Don’t Be Afraid to Shine.

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Another big obstacle to happiness arises when people start to become happier than those around them, including their families. It is very tempting to give up your happiness if you have a tribal belief that says It’s not okay to be happy when my family (husband, wife, mother, father, brother, sister) is not. Before you assume you don’t have this particular belief, ask yourself how comfortable you would be becoming a shining light of happiness in your family circle — would you downplay your happiness if you knew your tribe wouldn’t celebrate you?

Believe me when I tell you that each tribe has a very specific level of happiness it will allow its members. Some allow a very high level and support their members in achieving it. But more commonly, people run into difficulty when their happiness starts to show. After all, how come you have the right to be so happy when your sister has two autistic children, your cousin has a serious illness, your brother just got laid off, or your dad is in chronic pain from working the job that supported the family while you were growing up? And what gives you the right to be happy when your parents have stuck it out in an unhappy marriage for so many decades? Or how can you be happy when a friend you love is experiencing depression, a breakup or divorce, or is struggling to find his or her way in life?

Please look at all the ways in which you believe you have to give up, silence, or hide your happiness if people you love aren’t happy in their lives. If you believe it’s not quite okay to shine brightly unless the others you care about are shining just as brightly, you will find ways to sabotage your joy. One woman I worked with found great solace in her rewritten tribal belief: It’s reasonable to believe that everyone I love has the right to choose their level of happiness. Then she went a step further: Being happy by shining my brightest inspires others to do the same, if they choose.

— Christel Nani, Sacred Choices, p. 154-155

Heralds of Hope

God, Joy, Praising God, Redemption 0

The Gospel is the real antidote to spiritual destitution: wherever we go, we are called as Christians to proclaim the liberating news that forgiveness for sins committed is possible, that God is greater than our sinfulness, that he freely loves us at all times and that we were made for communion and eternal life. The Lord asks us to be joyous heralds of this message of mercy and hope! It is thrilling to experience the joy of spreading this good news, sharing the treasure entrusted to us, consoling broken hearts and offering hope to our brothers and sisters experiencing darkness. It means following and imitating Jesus, who sought out the poor and sinners as a shepherd lovingly seeks his lost sheep.

— Pope Francis, The Spirit of Saint Francis, p. 131

The New Blessing

Joy, Letting Go, Life 0

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good…. On every level of our life — in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience — we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good.

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, chapter 5

Learn to Bear Joy

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One of our greatest life tasks is actually to learn to bear joy, and to let it influence our psychology in deeper and deeper ways. In actuality, there is a great cultural discomfort with joy, and our voracious pleasure seeking is often a mask for our fear of simple joy. Joy frightens us, it makes our defenses quake — it almost invites a superstitious fear of “the other shoe dropping.” We can bear joy for fleeting moments, but for most of us, self-appreciation all too quickly devolves into self-measurement.

In my work as a therapist I watch for these moments of inspiration and try not to let them pass. I encourage my clients to stay with their inspiring moment just a bit longer. When they do, something surprisingly deep will likely emerge….

You have similar gifts inside you, and the more you savor your small moments of inspiration, the better you will come to know them — and be changed by them.

— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 45

Embrace Your Joys

Core Value, Joy, Relationships 0

The more you feel close to your joys, the more the people who are right for you will notice you and become attracted to you. Your joys are some of the very things your partner-to-be will love most about you, and will need most from you….

Also, the more time you spend with the things that touch you and move you, the more you will be noticed by the people who are good for you. The kind of person you’re seeking is someone who is drawn to your Core Gifts, your authentic self. If you wait until you know someone loves you before you reveal these parts of yourself, it’s as though you’re waiting for the harvest without planting the seeds. It’s the vulnerability, warmth, and humanity of your gifts that will make the right person notice and come to love you.

— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 41

Finding Our Core Gifts

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The quickest way to access your Core Gifts is by using the small moments of joy and meaning in your life as springboards. All of us, no matter how desperate our situation, experience moments when we feel nourished and inspired in our lives. We know when our heart feels particularly touched, when our spirit is quickened, when we feel loved, or when we are making a difference in someone’s life. Moments when we truly love who we are.

We can use these experiences in two important ways to change our lives and speed our intimacy journey. First, when we open to these positive experiences more fully and stay with them just a bit longer than we might normally do, we actually develop our capacity for love. These moments are more than moments; they are actually portals, and the more we enter into them, the more our ability to love grows.

Second, when we pay attention to the experiences that fill our hearts, we discover what types of interactions and experiences inspire us and encourage us to open up and trust. When we take the time to notice these patterns, it’s like a connect-the-dots game. What emerges is a picture of our Core Gifts.

— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 40

Made to Shine

Core Value, Joy, Life 0

Every time you suppress some part of yourself or allow others to play you small, you are ignoring the owner’s manual your Creator gave you. What I know for sure is this: You are built not to shrink down to less but to blossom into more. To be more splendid. To be more extraordinary. To use every moment to fill yourself up.

— Oprah Winfrey, What I Know For Sure, p. 109

Your Gift Zone

Joy, Love, Relationships 0

Your Gift Zone isn’t static. It is constantly generating a living stream of impulses toward intimacy and authentic self-expression. It wants things. It reaches for life. It needs to connect — and it tells you how. In your Gift Zone you might feel a desire to listen to a piece of music or to go for a walk, to be alone or to reach out to someone. Your intimacy journey becomes an adventure when you act on the promptings of your Gift Zone. Doing so will change your love life from the inside out. It will begin a wave of unknotting and self-expression that will ripple into the ways you love and the way you live.

— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 26

Enduring Joy

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There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter. I realize of course that joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life, especially at moments of great difficulty. Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.

— Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, p. 8-9

Don’t Squander Joy.

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We can’t prepare for tragedy and loss. When we turn every opportunity to feel joy into a test drive for despair, we actually diminish our resilience. Yes, softening into joy is uncomfortable. Yes, it’s scary. Yes, it’s vulnerable. But every time we allow ourselves to lean into joy and give in to those moments, we build resilience and we cultivate hope. The joy becomes part of who we are, and when bad things happen — and they do happen — we are stronger.

— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 126