Do you ever find yourself downplaying your own joy?
Maybe you try to quiet your self-confidence when you are feeling bright and shiny so your strut doesn’t shine through. Maybe you deflect a compliment, or minimize your own success.
Maybe you hold back asking for what you really want, what would really make you happy, in service of making sure others are happy around you.
Maybe you allow your own stress, fatigue and resentment to build as you focus on tending to everyone else, placing your own needs last. But it’s hard to feel joy when you are running on empty.
Joy is a conundrum for women. Of course we all want it, but we have also been taught that serving our own needs, our own desires, our own JOY, is selfish… as if joy is a zero-sum game, and you filling your own bucket leaves someone else dry.
But joy buckets don’t work that way. When it comes to joy, “my cup runeth over” simply creates more flow and abundance for everyone nearby. Imagine how it might feel to release the narrative you have been fed that tells you to reign in your joy, and that tending to your own happiness is selfish.
It may feel far away right now, but do you remember the intense feeling that comes with the holiday season of wanting to make sure everyone else is happy? There’s nothing like that time of year to get us focused on spreading joy for others, but so often we do so by trying to follow the rule of the false narrative: make magic for everyone else, make everyone else’ dreams come true, make sure nobody we love is disappointed. With the best of intentions, we can come up selfless at the holidays, ironically leaving us with less joy to share with others — less intimacy, more exhaustion, less laughter, more resentment, less presence, more stress.
This year is the year to do it differently.
I am running my Women’s Awakening Retreat right before the holiday season for a reason. Imagine a holiday season built on being connected to ourselves and open to our own joy. One steeped in the real intimacy that comes with authentic presence. One rich in the ease that comes from accepting and enjoying what really is, rather than trying to live up to unrealistic and perfectionistic expectations as if our worth, and everyone else’s joy, depends on it.
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The first step is dusting those old messages out of our corners, and then we will invite in all of who we really are…joy and all.
I hope you’ll join me in Stowe.
Simply send me an email to learn more or to register: [email protected].
Let the joy begin —
Lindsay B. Jernigan, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist – Doctorate
802-229-8270
drlindsayjernigan.com
instagram.com/dr.lindsayjernigan