Happy New Year, friends! 🥳
When I said on social media earlier this ‘twixtmas’ that I was going to use this space to start the book I’ve long wanted to write on joyful practice, it felt bold. Maybe even a little rash. But I’ve known for a few years now that I’d find it impossible to write a whole book ‘privately’. I have done some self-shaming before now about why I choose to write either collaboratively or publicly, but I’m reasonably sure it’s not for the likes. It’s definitely more about a sense of having community with me, while I write. I just needed to find the right platform. I thought for a while that the #JoyFE broadcasts were ‘it’ - and they will feed into this - but I am a traditionalist when it comes to banging down words on a keyboard. So here it is, the start…
…and it won’t be linear (or probably regular, I do know myself) but it will be coherent, I hope. And, in front of your eyes and mine, it will start to take shape.
Alone in the house now my boy has gone back to London, and with no commitments to my mum today, it’s probably inevitable that I start with me and the importance of doing the work on myself, continually, in order to do ‘the work’.
At this time of year, social media is awash with resolutions and goal-setting techniques. They don’t sit so well with me. Joyful practice has emerged as a process ontology, work that we do as we go along, a way of being in the world (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the subtitle of Nancy Kline’s 2009 book on the Thinking Environment, More Time to Think). It’s been a real shift to start thinking in this way and one which is helping me navigate the uncertainties of permacrisis (Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2022). All the goal-setting of previous years has been vulnerable to being blindsided, and that knocks me. So I’m choosing to 'do the work’ within the flow of uncertainty.
Of course, goal-setting may totally work for you, in that it gets you what and where you want. The goal-setting voice in my head which calls itself discipline is desperate for me to commit to writing every day, so that at some point in the year I’ll have the bones of a book (I always over-egg it). The first time I fail, probably before January gets into two figures, I’ll experience a sense of shame and set my face against it. So I’m choosing to know myself, remind myself of how much I actually love writing, and intentionally fold writing time into the routines of my life.
Ah, routines. Process ontologies have a different approach to discipline. If I let myself, I would alternate between anxious resting and unfocused graft, neither of which is productive. It took me years to realise this, conveniently hanging the boom and bust of my energies on the handy label ‘ADHD’. But last year I made progress towards being healthy and rested, connected and productive through gentle routines, even through the challenge of two new start ups and keeping my life on the tracks.
There’s danger in that. A lightbulb moment over the past few contemplative days has helped me realise that the things that work for me - yoga, walking, writing time - are not the work in themselves, but a framework for the work I need to do on me, to ensure I can carry on being a changemaker. If I just did that stuff, without deeper reflection, it would be like creating a wonderful revision timetable, then doing no revision (thanks to dear friend SJ White for that striking metaphor).
And that deeper work is hard, personal, vulnerable and private. It’s the work of identifying untrue limiting assumptions that we live as true and then overturning them, or at least confining them in a mental cage (where they still chelp like jackals). Therapy can help, but it won’t do the work for you. I experience it as the mental discipline of literally replacing one thought with another, until I believe it.
It’s exhausting, but the best work I’ve ever done and I’ll be doing it for the rest of my life. It’s a constant discipline and some things need facing down more than once. I’m claiming no moral high ground here, but I can promise you that I no longer have any issues with my self-worth these days.
Journalling, vision-boarding, ikigai, intention-setting, meditation, yoga, list-making - these are tools. They help the work, but they don’t do the work. I’m not saying they are not incredibly useful. My life is healthy because of the routines of yoga, walking and meditation I have; they quieten my monkey-mind and bring me peace. And it’s that peace that helps me do the private work in my mind that I need to do.
No short cuts. But the practice of a lifetime.
Love your honesty in the writing💛 looking forward to travelling this journey with you!