MAKING ROOM FOR JOY
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 26.
Hello, my friends. I've been talking quite a bit lately about pain and loss, and I thought it was time to make some room for joy. It seems to be a common experience for many of us that we can feel so overwhelmed by the emotional experience of letting go of our children, not to mention many of the other life changes and transitions we're facing.
We're so stuck in our pain that it can be difficult to make room for joy. But doesn't it seem like it should be the point of life to find joy, happiness? I mean, how many times have you said to yourself, I just want my kids to be happy. And in the meantime, we're miserable trying to make them happy.
There are actually quite a few things standing in the way of our own happiness, but they're not what you think. So today I want to talk through how to prioritize our own happiness. And unfortunately, this isn't as simple as going on vacation and getting a massage or buying something nice for ourselves.
Those things, while lovely, don't last. The vacation ends eventually. And frankly, even on vacation, sometimes we're chasing happiness.
So why does it sometimes feel like it's so hard to be happy? Well, let's first take a look at the times when it's easy to feel joy. What are those times for you? Holidays with the family, memories of cuddling with your kids, vacations, date nights, big celebrations. Let's face it, there are certain circumstances in our lives that we tend to associate with happiness.
For example, what's your favorite holiday? And how do you think about that holiday? I have a few favorites. For example, I love Halloween. Something about the dressing up and the candy, the scariness, the costumes, Charlie Brown's Halloween special.
I'm here for all of it. I just love Halloween. So when I think about Halloween's gone by, I can remember some amazing Halloween experiences.
Some when I was little, definitely in my 20s living in New York City. I have beautiful memories of walking neighborhoods with my boys when they were little and they were dressed up. And we would go out with a group of friends pulling a cart of hard cider.
And as my boys got older, I've loved going to Six Flags with my youngest and watching him be brave and get pictures with the zombies. These memories about special occasions and holidays propel us to look forward to the next holiday, the next season of celebration. So if the circumstance is Halloween, why do some of us feel joy about it and others no emotion or even negative emotion about it? Halloween is a circumstance and we all think about it a little bit differently.
For me, Halloween conjures up nostalgia and adventure, the chance to try on a different life for just a few hours. Unconsciously, I've cultivated these thoughts about Halloween. So now even the mention of Halloween can bring a smile to my face.
This happens even when it's not Halloween. I say all this to point out how sometimes depending on your perspective, circumstances make it easier for you to think thoughts that bring you joy. You may feel this way about Christmas or Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, Diwali.
These occasions bring with them a history of family togetherness and joyful moments, celebrations with friends. So we look forward to these precious celebrations. We prepare for them and make plans.
Maybe we decorate or invite people over to celebrate. We have an expectation of what that holiday is supposed to be like. And wouldn't you know it, sometimes the reality of the holiday doesn't quite meet our expectations.
The dinner doesn't turn out the way we planned. Family members get in arguments. Friends cancel at the last minute.
You give a gift and you sense the other person doesn't really appreciate it in the way you hoped that they would. You're disappointed by gifts you receive. Let's face it, we've all been there.
So the circumstance, that holiday, which brings you joy as you look ahead to it, can also bring pain or disappointment in the midst of it, particularly when things don't quite go according to your vision of what that holiday was supposed to be. I say all of this to illustrate how our minds create stories that bring us both joy and pain, all around the same circumstances. When I think of Halloween and all of the good times with friends and the adorable costumes my boys have worn when they were little, these thoughts create a deep sense of happiness in me.
And now that my boys are long past wanting to spend Halloween trick-or-treating with their mom, my thoughts about how I miss those days make me feel sad and a little disappointed as I hang out at home alone, waiting for the occasional neighborhood child to ring our doorbell to trick-or-treat. There are other times, other circumstances in our lives that help make it easier to think thoughts that bring us peace and happiness. For me, those circumstances are when my boys are at home, or at least where I expect them to be, doing what I expect them to do.
In particular, I find it easy to think happy thoughts when my boys are doing what I think they should be doing, in my expert opinion as their mom. For example, I love it when they're studying and applying themselves, in a good mood, talking to me, responding to my texts, telling me they love me. In those moments, I can capture joy a bit more easily.
Everything seems to be okay in those moments. But even though it's easier to find joy when things are going according to our expectations, it's really valuable to take ownership of the fact that it's not the circumstances that are making us happy, but rather the way we are interpreting those circumstances, what we are making them mean. When I see my boys studying, I often think they're taking their study seriously and working hard.
This makes me feel proud and perhaps a bit relieved. There's a big part of me that thinks it's my job to encourage them to apply themselves, so when they do, I can also think I'm doing okay as a mom. That makes me feel relieved.
When I see my boys smiling or laughing, I can think they're doing okay. They're happy. This makes me happy.
When they respond to my texts, I can think I know where they are. It sounds like everything is okay, and this makes me feel at peace. We're so tempted to believe that it's the proof that our kids are studying, or their smiles, or their texts that make us feel better, but it's always our interpretation that creates the pride, the happiness, and the peace.
When we see our kids studying, we could also be thinking they're working too hard. I think they might be overwhelmed, and when we think these thoughts, we start to feel anxious rather than proud. When we see our kids smiling, we could think they're smirking or not taking us seriously, and thinking that way makes us feel angry rather than happy.
When our kids text us, we might think they should be calling us instead, that maybe they're not telling us everything, and with these thoughts, we feel worried rather than at peace. Same circumstances. Kids studying, kids smiling, kids texting.
I can interpret these circumstances in a way that brings joy or pain, peace or anxiety. There is so much freedom in understanding that it's our minds that create our emotional experience. Think about how powerless we are when we believe that other people or the circumstances of our lives are what create the joy or the pain.
We often tell ourselves that we want to live in the present moment because we have this idea that this will bring us peace. There really is something to this, but it can be hard to understand how to do it in practice. What we often do is try to do things that will bring us joy or peace.
We might try to plan something fun to do, go to a yoga class, meditate, call a friend, read a book. These things can certainly bring us peace for a period of time, but then afterwards we're right back to living our lives, not in the moment. When it comes down to it, you can't solve a mindset problem with activity, with actions.
Our emotional experience doesn't come from the activity, it comes from your mind. Let me clarify, because you might be thinking, but when I take a walk or I go to yoga, I feel peaceful. But let's get back to what we were talking about when it comes to the circumstances of our favorite holidays.
If we associate yoga with peacefulness, then the circumstances of us doing yoga will lead us to think thoughts that are peaceful, like this time is for me, I get to relax and take care of myself right now. As a result of these thoughts, we feel peace. But what happens on the way home from yoga when you end up in traffic or you start thinking of all of the things that were stressing you out before you went to yoga? Peace goes out the window.
While we're experiencing the circumstance of the yoga class, we think thoughts that bring us peace. Once the class is over, we're not accessing those particular thoughts until the next class. And let me also point out, some of us hate yoga.
And if we were forced to do yoga, we might be thinking, this is miserable. I can't wait for this to be over. No peaceful emotion is coming from that thought.
So it's not the yoga that creates the peace. So if it's our minds that create the or the joy, whatever that beautiful emotion is that you want more of in your life, how can we make room for it? Well, there are three ways I want to offer you. One, we have to start recognizing the thoughts we have about the future that create anxiety and fear for us.
This is a big one for us as mothers letting go of our children. We can no longer control or even exercise influence over what our kids do or how they show up in the world. We project into the future all of the possible pain they might experience from getting sick or hurt to failing out of school, losing their jobs, dating the wrong person.
Honestly, if we were to make a list of all of the things that could possibly go wrong, we would be writing forever. The list would be infinite. So if the list is infinite, it stands to reason that the probability of any one outcome, positive or negative, has an infinitely small chance of coming true.
A one in infinity chance. And yet when our brains concoct a story of what could happen, we believe it. It feels real, possible, and even likely.
So we think some awful possibility for the future, maybe many awful possibilities for the future. And I don't know if you do this, but when I think of awful things in the future, I have a tendency to catastrophize. One bad grade in my mind can lead to failing out of school, not getting a job.
All of a sudden I see my child homeless. I'm laying it out this way. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, but that's where our minds go.
The worst case scenario isn't just disappointing. It's a doomsday scenario. And so what happens? We're thinking of all of these awful realities.
We feel anxious, maybe even terrified, panicked. And so we give our kids advice. We nag.
We follow up repeatedly. We look for evidence to support our fears. We spin in thoughts about pain that might happen, that right now we fear will happen in the future.
So we show up in a way that actively attempts to avert this awful outcome, as if without our assistance, it's inevitable things will go wrong. This is why I've often said the worry feels important. We feel important that it's our job to save our kids from the catastrophic consequences of quote unquote wrong choices.
How often have you found yourself waking up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep because your brain is in an endless loop, thinking of everything you need to do to make the future okay. This is not living in the present moment. This is living in the future.
But not only that, it's living in the most painful version of the future that your mind can imagine. Have you ever stopped to wonder why we don't spend our time thinking about the infinite number of positive outcomes for our kids' futures? We say we hope they'll be happy and successful, that they'll find their way in college, pursue their passions, choose a career path that brings them success and a feeling of contribution and accomplishment, that they'll find love. We want all of this for them, but we don't allow our minds to spin in dreaming of these possibilities.
It's almost like we don't want to jinx it, like achieving it is going to come at a cost of crossing a minefield of awful possibilities. It's almost like a mental game of Frogger. Now I'm dating myself.
We spend so much time mentally wishing we could protect our kids from the dangers waiting for them, thinking about all of the things they should be doing now to avert these dangers. But wishing is about all we can do. For all of our nagging and reminding and worrying, have you noticed that none of it changes a thing about how our kids pursue their lives? Now that they're adults, they're going to do exactly what they want to do.
And our nagging and worrying has absolutely no impact, except maybe they roll their eyes more, or call us less frequently, or worse, they begin to pull away from us. Our nagging feels like we're trying to control them, and in a way we are, if they would just do what we say. But have you stopped to consider that your advice, your way, may not be the best way? In fact, what if your advice is wrong? So the first way to live in the present moment is to notice the things you're worrying about as it relates to the future.
Maybe it's your kids, your parents' health, your partner and where that relationship is going, your job, where your career is headed, how to get back in the workforce, or maybe whether or not you'll ever meet another love in your life. Whatever negative vision you have for the future, notice the thoughts that are creating the worry and anxiety for you. Notice these thoughts and recognize that they are simply sentences in your brain about the future.
They're not destined to become true simply because your brain has manufactured them. The only purpose they serve is to create the pain of an outcome that hasn't even happened yet in our present moment. We're so afraid to feel the pain in the future, we actually create a situation where we feel the pain now.
Crazy to think that thing that we're worrying about may never happen, will likely never happen, yet we already feel the pain of it now. The second way to live in the present moment to make room for joy is to let go of the past. In the same way that we can bring the pain of the future into our present moment by worrying about the future, we bring the pain of the past into the present by carrying with us all of the should-haves and regrets from the past.
We think about all of the ways we wish we might have parented differently, as if just changing the past would make the challenges we might be facing with our kids now easier. The underlying assumption is that whatever is going on right now is somehow our fault, that we failed as mothers, or we think of the sacrifices we might have made for our children or our partners, and we might resent or regret those choices now. We might be holding on to guilt or shame about past choices or actions.
If we have little to no control over how the future turns out in many respects, we have absolutely zero control over the past. We simply can't change it. All of the guilt, the shame, regret, resentment, all of this pain, none of it changes a thing about the past.
Sometimes the past can be a We can learn valuable life lessons from our mistakes, but once the lesson is learned, the negative emotion gets us nowhere. We can apologize, we can change course, we can do things differently going forward, but holding on to the pain only serves to bring the pain of the past into our current moment, robbing us of our ability to be present. So if you're feeling pain from regret, guilt or shame, resentment over past sacrifices, have a little compassion for yourself.
You were simply wishing you could rewrite the story of the past, but the story of the past is no longer fiction. It's a circumstance in your life. You have no more control of it than you do the weather or the time of day, so wishing it were different.
The only thing this serves to do is once again to perpetuate our pain and rob us of our ability to live in the now. So it makes sense, right, to let go of past regrets and to try to stop worrying about the future. To be present, we need to be in the now.
Stay out of the past, stay out of the future, but sometimes the present doesn't feel great either. Sometimes the present moment carries its own pain, and this pain is typically a result of arguing with the reality of our life. More specifically, we often wish that the circumstances of our lives were different.
So if we think of circumstances as facts of our lives beyond our control, these facts are neutral. They are neither good nor bad, but we often wish we could change them. Let's take our weight, for example.
When I step on the scale, the scale produces a number. The number is just a number, not good, not bad. In fact, the number is arbitrary, meaning it could be 200, 75, 125, 175, 300.
These numbers are totally random, until we start to frame these numbers in the context of what we think we should weigh. Now keep in mind, of course, whatever we weigh in the present moment is what it is. We can't lose 20 pounds in a moment just because we wish it were different.
But if you ever had that experience, stepping on the scale and feeling so disappointed, wishing the number were different, simply because we'd hoped somehow it would be, the number on the scale didn't meet our expectations. This becomes even more fun when you apply it to other human beings. Have you ever noticed how infrequently other people meet our expectations? We come to experience our lives through a certain lens.
We have values, we've been raised to act a certain way, to expect a certain kind of behavior. We've raised our kids to act a certain way. We expect our partners to act a certain way.
We have all of these expectations of each other, and we're angered and disappointed all of the time based on these expectations. You might be mentally saying to yourself, I don't do that. But let me challenge you on this.
Do any of these sentences sound like something you might have said at one point? They should pick up their rooms. My kids should be respectful. They shouldn't do drugs.
My husband shouldn't cheat. My son should apply himself at school or at work. My daughter should date someone who likes me.
They shouldn't yell. My boss should appreciate me. My boys should put away their laundry.
She should say thank you. It's endless, this list. All of the shoulds and the shouldn'ts that we apply to others, that we apply to ourselves.
I should work out more. I should be more productive. I shouldn't eat that.
I shouldn't be so sad. I should be happier. All of this is often arguing against the reality of what people do in our lives.
How do I know my kids shouldn't pick up their rooms? Because they don't. How do I know my son should date someone who doesn't like me? Because he does. Husbands cheat.
Kids do drugs. People don't say thank you. Bosses don't appreciate us.
We are not happy all of the time. This is life. So when these things happen that we don't want, we can either waste our lives wishing they were different, or we can try to find the perfection and the reality of our experience.
It's not always easy. You often can't change your mind when you're in pain. But it's helpful to know that our brains tend to find what we are looking for.
So if we believe that our lives should be different, we will find everything that is wrong in our lives. This tendency of our brain is called confirmation bias, and we do this in so many areas of our lives. But when it comes to our emotional life, we're experts.
If we believe our kids aren't applying themselves, we'll find evidence for it. If we believe our partners don't support us, we will notice all of the ways they are unsupported. And look, there's nothing wrong with you if this is your experience.
Our brains have a natural tendency to focus on the negative, call it a survival instinct. When we find things wrong, we can try to fix them, to try to avoid danger. But the problems we're facing are much more complex than simply averting imminent danger.
So look, it sometimes feels like the odds are stacked against us. As I said, sometimes the circumstances make it easier to find joy, the holidays, time with loved ones, evidence that everyone is safe and moving in the right direction. But so often, circumstances of our lives trigger us to reject the present moment, either because we're worrying about the future, wishing we could change the past, or wishing we could change something about our present circumstances, including others' behaviors and actions.
But what if we could just, as Byron Cady is known to say, love what is? It comes down to truly being in the present moment, not the past, not the future, and not some imagined wish of what we would rather have right now. Just being in the present moment and loving all of it, even, and this is the hard part, loving the parts that our brains want to argue against. Earlier today, I tried to focus on being in the present moment.
I noticed the beautiful sky and the warm sun as I took a walk. I noticed how my body felt as I walked. I imagined my boys' faces.
I could see them smiling in my mind, happy, doing what they're doing, all of it perfect because that is what is. This is what is true right now. And wishing it away, wishing the parts that I don't want or expect, wishing that away only brings me pain and not the peace or the happiness I so desire.
There is so much beauty that exists in your life right now if you would only look for it. We so often shroud ourselves in these cloaks of unhappiness that we don't see the perfection of what is. Sometimes you have to work for it a little bit, but it is our minds that create the pain and it is our minds that create the joy.
So if you find yourself in pain, know that if your mind is powerful enough to create that pain, it is powerful enough to make room to create joy. I'm not saying it's easy. The pain can feel overwhelming, but that's why it's even more important for us to cultivate the feelings of peace and joy.
They are available to us right now, but sometimes we have to create them with intention rather than waiting for them to come to us. Just notice peace is there if you look for it. Gratitude, joy, happiness, it's available to you right now.
Can you find it? Don't look to your past. Don't look to your future. Just look for it in the present moment.
Make room for joy. Until next time, friends.
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