Joy is not the absence of pain, although it can seem that way when you don’t know any better. When you feel stuck in your love life, nothing has a shine to it. You’re in search of something to make you feel happy, yet you don’t see the limitations you put on it. Perhaps you believe if you have too much joy, something bad must happen to compensate, so you keep it at bay. When you wish for big, but settle for little, you continue running in circles, chasing a feeling you don’t truly know. Understanding what joy is and experiencing it is a process; but it’s not something you will find in an attached relationship.

Intellectually you may know joy isn’t something to be gotten or achieved, but you still equate it with other people, hoping they will give it to you. Does joy equal that second date you’re trying so desperately get? Does it equal revenge with an ex who hurt you? What fleeting twinges do you associate with joy and why? Be curious about what you perceive as joy and ask yourself what it REALLY is. Joy isn’t in the future, it isn’t a temporary high and it isn’t something to be chased. But the tricky thing about joy is if you don’t know what it is… you don’t know it.

So how do you find it? You don’t. Joy finds you when you walk through your fears and stop leading with your head. It happens when you start paying attention to what you’re intuitively drawn to and silencing the critic in your head. Joy is a choice, and it comes through believing it lives inside you. Stop fixating on others and expecting them to change—that is not where joy lives. When you connect to your heart and feel what is there, it will guide you. Stay with it and be present; these are the seeds of joy. Even if you can only hold onto it for a minute, do it. Bit by bit you’ll become acquainted with joy and reject your old notion of what you thought it was