Why "Just Choose Joy" Never Sticks

spilling the tea on the reason our good intentions don’t survive the day & what works instead

Hello, beautiful humans of Substack. I hope you’re abundantly well today!

I did not plan on recording anything today, and I am squeezing this in before my Full Light circle in half an hour, because something happened in the car ride to school this morning with my daughter that I really felt called to give a voice to.

So we’ll rewind back a couple of hours into my morning. We’re going about our nice little car ride to school, my daughter’s sharing her very vivid dream from last night, we’re unpacking the subconscious meaning of it, which is just a fairly normal morning around here… maybe it is in your family too. Then we’re getting close to school and she completely pivots on me and comes out with this zinger of why do women stay in unhealthy relationships.

Whew. Okay. This is all pre 8 a.m.

I think it’s coming from a book she’s reading, and I’m going to need to unpack a little bit of that later. We were closing in on the school at that point, so I gave her the quick version, which is that we often choose the familiar because it feels safer. She got out of the car and hopped on her way and her question stayed with me all morning. So now we’re at eleven thirty and I’m going to share my reflections with you.

I guess I’d start by saying I don’t think this question is really about relationships at all. I think the question is about patterns, about why the familiar thing feels so much like home, this comfy cozy pattern, even when the familiar thing might be hurting us and why another choice can feel strange and far away.

The timing of this is interesting too, that it’s coming up in Venus retrograde, because this is a great time to go into the underworld and look at our patterns and the stories we’ve been playing out. Of course this is now going to be the theme for our circle at noon today, because when we are individuals who are wired for beautiful, abundant, fantastic, juicy lives, we often have to say goodbye to old patterns and it’s really fucking hard.

The truth is, our body would rather run an old program than run no program at all.

These patterns we have are cheap, they cost nothing to repeat and a brand new one costs a ton of energy and attention and effort. I’m not going to pretend it’s easy to shift a pattern. They are possible to shift. Our natural default state is to reach for the familiar groove because it saves us the work, even when that groove is worry, even if it’s the exact same fear we woke up with yesterday and the day before and maybe even our entire adult lives. That’s the wiring and there’s nothing wrong with any of us. It’s comfortable to choose these patterns.

If you’ve been hanging around in some of the spaces I hang around in, you may have heard the phrase that neurons that fire together wire together. It’s a big Dr. Joe Dispenza phrase and it actually comes from a psychologist named Donald Hebb, who started writing about this back in the 1940s. The concept has held up really well because it helps us understand that these patterns really are just a sequence running in our brains. They’re smooth and fast and automatic and when we repeat them they get faster and faster and faster and the path wears in, until eventually the pattern runs without you even asking it to. It’s kind of like when you’re driving a familiar route, like our car ride to school and sometimes you have no memory of the drive because you were on autopilot. That’s sort of what’s happening with these patterns in our brain.

On top of that, our nervous system is really good at memorizing whatever we give it to practice.

Hmm, yeah.

Our nervous systems will memorize a pattern of contraction just as faithfully as they will memorize a pattern of light. They don’t judge what we hand them, they just record the repetition.

So this morning when my daughter asked me why a woman stays, sure, that brings up a lot of feelings for so many of us. Leaving is asking a body to stop running a program it has run 10,000 times and to run an unfamiliar one instead, often from a state of exhaustion, frightened, doubting ourselves. That’s a big fucking ask.

Staying has a lot more to do with physics than it has to do with being weak.

There’s a version of this story I’ll tell my daughter someday when she’s old enough to hear it, about why I overstayed in an unhealthy relationship with her father while he was in the depths of addiction. Let’s just say I know this pattern well.

I know the comfort of staying.

I know I overstayed maybe a tiny bit in my corporate job too, though thankfully I’d gotten some repetitions in before that and knew by that time that I was creating a new pattern. Staying is comfortable because we know that path. For those of us who might be recovering people pleasers and I have a particular talent for that, we’re really good at making situations work long past the point that they’re working.

Feeling you, any recovering people pleasers out there today. 🙋‍♀️

So why can’t we just say I’m going to choose joy? I’m going to choose to be joyful today. Or choose an affirmation. I am joy, I am joyful, I am abundant.

We might wake up in that state, but often if we say a nice little affirmation in the mirror in the morning, it’s long gone by lunchtime.

I get it. We believe we can decide our way into a new feeling. We can say it out loud, I am choosing to feel abundant, today I’m going to trust myself and we mean it completely in the moment we say it. I’m not making fun of any of this, because I’ve done it in journals, in my car, at the start of many a January. It has not worked for me, and I’m going to tell you what I do instead.

When we really intentionally want to create a new pattern, we want it to last past lunch.

What I have learned is that our bodies reorganize around repetition.

We can’t just say I’m choosing to be abundant today and feel that new feeling once, because the old feeling has been practiced 10,000 times and the old one is always going to win in that scenario. We get to practice with repetitions and we build the new feeling the same way the old one got built, because the old one got built by repetitions too. We just might not have been conscious of those repetitions.

This is what we do when we take these Light Rides™. We drop into the heart and we deliberately call the light forward, laying down new patterns on purpose, incredibly intentional, handing the body a coherent signal to memorize instead of leaving it to rerun the past on its own.

I always think of the mind like a library of books of our past. When we go into the heart space, we access all these new possibilities, new patterns. Then at the end of the Light Ride™ we ride back up into the mind and we inform it. We teach the mind. We say, hey, we learned something new and we’re going to take action on that something new. The more we practice the state, the more the body learns the shape of it, until one day we start running it on its own. That’s our light becoming automatic. That’s self-trust becoming a reflex instead of a decision you have to make every single morning.

I’ve seen so much evidence of this, because I’ve been working with some of the same women for years now. We’ve been in circle together taking these Light Rides™ and I’ve had the beautiful opportunity to witness lives radically shift, radically transform, and mine has too amid it all.

I do think when you do this with other women it is exceptionally powerful, because you realize that some of these patterns you’ve been running are more collective patterns than individual patterns and there’s a power in breaking them together.

Hmm. Okay, let’s see. Where should we go from here?

Let’s talk about the retrograde we’re in for a minute, this Venus retrograde. We are descending into the underworld. I know that sounds scary and yucky… it’s actually a great time to look at our patterns. We have about nine days left, because on October 23rd Venus meets the sun and is reborn and then for the next 20 days of this Venus retrograde we get to ascend back up in this new pattern. So I think this is a really timely conversation that my daughter was bringing forth in the car. We can repattern anytime and this is a particularly juicy juicy window to work with our old patterns.

I get it. It is scary to change. It is scary to build new patterns, because with the old ones at least we know what we get. It is also scary to live a half life. It is also scary to be happy some of the time and call that the deal.

So let me leave you with a little mini practice. I will always invite you into joining the Full Light circle or taking the Light Ride™ subscription here on Substack, because it is what I believe in and I believe these repetitions make radical changes in our lives. For today though, one little baby practice you can do.

Take 60 seconds and hold your hand on your heart. I invite you to call forth the light, however it comes to you, maybe a warmth or a glow or a color, maybe even a small little sun in the middle of your heart space. Then I invite you to pick one feeling you want your body to learn. Maybe it’s trust, or peace, or joy, or being whole. Let that feeling fill you the way the light fills you and hold it for one full minute.

It’s different when we call forth and inform these patterns in a field of light, because our body speaks in light and feeling and thought and radiation. So when we really feel peace in our hearts, or abundance, or whatever you’re calling for, we start that rewiring.

If you want to go deeper, try it for 30 days, or for 60 days, this little baby practice. If you want to go deeper still, join me for a Light Ride™. It takes us out of the busy mind and into the stargate of our hearts, into this still place, this zero point. It’s a really magical place and what makes it life changing is that we bring what we learn in that heart space back up, we inform our minds, we take action and we create new patterns.

So do what you can. Maybe you learn something new today.

Maybe as another way to practice this in your daily life, if you’re going out for a walk, take a new path. I think sometimes when we reinforce that into our bodies, that hey, it’s safe, it’s safe to walk a different way, we build a little more trust to make some of these bigger changes.

I’m sending you so much love and I am going into circle now.

Trust your light, because what lights you up lights up the world.

xo,

K 💖