains that even a painful experience, say childbirth, “can bring great satisfaction and joyfulness.” Robert Emmons, the author of The Psychology of Gratitude, says “Happiness is an inch deep and a mile-wide, whereas joy is a mile deep and a mile wide.”
I, like many, long thought of joy as a single note. Call it ecstasy—a kind of big bang—what you experience on New Year’s Eve, July Fourth, at a birthday bash or a wedding. My niece, Jessie, was recently asked to officiate at the wedding of her two best friends. She wrote in an essay, “How to express the joy this incites in me. Words like ‘implode,’ ‘explode,’ ‘burst,’ ‘erupt.’ The sensation of the uncontainable.” All powerful joy. Overwhelming joy. Joy that takes up every inch of space in our bodies.
But, as I’ve learned on my journey, this kind of ecstatic joy is but one kind of flavor—one that overshadows, even eclipses the many other types of joy, which once understood, we can experience on a daily basis.
One of the most comprehensive studies of the different forms of joy took place in the 1970s when Chris M. Meadows, a clinical psychologist who taught at Vanderbilt, established that there are three dimensions of joyful experience. First, there’s what Meadows described as “excited” (intense and high energy) versus “serene” (quiet and calm) joy. Meadows also looked at what he calls “individuated” versus “affiliative” joy, by which he means joy experienced solo as opposed to joy that is shared with others. (More than 70 percent of our joyful experiences took place in social settings, with others.) Finally, there’s what he refers to as “anticipatory” joy, when the fulfillment of some desire appears to be imminent, versus “consummatory” joy, when the desire has been fulfilled.
I find comparisons may help us to better understand how joy manifests, which boosts our awareness, which in turn allows us to better—and more frequently—experience it. Here are a few examples:
Happiness is eating a fudge brownie.
Joy is making a pan of brownies to share.
Happiness is a highly charged kiss.
Joy is the sense of connection or oneness that comes from trust and intimacy.
Happiness is buying the red sports car you’ve always wanted.
Joy is the experience we can have when traveling. (And if you do so in your new sports car, there’s no reason you can’t hold happiness and joy together.)
Happiness is about me.
Joy is about we, which is to say, you and me.
Today’s Contributor—
Steven Petrow is a columnist with The Washington Post and the author of the new book, The Joy You Make: Find the Silver Linings—Even On Your Darkest Days. He regularly does nothing with Jeff—and friends—on Sunday evenings, and will probably be there tonight. This post is adapted from his new book.
THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD
Tim Hwang is an occupational therapist in New York City's public school system. His specialty is teaching mindfulness to young people with “disabilities classifications” - Autism, ADHD, and so on. Some of these teens are into the practice, some are bored by it, and some are highly resistant to it. And that’s what we get into.
Winter Reset in Mexico - Yoga, Movement and Stillness
February 1-8, 2025, Mar de Jade, Chacala, Mexico
Teacher: Scott Davis
My good pal Scott Davis is an absurdly talented yoga and movement teacher and martial arts grappler and Chinese Traditional Medicine healer and just hanging around him is a master class in being human. This is a last minute thing, but I’m gonna join him for this February retreat in Mexico - come hang out if you’re looking for a getaway. A bit of meditation, but mostly it will be moving and beachcombing.
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