Releasing Our Fear of Abundant Joy
As we move into Thanksgiving this week, I thought I’d write a short newsletter on gratitude. Even though there’s so much research out there on the power of gratitude, I often find myself thinking, well, if we have too much gratitude, if we have too much joy, if we feel too alive, then something bad could happen.
It’s this mindset of counting your eggs before they hatch, this fear that the other shoe is going to drop. It’s this feeling that we have to limit our joy, we have to limit our gratitude, we have to stop and make sure we’re not taking more than we deserve.
It’s taken me a long time to really sort through what that means.
Joy, bliss, and gratitude are present-moment emotions, meaning that when you feel them, they bring you completely into the present moment. You can’t necessarily be joyful in the future. You can’t necessarily be grateful in the future.
Joy and gratitude tether you to the here-and-now: I’m grateful for the comfy t-shirt I’m wearing. I’m grateful for the solid floor that I’m standing on. I’m sealing joy in this moment spent with family and friends.
But I think many of us are programmed to only contain so much. We can only have so much joy and so much gratitude.
And when I dig for the roots of that limiting belief, I find myself going way back to the times before we had the scientific knowledge to explain why bad things happened. Why did crops die? Why did women die during childbirth? Why did people get sick?
Back then, people – especially women – explained these phenomena by blaming themselves.
“Maybe I did something wrong. Maybe I was too joyful. Maybe I celebrated too much. Maybe I had too much pride, and that led to these awful events.”
This belief of cause and effect still lives within us today. Whether we realize it or not, we still limit our joy and gratitude because we’re afraid that feeling too good will lead to something bad in the future.
But the truth is – we know better.
Now that we know so much about how the universe works, we know that there are logical reasons for everything.
Those of us who are more spiritual can choose to have a larger understanding of a God or a universe that is not vengeful, that doesn’t punish – but, in fact, wants us to fill our lives with joy, bliss, and gratitude.
So our challenge as we come into a holiday about gratitude is to let go of old beliefs that we can only be so much, we can only have so much.
Instead, let’s ask ourselves – how much joy can we have? How much gratitude can we carry? How many blessings can we hold? How can I fill my cup up even more today?
I, for one, today, am so grateful for you, for my business, for my readers, for the honor it is to have eyes reading these very words. Tomorrow I will be even more grateful, and each day my cup will expand to hold more and more gratitude.
Each and every day, we can work together. We can all work on making our cups even bigger so we can hold unlimited amounts of joy and gratitude and bliss.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
