10 Tips for Instant Joy

Feel Better Instantly: 10 Easy Tricks for Joy

First trick: Get out of your head and into your feet The body craves movement. Exercise really works. Let's not think of it as exercise though. Nothing is gnarlier to the depressed person than imagining him/herself at the gym in ill fitting sweats, panting on the stair master while svelte athletes are bopping around in all directions.
As Woody Allen says, 90% of success is showing up. Once we've got our walking shoes on, once we get endorphins cooking, the doldrums have less power to penetrate .

Second trick: Turn on music! Now!
I recommend that my clients have an arsenal of inspiring and fun music at their fingertips. I have even been known to make CD's for my clients. When we're depressed, the smallest task feels overwhelming. If I can kick-start someone's joy, then I am thrilled.

Third trick: Turn on the light and sit in the sun.
Many of us work in windowless cubicles or offices, and wonder why we feel blue. This time of year, when the sun sets earlier, we must 's dark out in autumn and winter, get a light, get some sun, get some more sun. And if there is no sun in your world, then buy a full-spectrum light.

Fourth trick: Hang out with 4-leggeds. (Unless of course, you're allergic) Having an animal companion near can instantly release oxytocin, that magical hormone that we secrete when we fall in love, give birth, or are nursing. It releases a feeling of goodwill, or trust in the world. OK, so not all of all are blessed to be in love all the time, or be breast feeding, so I recommend my clients find other ways to bring on the joy chemical. Read on.

Fifth trick: Change your thoughts. Right now. We have around 60,000.00 thoughts per day. 87% of them are negative and are the same thoughts we had yesterday. Experiencing joy is a deliberate choice. Joy takes practice. Joy is hardcore. I use realistic affirmations, which, at times are posted all over my room. Notice I said realistic.

We must remember that affirmations don't make something happen, they make something welcome. People tell me, "I put an affirmation up on my bedroom wall, saying: "I am ready to meet a gorgeous, successful, charming man who will adore and worship me." It's been 3 months. Where is he?" I tell them; "You have made yourself more open to meeting this human. Finding him is another story. Sorry."

Sixth Trick: Follow a joyous lifestyle. Choose joyous entertainment; find a class, a workout, anything that gets you in your body, preferably sweating a bit.

Seventh Trick: Affirm joy with words. 
Rudyard Kipling said "I am by calling a dealer in words. And words are by far the most powerful drug in the world". It may seem trite, but changing the way we speak can be extremely influential in changing our moods.

Eighth Trick: Grab hold of a goal. Make it a do-able one. Happiness and joy come from goals. We mustn't put off our lives.

Ninth Trick: Cultivate a relationship with the divine. 
We are whom our higher self wanted to experience. 
There is some truth to the pithy phrase: There's no aetheists in foxholes. Have a smidgens of faith and the world can be a gentler space.

Tenth Trick: Choose joyous companions. When we are depressed, we take our somber, sluggish selves wherever we go. It can be very . We need company. We need intimacy. It is very important to be around authentic people. We need someone who believes in us. No nay-sayers!

The 4 Tenets of Dance Your Bliss

There are 4 basic tenets in Dance Your Bliss. I invite my students to utilize these after our workshops:

1) Mindfulness; Yes, I know this is a big buzzword these days. Buy for good reason – it works. We need to slow down, take in in 3-biggest breaths of the day. Stop the fidgeting. So we work on being in awareness. This includes breath work, seated meditation, walking meditation, T'ai Chi, nature play, restart-making, guided imagery, prayer, ritual, intention setting.

2) Motion; we must remember to move the body every day, consciously, in ways that feel pleasurable.

the body excels at locating the present moment – there is no way to take a breath for yesterday or tomorrow. Mary Starks Whitehouse, creator of Authentic Movement, tells us; “the body is the personality on the physical level and movement is the personality made visible.” I ask all of my students and clients to find a physical activity that they enjoy. Not everyone loves to dance. And that is ok.

3) Connection; many of us are starved for contact. We need to spend more time around people and animals each day (not just our clients, which can be alienating). We must reach out and share intimate contact. This is crucial for us in a time when social media (I call it “anti-social media) is ubiquitous, and it can be easy to disconnect from others. But we have within us this deep, intrinsic hunger for connection. When we nourish that, we can be well again.

4) Creativity; I believe we are all creative geniuses. We just need the chance, and comfort to shine our light.) In the early 1960's in a lecture at the Cooper Union Hall in New York, Joseph Campbell was asked what you should if you are stuck in your life: “Follow your fascination, he immediately replied. Your fascination reveals your deepest connection to the life force; if you follow it rather than what society tells you you should follow, you will be all right.” By following what moves us, we grow in mind-blowing ways. Lately, I am obsessed with making terrariums and giving them away as gifts. These miniature and magical worlds are so whimsical and playful to me. It does not need to be high-art – but we must follow our bliss, and stoke the creative genius that I believe we all have.

I believe that if we can live with more of these elements, we can achieve more balance and health.

Here's you you. Your art. Your journey., Your dance.

Rachel Fleischman, LCSW, REAT is an experiential psychotherapist and workshop facilitator. She has a practice in San Francisco and leads workshops at retreat centers across the US and MX. DancingYourBliss.com BlissCounseling.com

Books:

Returning to Health with Dance, Movement and Imagery; Anna Halprin

Moving Toward Life; Five Decades of Transformational Dance; Anna Halprin

The Three Marriages; David Whyte

Film: Breath Made Visible (about the life and work of Anna Halprin)

The Expressive Body in Life, Art, and Therapy; Daria Halprin

Wisdom of the Body Moving; Linda Hartley

Bone, Breath and Gesture; Don Halon Johnson

Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology: The Moving Imagination; Joan Chodorow

Stoking the Creative Fires; Nine Ways to Rekindle Passion and Imagination; Phil Cousineau

Head n Neck Release - A Fabulous Stretch

Stress-Relieving Head 'n Neck Release

The neck separates the head from the heart; that's no easy feat. So many of us wear masks for most of the day; forcing smiles even when we feel blue, suppressing feeling, holding back authentic self-expression. We hold so much tension in our jaw, face and neck that a lot of us continue this during the night, grinding our teeth.


1. Take a moment and open your mouth and release your jaw; move it from side to side, let the mouth hang open, relax the face.

2. Let your eyes soften, and let the head roll slowly, effortlessly.

3. Think of your neck like a turtle's. The head needs to just rest on the neck, easily, with no jutting forward or back. As you make circles with the head let the jaw be completely slack.

Notice how great it feels to move in this way. If it doesn't feel great, tweak the stretch, shift it, make it yours, but always be gentle and kind as you move your head.

4. Now exaggerate the jaw; loosen it, make silly faces, yawn, stick your tongue out.

5. Find a partner and out-silly one another. Your face, neck, and jaw will thank you for it.

Get Blissiplined - Now!

“We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failures to grow anything beautiful from them. “ ~Alain De Botton

The author and poet Robert Bly says, “go where a man's wound is and that is where his greatest gifts lie”. He nailed it. As a creativity expert, I consistently see how we spend a great deal of time covering up our best parts, thinking them strange or unlovable. Tara Brach, the author of Radical Acceptance, calls our belief in being less-than, the “Trance of Unworthiness”. When we are so mired in our self-loathing, we are indeed in a trance, zoned out and believing the sadistic propaganda of the mind. Buddhist teacher and poet, Mark Nepo says: ”We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves.” I am here to teach you a few fun and easy ways to get ungloved, unmasked, and authentic. It all starts inside; in the body.

“There is a gem in the mountain of your body. Seek that mine.”

Rumi

Over the last two decades, I have found a place to take my feelings of unworthiness. And that place is the dance floor. I continue to study many movement forms including; authentic movement, dance therapy, Jungian Expressive Arts, modern dance, African dance, Qigong, contact improvisation. Very carefully, I have created a mindfulness-based healing system that uses dance and movement as it core. I call this system Dance Your Bliss. With it, we can be surprised again and again by where our work takes us and what kind of person we are becoming as we follow it. What can we really learn from our bodies? You might ask... I believe that the body serves as a metaphor for our entire life experience. Roberta was a 58 year-old woman who was very shy and disconnected from her body. She looked so uncomfortable the first day of our workshop that I expected her to leave. But she stuck around. By the close of the workshop, she was brimming with the new beginning that she had created. She not only could love herself – and her body so much more, she felt creative, expressive and alive. But this happens all the time.

In my work, I have danced with hundreds, possibly thousands of people, but I especially love leading those who do not see themselves as dancers, those who deeply want to feel beautiful in the home of their bodies. Becky emailed me several times before my weekend workshop, terrified she would be the “fattest person in the room.” She hadn't danced in years, and couldn't imagine moving in the much bigger body that she now lived in. She imagined the awful shame that the workshop might bring on. Instead, she was able to contact a level of beauty, confidence and sexiness that shocked her. I remember the beautiful expression on her face when she began moving. I could see the narrative in her changing, and by the end of the workshop, she was not only beautiful and more confident, she shared with me that she deeply wanted to lead this kind of work. And she is.

I have a keen and deeply intuitive ability to support and help heal those who are plagued by shame, especially body-related shame. Together, we create a new physical map and script for how they can and will live in these vessels. I love bearing witness to someone who felt stiff, disconnected from their body, leave a workshop with a whole new tool-kit of moves, stretches, and a new story about their body. When we move with authenticity, we can discover and re-cover our inner dancer and creative genius.

When I teach, I show my students a new way to be in – and possibly change and restore - their body's structure, so they can have a different way of experiencing, moving and acting. As my great teacher Daria Halprin says; “It is as if each body part, as well as the duets, choruses, and symphonies between and among the body parts, has a particular piece of a story to tell. Exploring part by part, we uncover and reveal a whole picture of our lives.” We are born on a dance floor called experience. Life is our partner. I support people in developing a new relationship with this ever-present magnificent and tragic partner. 

What do we do in Dance Your Bliss?

Dance Your Bliss employs a full range of the creative arts: movement/dance, drama, voice, painting, poetry and other forms of writing, ritual and performance. I use a blend of modern dance, gentle yoga, mindfulness meditation, contact improv, authentic movement and body-mind centering. I want everyone to find a new relationship with their body. There are so many wonderful, accessible movement forms for all of us. As you know, creating a free and protected space is crucial in the therapeutic relationship. Safety and freedom are two main ingredients in opening up creativity and the creation of the play space. The thrust of my workshops is to ignite the creative process in each person through the use of expressive techniques which bring on healing and growth.

Why not follow the path that is beckoning you? Why not acknowledge that yo are already on your way home. ~David Whyte, The Three Marriages

When we dance we can access preverbal experiences. When the unconscious leads, creative energy begins to flow back into our lives and balance the suffering of life with one's creative potential. My partner Ben loves to play Cricket. That is his bliss. (it doesn't have to be dance). For you it might be golf or swimming or lifting weights or T'ai Chi.  I ask my students to find what they love – that which gives them pleasure, and to do it. Every day.

There is a crack.
A crack in everything.
It's how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen

We have this built in, absolutely incredible gift –that we constantly forget about. We are housed in these wonderful bodies, that we spend far too much time judging, or downright hating. To be able to move our bodies is pure pleasure. If one is dealing with chronic pain, there are very gentle and extremely powerful tools. In any creative outlet we have permission to let down our masks. My hope is to create a safe space for people to journey to a more joyful self through dance. Using the 108 structures in Dance Your Bliss allows the whole body to be restored to a state of unity and balance. It is intended as a healing method and expressive arts system that connects us deeply and profoundly to life, each other, and the magic and power in every moment, even the “ordinary” ones. We fall in love with life. I say this as an extreme skeptic.

He who feel it, knows it more.

~Bob Marley