Alongside joy there are other aspects of truth that are fundamental parts of our experience. These truths can grab our focus and make it easier for us to forget joy and our fundamental value. As such it becomes easier for us to experience purposelessness, anxiety, depression, loneliness, oppression or trauma. We have to contend with these truths as like Joy they are fundamental parts of our lives. The Joy Movement seeks to help us navigate our way back to joy. To make it easier to feel valuable in the midst these other experiences.
We exist. We have a body and a soul and feelings. Health, mental health, birth, death. These are all things we have to contend with.
While there is a lot we can know and can learn, there will always exist knowledge beyond our grasp. Knowledge systems like science may be able to expand our capacity but even they are full of mysteries of their own. We need to contend with the fact that our minds are fundamentally limited.
Things change. Time moves on. All things end. While we so often want things to be exactly the way we want them, in perpetuity, this is never truly the case. So much of the world is beyond our control.
We do not exist alone. There is a whole world around us that were are deeply entwined with. Whether that be the friends, families, strangers, comunities we've constructed or the systems of nature that allow life to happen, we can't escape the world around us.
We get hurt and we hurt the world around. We exist with cycles of impact. Every word, breath and action changes the expereince of those around us. These impacts can become harms and traumas or they can fuel growth and transformation. We need to comes to ters with the innate violence of our world and how that frames action.
We are conscious, we are unconscious, we have idenitities. We have a system of internal structures that we spend our lives interacting with. We build them up, we deconstruct them. Internal worlds that are wholly ours to experience.