Hi! I'm Anne Marie, the creator of KaleidoSoul.com, and a SoulCollage® Facilitator in New England and worldwide online.

Rehearsing Joy

Peace is joy at rest

and joy is peace on its feet.

~ Anne Lamott

While watching the Jean Houston video, Passion for the Possible, she spent a lovely amount of time talking about her concept of "rehearsing joy." My heart sat up at attention in immediate response to this beautiful phrase. 

The dictionary defines the word "rehearse" like this: to practice in private, to drill or train as for some performance or part. Let's face it. Most of our moments, days, years, lives are spent rehearsing and replaying the old stories of our lives, stories that are woven with fear, distress, anxiety, compulsion and dis-ease. 

What if, instead, we make a practice of rehearsing and replaying those moments in our lives that were laced and anchored with joy? 

Try this, right now, just for one minute (and I am adapting Jean's exercise from Jean's video): Close your eyes and remember a favorite game from your childhood. What were you playing? Who was there? Were you outdoors or indoors? Where were you? What were you wearing? Take a moment now and simply go back in time and "play" there again. Just for a few seconds. 

If no memory comes to mind, call up a moment of joy from your young adulthood or even a moment from last week.

Now, how did that feel? Are you smiling? Did you re-experience the joy? Is your body a bit more relaxed right now? Ahhh... 

Consider making this a practice. Just once a day (maybe twice), for one minute, close your eyes and remember a joyful moment. Consider making a list of these moments as they come into your awareness. You might think that you don't have very many moments of joy in your life, but you will find that the more you practice rehearsing joy, the more memories will surface for you. 

The deepest gift of rehearsing joy is the scientifically proven fact that the more you remember joy in this way, the more you will be open to the abundance of new joys that are knocking at your door right this very moment. 

Anne Marie Bennett is a SoulCollage® Facilitator / Trainer, published author, website goddess, and two-time cancer survivor who was mentored directly by Seena Frost. Anne Marie is a recent transplant to southern coastal Maine where she lives, laughs, and creates with her silver-haired husband and one adolescent feline. She loves exploring all the wildlands including forest and ocean near her new home. Her books about SoulCollage® are available here.

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I’m Linda Woolfson, MA, PhD, SoulCollage® Trainer & Facilitator, Veriditas Labyrinth Facilitator, writer, translator and creativity catalyst. One of the subtlest pleasures of SoulCollage® lies in bringing together the intuitive and intentional aspects of our creativity. The emotion of joy can be sweetly spontaneous. We can also bring more of it into our lives by making joy a conscious focus of our SoulCollage® practice. 

SoulCollage® Can Deepen Your Joy

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Exuberance, Delight, Gaiety, Bliss, Jubilance, Elation…Joy. Joy is one emotion in the range of pleasurable peak states we human beings can experience. As well as subtly overlapping each other, these feelings have much in common. They are intense by nature, like the Biblical cup full to the brim which “runneth over.” They are also inherently surprising, flooding us suddenly with unexpected sweetness. 

Joy is different from happiness which can be a more settled state. Joy is by nature dynamic. To explore what joy is for you, go quickly through your SoulCollage® deck and pick out two or three cards with a joyful energy. Do you, like me, have an image in your deck of pure joy? Strong memories of childhood and teenage years still conjure up for me the quintessence of joy. Once my friend Alete and I saved up all our pocket money to play hooky from school and go boating on a local lake, on a day featuring a much-hated double math lesson.

Here is my Committee suit card, Sharing Joy. I am one who.revels in the joy of time out with a special friend. I am one who.delights in the shared jokes and hilarious conversations unique to that friendship. 

As young people we experience joy with ease. Once we grow up, joy may become a more elusive state. As Kay Jamieson reminds us in her wonderful book Exuberance, “Our greatest sorrows and our greatest joys ripen on the same vine.” For adults, at least in our society, joy may become intricately interwoven with other emotions. Our adult awareness of its fleeting nature may even cause us to tamp down our capacity to feel joy. Yet as adults, we also have the capacity to cultivate joy, to cherish it as a wonderful experience, and to value it as a powerful antidote to stress. It is a joy to embrace our capacity to bring more joy into our lives! 

For me now, one of the most frequent sources of joy is my relationship to the rhythms of the natural world, especially the cycles of the moon and of the seasons. Observing nature on my walks and attuning to the special qualities of each moment in the year is an ongoing source of joy – the joy of being present in the moment to appreciate what is there. This is my Committee suit SoulCollage® card for this theme. I am one who practices paying attention to the beauty around me. I am one who consciously cultivates joy in my life. 

Being present to the moment can also yield treasures in less uplifting environments. One sweltering day I got caught in an infernal traffic jam in the soul-less suburbs of Lisbon. The car was at a standstill for ages, and I was so hot I got out. Right next to me was a tiny, dilapidated house with the most beautiful garden - veggies, roses, cornflowers, marigolds …in profusion. When I eventually got home, I straightaway used my photos of the garden in a new Council suit SoulCollage® card (see left). I am one who celebrates the miracle of finding joy in unexpected places. I am one who resolves to stay aware of the transformative power of joy. 

SoulCollage® can help us explore the subtle emotional states which infuse our lives with color and vitality. In his poem “Eternity,” William Blake gives deceptively simple expression to the paradoxical nature of joy:

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy; 

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sun rise.

These lines are like a condensed elixir of the multi-facetted nature of joy. If you find that you don’t yet have a rich array of SoulCollage® cards expressing joy, how about using Blake’s lines as a springboard to create more? Here are some possibilities:

- A card expressing the tendency to cling to joy

- A celebration of your capacity to take joy in small things

- An exploration of joy’s fleeting nature

- A card conjuring up your capacity to create more joy in your life

- A Council card evoking an over-arching, archetypal energy of Joy

The imagery of flying in Blake’s poem also expresses another important facet of joy: its connection with freedom. When we start to explore Joy, we realize that its unstoppable flow far transcends the personal nature of our “local story.” It is a uniting force, something we all instinctively recognize and which brings us together, just as Beethoven expressed in his Ode to Joy symphony. In this excellent flash mob video, watch the expressions on everyone’s faces and give yourself permission to both laugh and cry with Joy! 

Linda Woolfson, MA, PhD is a SoulCollage® Facilitator and Trainer, Veriditas Labyrinth Facilitator, writer, translator, and creativity catalyst. She leads a dual-based life between the United Kingdom and Portugal, running SoulCollage® and creativity workshops, Facilitator Trainings, and retreats in both countries. She trained with Seena Frost as a SoulCollage® Facilitator in 2010 and has been a SoulCollage® Trainer since 2014. She loves delving into the depths of SoulCollage® and introducing others to our empowering process. To find out more about Linda’s workshops, SoulCollage® Facilitator Trainings and retreats visit her website.