Your Joyful, Amazing Life

We were traveling back to Vancouver Island via BC Ferry this week when I looked up and saw the stunning cityscape of Vancouver. I had to take a picture so I took 4 shots of the same skyline. When I looked at them only one had what looked like the outline of a large whale in the ocean right in front of the city. I was suddenly moved and really happy. (Sorry for the blurry picture.) It was a moment of pure happiness because I saw and felt something that touched my soul. I was joyful for a moment and I certainly was not joyful before that. My husband and I had been up at 3:30am to catch the first ferry over to Vancouver for an important appointment and were traveling back home on the 6:15pm sailing so we were quite tired. I wondered if this is the way most people experience joy. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.

I say, from the experiences I’ve had, that it is a state of bliss packed into a short period of time. Ingrid Fetell Lee’s Ted Talk on Joy is enlightening and beautifully stated:

Joy is the soul of happiness. Like pleasure, it can express itself through the body, but it is not of the body. Like satisfaction, it can be felt emotionally and appreciated mentally, but it is so much more than just an emotion or a state of mind.

It's different than happiness, which measures how good we feel over time. Joy is about feeling good in the moment, right now. …as a culture, we are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, and yet in the process, we kind of overlook joy. …

Ingrid Fetell Lee, “Transcript,” in Where Joy Hides and How to Find It (TED Talks, 2018), https://www.ted.com/talks/ingrid_fetell_lee_where_joy_hides_and_how_to_find_it?language=en.

We kind of forget about joy, don’t we. Other words associated with joy are happiness and bliss. I turned to author Sean Meshorer who wrote "The Bliss Experiment". He says,

Happiness, to some extent, requires action on our part. Bliss, on the other hand, is a state of being. Accessing the bliss within us requires nonaction, of learning how to be rather than to do. It is about stripping away all that is not bliss.

Meshorer, Sean. The Bliss Experiment: 28 Days to Personal Transformation (p. 28). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

What about joy and bliss? Sean explains that, too. “Bliss is the innate state of joy”

meaning it’s “natural” or something we’re born with. So is a bliss state a prolonged period of joy? Sean also says bliss is “what’s left after everything fleeting and external has disappeared”. Could it be that joy is another step, possibly after happiness, on our way to achieving a blissful state? Where does joy fit in?

Perhaps where we are in our journey to joy is a factor that needs to be explored. I experienced something akin to bliss and joy some years ago. I was preparing a flute solo for my final Graduation Ceremony toward a Bachelor of Music degree. Every performance major had to do a solo and the music faculty judged who would receive the honor of playing their solo on Graduation Day. I prepared well and had progressed to the point where I could concentrate on communicating the essence of the music instead of memorizing notes. In this state, I would say a soloist and their accompanist can play together as one entity exploring nuances and expression. That’s hard work and not even close to bliss.

The day came and I played like I’ve never played before. When the last note sounded, the whole auditorium paused like it had been holding its collective breath. All present in the concert hall had been transported to a place that transcended time. The accompanist and I were frozen in place for a second, his hands slightly lifted off the beautiful ivories of the grand piano, my flute still suspended in the air. I described that shared state as being suspended in pure bliss. Joy came when I stepped out of the auditorium with an upwelling of pure emotion. I knew I had won whatever decision the faculty made. I won the joy of accomplishment, the joy of achieving my highest goal–the ability to play in such a way as to elevate the experience of the music into a transcendent state shared between all those present in the room. My skin was alive with goosebumps.

There was another, longer period of time after a particularly vivid dream that I experienced bliss. It lasted for hours. Today as a much more conscious being, I experience joy when a hummingbird hovers and looks at me, or when I see something unexpected and uplifting, like a solitary heart-shaped leaf in the middle of the path. They are moments that instantly take me away into joy.

I experience happiness doing something visually to help define what is waiting to be created. A blank screen is like my very own canvas where images come forth and with those images come words. I often go to CANVA for visual creative inspiration when I’m writing my blog. I found a slideshow video made in 2022 when I was exploring another business venture I called “Designed Pages”. Creating monthly planners for myself was a labor of love, and the result was so much better than any I could purchase, so I thought others would love them, too. When I did the research, though, this kind of product wasn’t feasible as a business for me, so the video just sat there.

When I played that video again over a year later, I was completely blown away by how similar the concept was between the first business and the book I wrote. The text of that video was written before I started writing about soul and consciousness. The words I wrote and the images I used were exactly what my book was all about. That experience I would say made me feel happy.

When you look back after a breakthrough of any kind, you realize there were clues and dots that were connecting but didn't see as you were searching. We often don't get the understanding of our path or journey until we arrive at a certain point and reflect back. Here’s the text of that video now on my website:

Visioning your Self. You’re planning your day and dreaming of your future. You're accessing the light of your soul to be your authentic self. Imagine having tools that help you design your best day. And those days are your joyful, amazing Life. From Carlssen.com Home Page

When I wrote “Your Joyful, Amazing Life”, the feeling of that title today instantly reflected the joy I had experienced at that performance years ago. At the same time, I knew with certainty there was more, much, much more. It was like a glimpse through a funnel from the smallest end before it disappeared.

So envisioning my future, am I on my way to achieving a bliss-like state and is experiencing joy the precursor to that state? I’m happy I have joyful moments and that I have experienced, and no doubt will experience, states of bliss in the future. In the meantime, the doing and the being are living simultaneously in me.

“If you really love what you’re doing, then you’ve found a way to blend the promise of future rewards with the immediate experience of joy in the present. This is increasingly rare. Too often our goals turn against us, becoming a cruel taskmaster, robbing us of the present moment.”

Meshorer, Sean. The Bliss Experiment: 28 Days to Personal Transformation (p. 113). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

I take Sean’s words seriously. In our pursuit of future milestones and deciding how to get there via goals, we can forget about the present moment. That’s where the bliss funnel starts and “stripping away all that is not bliss” is where we must visit to thrive.