Earlier I mentioned how surprised I was to see certain concepts from my research emerge in pairs or groups. These “collections of concepts” have created major paradigm shifts for me in terms of the way I think about my life and the choices I make every day.
A good example of this is the way that love and belonging go together. Now I understand that in order to feel a true sense of belonging, I need to bring the real me to the table and that I can only do that if I’m practicing self-love. For years I thought it was the other way around: I’ll do whatever it takes to fit in, I’ll feel accepted, and that will make me like myself better. (Just typing those words and thinking about how many years I spent living that way makes me weary. No wonder I was tired for so long!)
In many ways, this research has not only taught me new ways to think about how I want to live and love, it’s taught me about the relationship between my experiences and choices. One of the most profound changes in my life happened when I got my head around the relationship between gratitude and joy. I always thought that joyful people were grateful people. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? They have all of that goodness to be grateful for. But after spending countless hours collecting stories about joy and gratitude, three powerful patterns emerged:
1. Without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice.
2. Both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual practices that were bound to a belief in human interconnectedness and a power greater than us.
3. People were quick to point out the difference between happiness and joy as the difference between a human emotion that’s connected to circumstances and a spiritual way of engaging with the world that’s connected to practicing gratitude.
GRATITUDE
When it comes to gratitude, the word that jumped out at me throughout this research process is practice. I don’t necessarily think another researcher would have been so taken aback, but as someone who thought that knowledge was more important than practice, I found these words to be a call to action. In fact, it’s safe to say that reluctantly recognizing the importance of practice sparked my 2007 Breakdown Spiritual Awakening.
For years, I subscribed to the notion of an “attitude of gratitude.” I’ve since learned that an attitude is an orientation or a way of thinking and that “having an attitude” doesn’t always translate to a behavior.
For example, it would be reasonable to say that I have a yoga attitude. The ideals and beliefs that guide my life are very in line with the ideas and beliefs that I associate with yoga. I value mindfulness, breathing, and the body-mind-spirit connection. I even have yoga outfits. But, let me assure you, my yoga attitude and outfits don’t mean jack if you put me on a yoga mat and ask me to stand on my head or strike a pose. Why don’t they mean jack? I don’t practice yoga. I don’t put my attitude into action enough to call it a practice. So where it really matters—on the mat—my yoga attitude doesn’t count for much.
So, what does a gratitude practice look like? The folks I interviewed talked about keeping gratitude journals, doing daily gratitude meditations or prayers, creating gratitude art, and even stopping during their stressful, busy days to actually say these words out loud: “I am grateful for…” When the wholehearted talk about gratitude, there are a whole bunch of verbs involved.
It seems that gratitude without practice may be a little like faith without works—it’s not alive.
WHAT IS JOY?
Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness. Happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you’re lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love. —ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS
The research has taught me that happiness and joy are different experiences. In the interviews, people would often say something like, “Being grateful and joyful doesn’t mean that I’m happy all of the time.” On many occasions I would delve deeper into those types of statements by asking, “What does it look like when you’re joyful and grateful, but not happy?” The answers were all similar: Happiness is tied to circumstance and joyfulness is tied to spirit and gratitude.
I also learned that neither joy nor happiness is constant; no one feels happy all of the time or joyful all of the time. Both experiences come and go. Happiness is attached to external situations and events and seems to ebb and flow as those circumstances come and go. Joy seems to be constantly tethered to our hearts by spirit and gratitude. But our actual experiences of joy—these intense feelings of deep spiritual connection and pleasure—seize us in a very vulnerable way.
After these differences emerged from my data, I looked around to find what other researchers had written about joy and happiness. Interestingly, the explanation that seemed to best describe my findings was from a theologian.
Anne Robertson, a Methodist pastor, writer, and executive director of the Massachusetts Bible Society, explains how the Greek origins of the words happiness and joy hold important meaning for us today. She explains that the Greek word for happiness is makarios, which was used to describe the freedom of the rich from normal cares and worries, or to describe a person who received some form of good fortune, such as money or health. Robertson compares this to the Greek word for joy, which is chairo. Chairo was described by the ancient Greeks as the “culmination of being” and the “good mood of the soul.” Robertson writes, “Chairo is something, the ancient Greeks tell us, that is found only in God and comes with virtue and wisdom. It isn’t a beginner’s virtue; it comes as the culmination. They say its opposite is not sadness, but fear.”
We need both happiness and joy. I think it’s important to create and recognize the experiences that make us happy. In fact, I’m a big fan of Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project and Tal Ben-Shahar’s research and book Happier. But in addition to creating happiness in our lives, I’ve learned that we need to cultivate the spiritual practices that lead to joyfulness, especially gratitude. In my own life, I’d like to experience more happiness, but I want to live from a place of gratitude and joy. To do this, I think we have to take a hard look at the things that get in the way of gratitude and joy, and to some degree, even happiness.