05: Do You Have Joy or Are You Joyful?

Why do some people stay grounded, open, and alive no matter what life throws at them… while others struggle to feel joy even when everything looks “fine”?

In this episode, you’ll explore the difference between experiencing joy as a fleeting feeling and cultivating joyfulness as a way of being. If you’ve ever found yourself chasing moments of happiness but still feeling inconsistent or depleted, this conversation will help you understand why. Joy isn’t just something that happens to you. It’s something you can learn to access and sustain.

Through powerful stories and simple practices, you’ll begin to see how joyfulness is built. Not through perfect circumstances, but through how you relate to your reality. You’ll be introduced to three dimensions of joy and a simple daily practice to help you shift from waiting for joy… to becoming someone who lives from it.

Chapters 

00:00 – Why some people stay joyful no matter what
01:09 – Joy as fuel, not escape
03:10 – The difference between joy and joyfulness
04:45 – The kaleidoscope lens
06:00 – Why joyful people experience more of life
07:04 – A lesson in joyfulness from Jane Goodall
11:42 – Choosing hope in the face of hardship
12:05 – A personal story of joyfulness in real life
16:48 – Finding light in heavy moments
19:03 – Reframing challenge into meaning
19:53 – The three dimensions of joy
21:57 – Joy as a response
22:57 – Joy as a practice
23:59 – Joy as a way of being
25:20 – A simple daily practice: beauty, breath, connection
28:56 – Moving from having joy to being joyful

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You’re not here to survive your life. You’re here to experience it.

This is your invitation.
This is your reclamation.
This is The Joyful Rebellion.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Why is it that some people seem joyful no matter what life throws at them, while others can't find joy even when everything's going right? I don't believe it's luck. I think it's a skill that everyone can learn. And I am keen to unpack this topic with you today. Welcome to the Joyful Rebellion, the space where we choose joy as our fuel, even when it feels unreasonable, so that we can respond from our deepest wisdom instead of reacting from overwhelm. Because joy isn't denial. Joy isn't an escape, it's a return to ourselves. Let joy be your power, let presence be your practice, let play be your way. Let's begin. This is episode five. If this is your first time here, I'm so glad you found your way, and thank you for your curiosity. If you're a returning listener, I'm grateful for your presence and continued support. And last episode, you may recall, we explored joy as a prerequisite and not as an outcome. And I was sharing how joy gave me capacity and not the other way around. How this micro moment of joy gave me the energy to actually create this podcast. And how Alisa Liu's joy returned first, and that made her Olympic gold possible. Today I want to explore that skill I mentioned, the ability to be joyful regardless of circumstances. Because I'm not doing in my transformational leadership work with driven impact-focused people. The ones who create the most meaningful impact, they have cultivated this quality, this way of being. So I'm pausing and asking you who in your life is or was a joyful person? Not someone who experiences joy occasionally, not someone who's happy when circumstances alike, but someone who is simply joyful as a way of being. Can you think of someone? I'm curious what makes them different. Because I'm gonna share about two teachers of joyfulness, two incredible women who showed me what that skill looks like in real time and space. And through their stories, I want to explore the difference between having joy and being joyful. And why that difference may be so important is because this is the most powerful choice we can make. So let's explore. First, I'm going to make a distinction. There's a difference between joy and joyfulness. Joy is a feeling, emotion, reaction, the moment when you taste something delicious, when you see something beautiful, when you connect deeply with someone. It is powerful, it's real, but it's also fleeting. It arises in response to something good happening. Joyfulness is a way of being, an attitude, a disposition. It's a lens through which you and I can see reality. And I like to think of it as a kaleidoscope. And when people ask me, what do I do for work? I say that I sell virtual kaleidoscope glasses. And you'll see why. So kaleidoscopes. You know those little tubes filled with colorful pieces. When you turn it, the same pieces reorganize into completely different patterns. That's joyfulness. That's not about having different pieces, different circumstances, different luck, different lives. It's about how you turn the kaleidoscope, how you reorganize the components of your reality into patterns that allow you to feel joyful. Everyone has the same basic elements: challenge, loss, beauty, connection, struggle, wonder, everything is the same. But the joyful people, they have this particular lens, this ability to reorganize those elements into patterns that actually fill them up instead of depleting them. And in my research, I noticed that joyful people seem to attract more joy, more opportunities, more people who are good to them, and more wealth and more health. It's not luck. And it's because joyfulness allows you to adapt faster, to utilize more of your own resources, your creativity, your resilience. You tap into your wisdom, into various forms of intelligence beyond just logic and cognition. Joyful gives you access to the intelligence of your heart, of your body, of your God, your connection to something bigger than yourself. Okay, I'm I'm realizing I'm getting ahead of myself because I'm so passionate about this. Let me tell you about these two teachers of joyfulness. The first is someone the whole world knows, someone I deeply respect. The amazing Jen Goodall. I still feel the ache, the heartache from her recent passing, past October at 91. And you may not immediately think of her as a joyful person. She was a serious scientist, an environmental activist fighting for a dying planet. She has witnessed so much environmental destruction, species going extinct, forests burning. I mean, she had all the reasons to be joyless. And as a graduate of biodiversity conservation, who is also very passionate about forests and habitat preservation, I understand the weight of what she's seen. The devastation, the urgency, the loss. And yet, watch her interviews. I had the honor to witness her humble presence at several climate and sustainability-related gatherings in San Francisco. Listen to her talk about chimpanzees, that unmatched passion and joy. There's this spontaneous childlike giggle. It's not perform, it's pure delight. And she did the this chim call even when she was in her 90s. I'm I'm going to play you a recording of her doing it at a conference.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Some of us could say good morning, and so on, but I can say that's good morning in chimpanzee.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

That's good morning in chimpanzee. Did you hear that? Yeah, that's joyfulness. That's a woman who spent over 60 years witnessing what could have destroyed her spirit. But her wonder never faded. She had that kaleidoscope lens. She took the same elements: climate crisis, habitat loss, species extinction, the urgency, and she reorganized them into reasons for hope. She really had this message her entire late life about hope, not despair. She also believed deeply that each of us make a meaningful difference and not to really doubt this ever. Jane famously described the forest as her temple and a cathedral of three canopies and dancing light. This poetic phrase highlights her deep spiritual connection to nature and her awe for the forest environment she studied. She found joy in the simple act of presence. Sitting with a chimp, watching Dawn in the forest, teaching one child to care. That's not joy as a response to good circumstances. That's joyfulness as a way of being, as a choice. A choice to see the unseen, to hear the unheard, and to feel the unfelt. Because when you're in that vibration of joyfulness, everything that's already around you, the aliveness, the beauty, the connection, they become accessible in a different way. Jane, she taught me that joyfulness isn't about what you're facing, it's about how you choose to reorganize what you're facing. But the person who really taught me what joyfulness looks like up close, and I'm becoming emotional here, that was my grandmother. Nana or Eugenia or Ajeta Mama, how some of her grandkids used to call her. She was uh a great spirit. She lived to be 88. She was the matriarch of our family. And she lived through things that should have broken her spirit. When when she was an adolescent, her family had everything confiscated by the revolutionaries. She grew up on this big, prosperous vineyard in Romania. And wine was so abundant there that they even washed their hands with it when their well got contaminated from oil explorations by the government. Then during retirement, she and my grandfather were forced to move out of their beautiful home in the heart of Brushov. And their beautiful home was demolished to make way for a civic center. Those ugly, alike-looking condo buildings. No choice, no compensation. Beautiful replaced with Soviet-style concrete uniformity. Then in her early 80s or late 70s, things are blurry, she went through chemotherapy. It took a huge toll on her frail body. But she kept her elegance, her lipstick, her way. I recall as a child, I loved to open her closet and smell the little perfume bottles she kept and various lipsticks. She had this way about herself. And even through chemo, after losing her home and the vineyard and all the things and all the belongings, her trust remained steady. Her belief, her optimism. She was the one who actually encouraged me to follow my heart, to be courageous, to travel and learn about the beauty and the essence of the world and myself through being curious. She didn't have the means to travel much during her time in the communist regime. So, in a way, I got to fulfill this dream. Living and working on four continents. By the age of 40, her unlived adventures became mine. And my siblings and my cousins, they also have this traveling bag. So I think collectively we all fulfilled her desires. But the moment I want to tell you about, the moment that really showed me why joyfulness really is, happened one Easter. That year, I was traveling from Australia to Transylvania to celebrate Easter with family. For us, Easter has an even stronger meaning than Christmas. Because after months of heavy winter, it's the victory of light over darkness. Even in our less flerigious family, Easter was beloved. So it was the Easter, the evening before Easter Sunday. And we were all at my parents in a little village, and I remember we were all a bit down. One of my family members was facing serious medical concerns, and the atmosphere was heavy. And during the evening, a shepherd who was a dear neighbor of ours brought us fresh ricotta cheese, urda, still warm from the day. It was pure delight, especially that Easter was quite early, so the sheep weren't producing that much milk yet. And my grandma, frail from chemo, and feeling the heavy energy from everybody else, still found a moment to find a crack where light comes in. She said, Come, we are gonna make pasca. Pasca is this traditional Easter cake: ricotta cheese, raisins, rum. It takes a few hours and it was already late. I recall that indoor oven was occupied with the traditional lamb dish. And in Europe we only have one oven, not multiple American sizes. So we went outside to the summer oven. We stood outdoors a few good hours, meeting the dough, mixing, chatting. She was a remarkable cook and dancer. I still have those vivid memories of her dancing at big family events, the Greek Sirtaki or the Hungarian Chardash. She had so much passion and pride. I want to believe I inherited some of her jeans when I do my dances. So back to the baking process. To make sure that we were blessing the cake and that the pasca turned out just right, we shared some Romanian spritz. Now, don't think about the Italian spritz because it wasn't that fancy version. It was just white wine mixed with mineral water. She absolutely loved that. We stood there, as I said, several hours and drinking wine and water, our hands covered in dough, making something beautiful together while the world felt heavy. And that, my friends, is the kaleidoscope lens. The same elements, the medical crisis, her frail body recovering from chemo, the worry about aging. She reorganized it all. Worm ricotta became delight, worry became creating. And the cool evening became actually a blessing. Scarcity became abundance. Because when you grow up washing your hands with wine, you know how to find richness even when you've lost almost everything. And that's not joy as a response, that's joyfulness as a way of being. That's choosing light over darkness every single day for 88 years. That was and always will be my nana. So let me take a breath and connect these two stories to something that I've discovered about how joy works. I've noticed that joy and the cultivation of joyfulness happens in three dimensions, or layers, or spheres. They actually represent the journey from sporadic to recurring, consistent access to recognizing aliveness as your natural state. You may recall if you listen to episode one, when I said that aliveness is like electricity running through your house. It's always there, it's constant. Joy is what happens when you flip the switch and the light comes on. And these three dimensions, they are about moving from lights that are sparking randomly to learning how to flip the switch yourself to recognizing that electricity was always flowing. So the first dimension of joy as a response. This is when something happens and joy just arises. You don't create it, it happens to you. That moment with Nana Worm Urda, you know, the Jane sitting uh with the chim in the forest. I tasting the oysters with the garlic that you may recall from the last episode, or smelling the redwoods, or joy just shows up. These are those grace moments, the beautiful moments, pure beauty. But you can't control when they come. It's like you only may experience joy when the circumstances align. Then joy is at the mercy of external events. Are you with me? And that's exhausting when you're at the mercy of external events. Now, the second dimension, a joy as a practice, is where we start to really have agency. This is where we learn to flip the switch ourselves. Instead of waiting for joy to arise spontaneously, we learn to activate our aliveness intentionally. And that is what Nana did when she mobilized me to make Pasca despite her exhaustion and worry. It's about choosing to create light. And that's what Jane did whenever she shared those reasons for hope, despite witnessing so much devastation. It's about choosing to reorganize despair into possibility. And this isn't about forcing yourself to feel happy. It's about creating conditions for aliveness to flow. And when aliveness flows, joy emerges naturally. This dimension, joy as practice, this is the bridge. It's how you move from a Occasional sporadic experiences to joy as consistent cultivated joyfulness. This is where you, as I said, develop the agency, the capability to generate it on demand, where you stop being at the mercy of circumstances and start generating your own fuel. And finally, the third dimension, joy as the state of being, this is when you've practiced enough that you start to realize something rather profound. That the energy and the electricity was always here. Aliveness is actually your natural state. Joyfulness is who you are. It's that return to yourself. It's not just how you feel occasionally. At this level, joy isn't something you do or something that happens to you. It's something you are. It's your natural frequency, and it's a pretty high frequency. When you're not performing, not proving, not trying to be anyone else but who you already are. This doesn't mean you're happy at all times. I presume James still grieved the forest. Nana still felt the toll of the chemo. But underneath these emotions, there's a baseline of joyfulness, an orientation towards life, a sense of being rooted in your own aliveness. You approach challenges with curiosity instead of dread. You find moments of beauty even in difficulty. You maintain this connection to wonder. And now that I've explained the three dimensions, hopefully you got something out of uh what I just shared. And we are shifting into a little practice, a tiny practice. If you are a returning listener, you already know that here we don't just talk about things, but we truly practice cultivating joyfulness. And the practice I chose may seem ridiculously simple given what we uh just discussed, and that's intentional. We are not trying to force anything, we are just creating the right conditions right now. Wherever you are, I invite you to notice three things. First, notice something beautiful. Could be anything, could be light, could be color, could be texture, a sound, something you haven't paid attention before. And if nothing comes your way, that's information too. Just notice that and seek again. What beauty does show up for you right now? That's using your conscious intelligence, your attention, the kaleidoscope lens, reorganizing what's here. Second, I invite you to take your deepest breath you've taken all day. Feel your lungs completely, fold it, and let it go with the sound. What intelligence did we use right now? We use the intelligence of the body, moving life force energy, creating conditions for aliveness to flow. And now the third thing, think of someone who makes you feel joyful. Picture their face. Feel that connection. And if no one comes to mind now, that's okay. Just notice with curiosity, not with judgment. That's using the intelligence of your heart. Joy amplified through connection. That's it. These three simple things: attention, breath, connection. That's how you practice. That's how you create the conditions for joy to emerge. Not by forcing it, but by tending to what's already here. Do this once a day. Three things. Beauty, breath, connection. That's how you move from having joy occasionally to being joyful more consistently. And as we wrap up, I would like you to remember that joy is a feeling that comes and goes. Joyfulness is a way of being we can cultivate. It's that kaleidoscope lens, reorganizing the same elements, challenge, beauty, loss, connection, wonder into patterns that fill you up instead of depleting you. I am learning every day. I'm turning the kaleidoscope. I practice it daily. And when I think I'm there, life throws at me new invitations. So my friend, it's always about the practice. And this is where you get the tools.com where you can find the details for the free workshop Become Fully Alive. If you resonate with what we talk about, make sure to follow so that you don't miss the next episode, where we are actually going to explore ways to actually practice joyfulness. We are gonna look at four specific practices that you may be surprised about. I'm not gonna disclose much more. I'm gonna say, don't forget to choose beauty, breath, and connection. And see you next time. I'm Monica Pandele. This is Joyful Rebellion. Stay alive.