And what I feel that’s authentic in myself is that this is the first time in my long life that I’ve ever heard a political campaign where people got up and talked about joy like over and over and over.

And if you watched the Democratic National Convention—did I watch it? Yes. How bizarre. I hate politics. I’ve never—I grew up with a fervent Democrat soul in Provo, Utah, in the sixties. It was—I got beaten up regularly. My desk was defaced. I was not popular, all because of politics. So it put me off my feed, right?

But I started watching the Democratic National Convention this year, and the moment people started talking about joy and I could see the joy in people’s body language, in their faces, in the music, in the way they were treating each other, in the way they spoke about and to each other: joy, joy, joy. It came up as a theme over and over, and I was mesmerized. This was a feeling I’d never gotten from anything political, and that’s why I’m wearing the shirt. And then in the New York Times a couple of days after, there was an op-ed piece that said, “Joy is not a strategy.”

And it was by someone who was saying, “You know, that’s not going to help you win. She’s not going to win just because there’s joy. Everybody’s talking about joy. Joy is not a strategy. You’ve got to have a strategy.”

And I was like, wait a second. I have been life coaching for 30 years, and that entire time I have coached thousands of people, and many hundreds of them have said, “I think this is working. This has helped.” Every single time, my one strategy was joy.

That is the only strategy I’ve ever had. And it started when I was sitting in a library carrel at the age of 17 in a deep depression, just mental post-traumatic stress disorder and depression and anxiety just dripping out of my pores, trying to decide why it was worth it to be alive. And I just said, you may have heard this story before because it was a turning point in my life. I sat there and I thought, if there’s one thing that is worth living a human life, it is the possibility of experiencing joy. Could I remember that feeling? No, not at the time, but I could remember thinking, this is joyful. I’m happy right now.

I remember one time, this was my big touchstone when I was about 10, 11, I was in a children’s choir that met at the local university, and my job was to stand behind the little kids, the seven- and eight-year-olds, who had these incredibly high silvery voices. Some of ’em were only like five, but they couldn’t really remember the music very well. All I had, I don’t have a voice, but I had a pretty good sense of pitch. So I was to stand in the row behind the little kids with the silver voices and just sing the melody into their ears so they knew which note was there, and then it would come out in their beautiful, gorgeous voices. We gave concerts sometimes, but then we got brought in, my whole choir got brought in to play a part in an oratorio of the life of Joan of Arc. An oratorio is where a bunch of singers stand in front of an orchestra and choir and they sing songs about what happened in the life of Joan of Arc, in this case, and different characters play different roles. And it’s kind of like a stagey sort of talking-heads opera. I’ve never been to another oratorio, but this is what it was. It was about Joan of Arc and she sang her song about having a mission to save France. And she was only a 16-year-old peasant girl. How is this going to work? And then it went through her whole thing of saving France and being on the battlefield with soldiers. And at the very end, of course, she was captured and she was burned for witchcraft because women weren’t supposed to lead in those there days.

And in the oratorio, the woman playing Joan of Arc, she put her hands behind her back, she pretended to be tied to this pyre. And then they just shone this orange light that undulated. And she went through this horrific experience of being burned. And the way the oratorio was written, she sang her way through it. She just focused on her vision of God, her belief in what she’d done, and she sang her way through it. And the choir, a full male/female adult choir picked up the song and projected it and it got bigger and bigger and it started to fill this huge amphitheater we were in. And they get to a crescendo and then there’s this pause and she’s dying. And the curtain opened further. And on each side there we were, all these little kids wearing these satin gowns. And I was singing into the ear of the five-year-old in front of me, the song the angels sing as they bring her up to heaven.

See? I can’t even talk about it without crying, and it’s been like 60 years or something. I remember feeling something at that moment that I’d never felt. I was a depressed, anxious child, and I did not run around being happy all the time. But I felt something in that moment of unity with the kids’ choir, the bigger choir, the orchestra, the singer, the real Joan of Arc, whoever had written the oratorio, the rest of humanity. And I remember going home and crying for hours and just begging,I’d been taught to pray, so I was begging the Almighty, “Please, please, please let me feel that way again. Please don’t let that be the only time in this life I feel that way.”

And then it went away. And there I was 17 years old, like seven, eight years later, scratching things into the wall of his library carrel going, “I remember feeling something once and I think it was joy. And if that’s possible, I’m staying. I’m here for the count. I’m going to keep myself alive.” And from that moment to this, joy became my only strategy for living. If something feels joyful, I believe that’s because it is telling us, body, heart, soul, and mind, that that is what we are meant to feel. And when we feel misery and flatness and lack of enjoyment and bitterness and all those other things, it’s just telling us, “Wrong way, wrong way, obviously wrong way.”

So I was quite incensed with the man who said, “Joy is not a strategy.” And I looked up “strategy” and it said in the dictionary that it’s “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.”

All right, what’s the overall aim in this case? It’s to elect someone president. Yeah, but why would we want to elect one person president or another? Well, because we want someone who we feel will govern the country wisely. Why is that? Because it may impact our lives and the lives of people we love. In what way? Well, it’ll make them, their lives better. And what will that feel like to them? Joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy!

We’re all creating fractals of whatever we feel inside ourselves. And that means that it’s like Joan of Arc is singing and the choir singing and the children’s choir sing and the audience tries to sing, and it spreads because joy was meant to be contagious. Then we have a society that says, “But that’s not a strategy.” Oh, what do you want? “I want success.” Why? “Because I hate everybody and I don’t want to live.” Well, until you have joy, what good is your strategy of success? There is no point to success except to feel joy.

So that’s our ultimate aim, which is our strategy, okay? Because all the way to joy feels joyful. All the way to joy, tastes of joy. Have you ever seen one of those cartoons where there’s a pie baking and someone puts it on a windowsill? It must be from years gone by, and the smell of the pie is shown as a line or a series of lines that wafts away from the pie and then it finds the nose of some character and the character smells the pie and is pulled ineluctably toward the pie? That’s joy. That’s what happens when we begin to live in joy. And if you smell, if you sniff just a little bit of apple pie cooling on the windowsill, if you feel in your body and your heart, just a tiny draft of joy, go in that direction! The little lines are pulling your heart, pulling your body, pulling all of you, except maybe pieces of your mind, toward what will make your life worth living.

So our objective is joy. The way to joy is joy. So let’s make it our plan of action, our strategy, to follow joy wherever it leads. So when I decided to wear Kamala shirts on this broadcast, it brought me joy. Okay, I’m going to do it, even if it alienates some people. If I feel like when I answer the questions at the end of this discourse, what answer will I give? The one that feels most joyful to me. When we gather as a community once Ro and I have got a community ready, so we can all talk amongst ourselves, each other, so everybody here can talk at the same communication level, what will that do? Elevate the joy of individuals to become the joy of the whole. Make your joy, my joy.

And it’s a beautiful opposite of a zero-sum game where—you can’t destroy joy. And that’s another thing that was so interesting about the DNC, the Democratic National Convention. There was a feeling, one of my friends called and said, “Can you feel that?” And I was like, yeah, but it’s still really close. And she said, “But feel the energy. Feel the energy.” That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And she said, “There’s nothing that can stop that energy. You may stop the people, but you’ll never stop that energy.” That energy is the force of the Divine rolling through this population. And we should all be grateful just to catch the scent of it downwind.

So let’s just turn toward joy, even if it takes us in ways that our families don’t understand or our friends don’t understand, even if it makes us look weird. Feeling good by looking weird, as Roey always says. And join with other people by sharing your joy and asking them what you can do to help lift their joy. Sometimes it’s just by listening to them while they grumble for a minute and then telling them a joke. Or giving them permission to not do something they don’t want to do and don’t have to do. Sometimes it’s by posting a funny or silly thing online or telling somebody a joke. As joy grows, it more than multiplies. As each person joins the joy, the pool of joy, it magnifies by more than a factor of one. It starts to be interactive between each member of the group, and the joy starts to multiply infinitely if we communicate it.

So yeah, all the way to joy is joy. Joy is my strategy for life. Joy is what I hope your strategy for life might be, and I intend to share my joy with you and to share whatever joy you have to bring to me. And that includes feeling comfort in times of sorrow. So it does not rule out things like sorrow, fear, or anger, but it permeates all those things with a sense of—I mean, that feeling I felt during that oratorio was when the hero is dying unjustly. But there was something so true in the way she had lived and in the way she was embraced by the whole, by the crowd, by the musicians and everybody, that even in this horror, there was a transcendent joy. And I’ve been lucky enough to feel that over and over and over and over again, and I can feel a little bit of it right now. A lot of it actually.

So we got some questions coming in, but first I think let’s just do our meditation, but dedicate it to joy. So even if you’re having a really hard time, you don’t have to feel it. Just intend. Open your intention to the experience of joy. And then calm, breathe out, settle your body, and ask yourself: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and whatever I’m looking at? Can I imagine the empty space inside the atoms of my body? Can I imagine that empty space connecting to all of space and embracing and pervading every other person on this call? Can I imagine it ringing with joy, with love, with light, with a sense of being uplifted and held and celebrated? Can I imagine that joy is everywhere?

It’s so tempting for me to say to turn those into statements, but that’s not the way this works. Everything is about questions. Everything is about the open mind. Only the open mind is available for joy. A closed mind is like a closed fist. It can’t do very much. It can punch, it can hurt, it can pound. But when it does this, its way, its possibilities are literally endless. Closed mind, open mind. So let’s look at the questions you sent, speaking of questions.

Jessica says, “I remember Oprah talking about joy hangovers. Pema Chödrön suggests calling these highs and lows ‘shenpa.’ Do we ride these waves or seek balance?”

I believe that “shenpa” means being attached to the feeling. So if you get really manic, you can actually squirt so much serotonin and dopamine into your brain that you exhaust the supply, and the next day you feel kind of joyless. People who take MDMA on the weekends sometimes have what they call a Suicide Tuesday where they feel really low. It’s because all their feel-good hormones got blared wide open by this chemical. So I would actually be on the side of balance here. I don’t think that joy is that high that becomes low. I’m going to plug this guy’s book because he’s fabulous. This is The Joy You Make by Steven Petrow. I just spoke with him because we have the same publisher. It’s called The Joy you Make. It’ll come out backwards on your screen, but it’s called The Joy You Make and it’s coming out in a few weeks. And he was just talking about how, I mean in the book, he writes about sitting with his dying sister, she died of cancer, holding her hand and weeping and stroking her face and telling her he loved her on her deathbed and feeling in the midst of this terrible grief, still the joy of his love for her and their relationship, which I believe persists. So he has lots of examples. He went through really hard things. Both his parents died, his husband left him, and his sister died all in the same year. And that was the year he decided to find joy.

So he found the joy that was not attached to things being a certain way. Happiness is attached to things being a certain way. Joy is the bliss of being, and it transcends highs and lows. And I really believe that it wasn’t at the DNC, it wasn’t the feeling “We are going to crush! We’re going to win!” That was not the feeling. There was just a feeling of commitment to love, commitment to happiness. I mean in the crowd members and certainly in many of the speakers, it was kind of a remarkable event. I’ve never seen anything like it in politics. And I think the fact that The New York Times was like, “But that’s not a strategy.” It’s a really good sign that maybe everything might shift. And we’ll start thinking as a society in terms of joy rather than in terms of needing to win, getting happiness from achievements, which takes us up, down, up, down, up, down, and never lets us be still.

Tracy says, “Question: All for joy. Duh. But my strategy has been peace. Is joy a better path than peace?”

What I’ve found is that peace is our ultimate state, complete stillness. But if you go there, you cannot help but begin to experience joy, love, freedom. Those four things— Peace, love, joy, freedom—they are inextricably entwined. So one is not better than the other. You can use anything you want. But some days peace will be your go-to, some days joy will be your go-to, sometimes freedom. Just canceling all your appointments and going out for a walk will be freedom. And sometimes love and service will be your freedom. And take any road, they all lead to the same mountaintop, and you will find joy there. So you can use any of them, I guess joy is not the only strategy. There’s love and freedom and peace as well, but they all end up being the same thing, which is inexplicable and unexplainable. The finger that points to the moon is not the moon.

Jenna says, “How can I come back to joy after heartache and honestly embarrassment for another failed relationship?”

If you’re embarrassed, you’re telling yourself you did something wrong and you are bad and should be shamed. That’s not joy. So according to my strategy, we’d have to say very gently, Jenna, maybe the part of you that is judging yourself and saying that you’re a failure, maybe we could take it in our arms and rock it to sleep and maybe give it a snack and a cup of soup and a piece of toast and then have it watch its favorite TV show and say, “Sweetheart, you can stop judging now. There’s no judgment where we’re going.” The publisher for Steven Petrow and for me is Maria Shriver whose favorite poem and motto for the whole publishing imprint is Rumi’s poem that says, “Out beyond judgments of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” So Jenna, meet us in the field beyond judgment of rightdoing and wrongdoing, drop all that. It’s not joy, we just make it up. Joy is real. That’s not real.

Cheryl says, “Do you think that joy is that feeling you say to pay attention to when you have a choice to make, and you close your eyes, and you describe it as freedom?”

Yeah, freedom, peace, love, joy, they all, they’re all mushed together. There should be a word that means all of them. Somebody can make up that word and get back to us.

Okay, Nick says, “Do you have any strategies for following joy? I felt a lot of joy for the first time since a long time during a concert, but don’t really know how to continue from there.”

That’s a brilliant example of joy tracking. That’s what we call it in South Africa when we run our seminar with Boyd Varty taking people out to track rhinoceros. He says, “We’re tracking, in our life, we’re tracking joy through the body.” So what I would do, Nick, is if you felt that at a concert, get some of the music from the concert. Listen to it by yourself or with people you love and really listen and try to remember the association with the feeling you had. And there was something about that experience, whether it was the crowd, but music is incredibly powerful at opening the doors of our emotions and our psyches. So use the music to take you back in. Use anything you can stimulate your senses with, folks, like a smell, the smell of something like pine trees or the sound of a waterfall or the sound of a loved one’s voice, even if that loved one isn’t here anymore. Get situated in the sensory experience. Drop into it and see where the joy lives inside you connected to that. We’ve talked about that a lot before. Using the senses to drop into joy, and that concert was an incredible sensory experience, and then share it with other people. This is why Ro and I are making this community because when you share it, it more than multiplies by the number you’ve brought to the group. I don’t even know how to calculate how much joy increases every time someone adds joy to a combined collective of people.

Dr. Donna says, “I had great joy witnessing the DNC until I saw on Facebook someone mock Gus Walz. And then that joy turned to sorrow. How do we hold onto joy as others spew hate?” 

Well, you were in joy, then someone said something repulsive and untrue and you got attached to them, to needing everyone to see it like you saw it. And we don’t need that. We do not need that. Everyone at that convention knew that there are very close to half of the country violently opposed to them. That’s none of our business. Can you find joy? Replay the little film of Gus calling to his dad, “I love you,” and both of them in tears. Wow. The love between a father and a son with a disability, and that is what is put on the world stage? Holy crap! Who cares about someone on Facebook? Hang on to the joy. That’s our only strategy.

Okay, Didi says, “Question: I’ve noticed that my joy reappears after I feel deep grief. Does that make sense?” 

Yes. Because if you let yourself feel grief, it’s the integration of a loss in a way that allows the heart to grow back stronger where it was broken. And I really believe that’s the purpose of coming here where we suffer, so our hearts break and when they heal, they’re strong at the broken places. And then we feel love, peace, joy, freedom, and we can feel it more. The muscle of the heart has grown stronger. It can contain more of those things. Yeah, and that’s what the grief of life is about.

A couple more questions. Johna says, “Should we be intentionally beaming joy to other people when we’re in groups? Like with a family that doesn’t practice joy? Or is that turning joy into work?” 

Actually, this is one of the best strategies I’ve ever found, and I’ve taught it to a lot of people, and they’ve used it in everything from court cases to getting green cards to dealing with their little kids. I like to just drop in, do the Space, Silence, Stillness meditation, and then just say in your heart, “I love you and you love me.” You don’t have to say it out loud, just think it. I love you and you love me, I love you and you love me. And there’s joy. We love each other. Isn’t that joyful? And I’ve done this with really angry people who were literally attacking me in a witness chair, just sitting there thinking, “I love you and you love me,” and watched it affect them. I watched it affect them. I felt that I was an expert witness in a case and I felt that. And when I went out for a water break, the lawyer who had requested that I come serve said, “What kind of weird voodoo magic are you doing in there?” So he could feel it, and it was really quite a wonderful experience. So just sit there and think, “I love you and you love me. And sharing my joy makes it bigger. So I’m going to expand it to you so that I feel better.” And guess what? They’re going to feel better too. It’s amazing. It’s my only strategy.

Okay, two more. Gail says, “As an activist, how do I sound a rousing alarm about what might happen if a certain person is elected president without losing the connection to joy? How does fear-based motivation fit in?” 

Not fear-based, but I mean you can see the fear that people have, and if you react with real fear, you’ll go into fight-or-flight. You’ll attack or you’ll run. But let me read to you a phrase from a famous Black poet, Toi Derricotte, who said, “Joy is an act of resistance.” And that phrase has been used by activists to describe how joy can be a positive force for change and a defiant statement of existence. I love that. Joy is an act of resistance. You cannot take our joy, you cannot take our laughter, you cannot take the love we share. You cannot take our joy, even though you may try. So keep on feeling joy all the way through.

Finally, Calgary Blonde says, “Martha, I’m afraid of joy. I know I need it. I think I want it. How do I move toward joy, even though I’m afraid?” 

Basically, sit in the pain of no joy until you’re tired of it. Sit in the pain of conflict and attacking and pulling each other down until you’re just tired of it. Like I was sitting in that library carrel, scratching things into the wood and thinking, “Do I stay or do I go?” And then remembering the moment that I got to join these little angels singing Joan of Arc into heaven in 1972 and connecting us back into the Middle Ages. When I felt that beam of joy go from that very ancient event through that concert where I sang and into the moment when I was asking whether it was worth it to live, at that moment, my longing for joy exceeded my fear of rejoining life. And I would ask all of you who are in despair to hang in. I’d ask all of those of us who feel joy to share it with everybody on this broadcast and out in the world. Your joy will increase. There’s a chance we can lift others into joy. We’re going to enjoy it all the way.

Joy, joy, joy. It’s the only strategy. I love you all so much, and I will see you again on The Gathering Room. Bye for now.