Practices for Finding More Joy Now [Episode #515]

Today’s solocast topic is: Practices for Finding More Joy Now

There’s so much going on in the world and to me joy is deeper than happiness. It is more sustained and sustainable when we start to open up to it and anchor to it. 

It’s something that isn’t dependent on outside sources so much as happiness, which can I think be a bit more fleeting. 

I’m excited to get into our topic today and share some of my personal practices in building that joy in my life.

Topics Covered In Practices for Finding More Joy Now

#1. Making your own raw almond milk

#2. Ways to simplify your life

#3. Practicing meditation 

#4. Joy in, joy out and what this means

#5. Using color in your clothes

#6. Practice making everyday routines celebrations

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:01 Hey Beauties, welcome back to our Monday solocast podcast, where our topic today is Practices for Finding More Joy Now. And I think this is a really important podcast right now because there’s so much going on in the world and to me joy is deeper than happiness. It is more sustained and sustainable when we start to open up to it and anchor to it. It’s something that isn’t dependent on outside sources so much as happiness, which can I think be a bit more fleeting. I’m excited to get into our topic today and share some of my personal practices in building that joy in my life.

Fan of the Week

Kimberly: 00:49 Before we dive in I want to give a quick shout out to our fan of the week, and his or her name is woodberryroland, I love it. My grandfather’s name was actually Roland. Anyways, he or she writes, “I sincerely believe that Kimberly Snyder is the expert on everything with health. Her podcast, books, supplements, yoga, and meditations are all truly life-changing. I had major health issues at a young age, trying every other diet and theory out there. Kimberly is the only one who could change my life, bring me back to whole body health and give me a way to live the rest of my life. I listen to every podcast and I recommend it to everyone. Thank you, Kimberly and team.”

Kimberly: 01:32 Wow, woodberryroland, I actually started to tear up a little bit at your beautiful review, thank you so much. I am so happy to hear about the improvement to your health and your energy and your body. And it makes me so happy and that’s really why I do this podcast and why I do the work that I do, to share what’s helped me and because I think we’re all part of oneness and one community. Again, Woodberry Roland, thank you so much for brightening my day and I love you.

Leave a Review and Subscribe on Itunes

Kimberly: 02:08 And Beauties for your chance to also be shouted out as the fan of the week, please just take a moment or two and please leave us a review on iTunes, which is free and easy and just a great way to support and give some love back, so I thank you so much in advance. You can also please be sure to subscribe to our podcast and that way you don’t miss out on any of these shows including our Thursday Q and A community show as well.

Solocast

Kimberly: 02:36 All right, so all of that being said let’s get into some of these practices for finding more joy now. And again, let me just break this down a little bit. Practices are a really important part of expansion and improvement, I think. Practices to me it’s more than habits, right? Habits just feel like things that you do that you may or may not be conscious of but it just feels a little bit more, I don’t know, humdrum, there’s a little bit of obligation thrown in there maybe or bad habits can have addiction.

Kimberly: 03:24 Good habits is a term but I really like the term practices. It feels, I don’t know, it feels yogic to me, it feels a bit mystical, it feels like a magical ritual that we can make part of our everyday lives. That’s how I really want to approach this topic, which is just thinking about how can we bring in more magic in simple, everyday little things that we do but that can really elevate this joy. Let’s define that next.

Kimberly: 03:58 I talked about it a little bit in the intro but happiness, there’s so many different movies and documentaries and books and all sorts of things about happiness, I think people look at it in different ways. But for me I use it in a way like I’m so happy that you called, I’m so happy to hear that you’re doing well, things like that, a little bit more attached to an actual outcome or an event or something that has transpired. Versus joy which is a very spiritual word, it’s a word that great yogis like Paramahansa Yogananda use a lot. Joy is bliss, joy feels ever new and it feels independent of outer circumstances.

Kimberly: 04:59 What we want to do with joy is we want to anchor into it. I think that joy and love and peace are our natural states of being as sparks of consciousness, the divine God, whatever word you want to use, these are our natural qualities. And what we want to do is we want to tap into these through these practices which we will explore in all four cornerstones, food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth, and we want to build it from the inside out. Like everything else we’ve build our beauty from the inside out, it can’t just be painted on. We want to build that magnetism and that glow, that health, that vitality that oozes out of you in true beauty and your energy being connected to yourself, being loving, being kind, being compassionate and passionate. These are all qualities of true beauty.

Kimberly: 05:52 And finally, the last word in our title is now. And our power is now. We hear this term a lot in different spiritual traditions, especially in Buddhism. This idea of the eternal now and being here moment-to-moment instead of worried about the future or over-analyzing the past, we want to be here now. And this is our point of power when we can start to really take control and make a big difference in our lives as we consciously choose to. Let’s get into it now.

Kimberly: 06:26 I scripted this out just before this podcast, the solocast, I actually sat down and sat with myself and Baby Moses, who is asleep on my lap right now. And I just thought about or I felt into rather, some of the things that I don’t always talk about. Some things I do talk about some things I don’t always talk about, but ways that I connect, how I build joy in my life. And again, they’re across all Four Cornerstones.

Practice #1: Make raw almond milk

Kimberly: 06:58 The first practice is to make raw almond milk. I wanted to start with a food one here because joy, we’re going to talk a lot about the spiritual cornerstone but again, everything that we look at in life can be approached from this holistic perspective. Food is what we put into our body and food helps to build our vibration and it affects us on a cellular level.

Kimberly: 07:27 It affects our prana, which is our life force energy. And it’s important that we put in foods into our body that are helpful and enjoy. So think about the qualities of joy. Joy is lightness, there’s a freshness to joy I would say. We don’t feel rigid or bitter or resentful, but again, there’s this lightness and this carefreeness and just this feeling to me that we easily let go and we let this freshness come in and there’s nothing that’s stagnant.

Kimberly: 08:11 The reason I love raw almond milk is I go back more and more to my yogic roots and the yogic scriptures and the teachings. And one of the highest prana foods according to many yogis is almonds. Almonds are considered very sattvic, which means rather than being rajasic which is overactive or tamasic, which is can induce slothfulness and sort of… Just like a degeneration… native… degenerative quality, sattvic is when we’re really balanced and aligned.

Kimberly: 08:50 And it’s nurturing without being overstimulating. So almonds are a very, very sattvic food. And of course from a Western perspective they’re full of minerals like calcium and vitamin E and just so many amazing, wonderful nutrients that really nourish your body. When we make raw almond milk there’s a couple of things at play. We’re taking the almonds and soaking them… And by the way, instructions for making the almond milk are over at mysolluna.com. If you want to see a video or see this written out I believe both of them should be over there. A little cry from Baby Moses.

Kimberly: 00:01 But besides the actual nutrients in almonds, when you make raw almond milk, you are connecting to self-care in such a different way because raw almond milk involves blending the almonds with water and then straining it through a nut milk bag, which by the way, you can get online for a couple of bucks. You get a nice organic bag somewhere since you probably aren’t going to many stores, but you can get one online for a couple dollars, and there’s this squeezing this energy, this putting into your own energy. So it’s like you’re putting energy into it and it’s going back into your own energy, so it really feels like such an amazing form of self-care to me and you’re nurturing your body in this deep way, which is going to inspire lightness through your body. It’s going to help cleanse your system. It’s such a… just a powerful, wonderful food.

Kimberly: 01:00 It’s completely different than getting store-bought almond milk, which I have done also when we’re in a pinch. But if you can make raw almond milk for just a few moments every day, or every other day, which is generally what I do, just makes a world of difference. When you’re having your power protein smoothie and you know that you’ve pressed that milk for yourself, it’s powerful. It’s a high Prana food, like I said, and I noticed an enormous difference in my life.

Kimberly: 01:25 I really got back into it since having Moses and, just again, really taking a deep dive in my 40 day sadhana, my 40 day postpartum period, where I was doing a lot of different yogic practices. I went back into the raw almond milk because I was reading again about the Prana and the energy of almonds, and I trust so much with the great yogis say, like Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Sri Yukteswar, Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya. There’s these amazing yogis with channeled wisdom. And so, again, I think that for me, it feels good. We can read studies and we can see the research about almonds versus walnuts, or different ones, but this is the layer of these spiritual teachers telling us that. Now, I know there’s different concerns about almonds and water and the environment and my answer to that is, yes, I acknowledge that there is a concern there, but I will say that everything is in balance. And you can certainly rotate your milks, so you don’t have to make almond milk all the time.

Kimberly: 02:49 Also, I just feel that being plant-based, as I have been now for over 12 years, or saving water in a lot of different ways, I think there’s different things to focus on. But because I don’t eat any fish, or chicken, or eggs, or meat, or any of… especially the meat, is a very water-intensive process to feed the cows and to water the crops that they end up eating, I just feel like if you look at your life overall, sometimes you balance and you make choices. And you want to make sure that you’re definitely doing your part, and the sum total is as positive as possible for the planet and for everyone. So, that’s how I look at it. And of course, it’s up to you how often you want to make almond milk, or if you do, but for me, that’s a practice that I feel very connected to.

Practice #2: Simplifying your life

Kimberly: 03:45 So, my second practice right now for you is to simplify your life. Now, even with COVID, it seems like, “Oh, well, things are simplified because I’m not going as out as much,” and blah, blah, blah, but you and I both know that even in our own homes, we can bring in a lot through media, through social media, through our screen time. We can just still try to do a lot of what we were doing, but maybe remotely and I just think it’s a great time to let go of certain things. I’ll give you a very simple example.

Kimberly: 04:29 I am one of those people that traditionally has always liked to have my toenails painted. I just feel like… I don’t know… it’s something that I’ve always done and I do use non-toxic polishes like Zoya, I like a lot. It tends to not chip, even though it’s a very natural nail polish. I believe it’s 7-free or 10-free of the big nail polish toxins. But since, for a couple of months now, I just let it go and first I was a little self-conscious. I was like, “Oh,” it’s like, “How many people are seeing me anyway?” But I see myself and it’s nice to feel pretty for your husband. I don’t know. Sometimes it gets into pictures on social media and stuff, my feet do or hands, but it feels so good just to let it go. I don’t have to paint my nails or my toenails right now. So these are just examples of simplifying.

Kimberly: 05:28 Another thing in the beginning of COVID as well, I was just getting back into a little bit more recipes and experimentation, and that felt good to me then. But right now, it feels really good to me to simply cook different dishes and to put them together in a bowl. So today, for instance, for dinner, I had sprouted brown rice; I had a huge amount of lightly sauteed kale; I had a bunch of sprouts and microgreens. That was my raw component. And then I… What else did I put in there? Oh, then there was a little bit of some cooked black beans because Bobby really likes them. So that was my symbol little bowl and each of them were cooked separately. I just put a little bit of salt and pepper and minimal spices.

Kimberly: 06:27 So I was sitting down and I realized, “Holy crap! My food has gotten so simple,” and it feels really, really good to me right now. I just think that simplicity is a way to find joy because complications just take our energy away. And again, when we think about the attributes of joy, there’s a lightness there and so we don’t want to feel bogged down. We don’t want to feel like our energy’s being tied up in things that we may not want to be doing. Now, you could be listening to this and say, “Oh, but I find great joy in cooking and following the recipes; I find it very relaxing.” Well, that’s wonderful.

Kimberly: 07:07 I’m just using examples of how I simplify my life, so if it’s not in the food department for you, think about how you can simplify your emails, your makeup routine. There’s just a million ways to simplify. I’m going a little bit play right now on the examples, but just think about simplicity. Think about scaling back. Think about cutting out anything that feels extraneous, feels like it’s taking up energy and it’s not really serving you back, and I think that’s really powerful.

Practice #3:Practicing meditation

Kimberly: 07:49 Thirdly, third, a very important practice is to meditate more. Now, real joy is found within. Real joy is inside of you; it’s not outside of you. So when we rely on things to constantly try to make us feel something, that’s more happiness. Like, “I’m so happy to get this beautiful new blue sweater. I’m feeling so happy today because I got this amazing, amazing new skateboard,” or whatever it is. There’s nothing wrong with that. Happiness is a wonderful part of life too. But again, joy is deeper and sustains us through tough times. We know right now, again, there’s just a lot going on in the world, so we want to anchor into that joy inside of us.

Kimberly: 08:41 What happens is if you start your meditation practice and you get going, you may find that, “Wow! This is hard at first. It’s hard to sit and I just keep thinking about different things and it doesn’t feel like I’m going deep.” But you start to go deeper and deeper, the more you sit and you practice. And then, the next thing that happens is you start to find that stillness. And then, next thing that happens after that is you start to look forward to that stillness; you start to relax into it. And then eventually, out of that, stillness, you start to feel the joy bubble up in your heart; it starts to come out from inside of you, and it’s something that I’ve experienced personally. I think it’s maybe the most important use of our time really, is going within and connecting to our deepest, deepest part of ourselves: our connection with spirit and with our truest selves.

Kimberly: 09:31 So, we do have some free guided meditations for you over at mysolluna.com. We weave it into everything that we do, including our upcoming pregnancy course. I would just really urge you, if you really want to build joy in your life now, make it a practice to meditate in the morning and, ideally, before bed, even if it’s just for a few moments, just to start really committing to that practice.

Practice #4: Joy in, joy out

Kimberly: 09:57 So, my next practice is joy in, joy out. What I mean by that is being very discerning about the whole practice, could be first taking a deep look at everything that’s coming in, everything that you’re consuming: newspaper articles, news sites, social media handles and feeds, the music that you’re listening to, everything. Just take a real look around. Is it joyful? Does it make you feel like your energy is going up or does it feel like it’s taking away from you and depleting you in some way? If that’s the case, you want to just shift away. It means, “Oh,” you can unfollow certain people or you can mute them, so they don’t know that you unfollow them. You can just really batch your time. This I have talked about before, but I reinforce it again. Batch your time watching news, being on new sites, things that can feel not so joyful, things that can feel stressful.

Kimberly: 11:04 Yes, we do need to know what’s going on in the world to a certain extent, but we don’t need to oversaturate our consciousness with it. We don’t need to tune into the news all day. It doesn’t have to be in the background all day long on our TV while we’re sitting at our desk. It’s just going into our subconscious, so remember if we want to feel more joy, we want to put more joyful things in, and that very much includes media, and screens, and all the different iterations of technology that are in our world today.

Practice #5: Using color in your clothes

Kimberly: 11:40 Next practice is using color. There is modern research about color therapy. Color, we know is essentially different vibrations and frequencies of light and there’s research about how it can have a profound effect on our moods. There’s also writings that I have read from yogis talking about color as well and just talking about the different ways that we can use color in our lives. For instance, there is a reason why monks will wear that ochre-toned robe, certain monks, including from the Self-Realization Fellowship. There’s the reason that white is used by certain other spiritual traditions like Kundalini yoga, so there is a lot too there’s a lot we can do to bring joy into our lives with color.

Kimberly: 12:41 Blue is a wonderful calming color. And again, there was research backing this up. It is a color that can make us feel soothed and more quiet and calm. What’s considered a Yang color in feng shui, if we want to build up energy and vitality in Prana, then we would choose more something like a orange or a red, which is very stimulating. Paramahansa Yogananda talks about focusing a lot on blue and gold, which are some of the colors that you can perceive through your spiritual eye when you get into more advanced stages of meditation, and that’s one of the reasons gold is our primary Solluna color.

Kimberly: 13:30 So, the ways that you can use color is, of course, from a food cornerstone perspective, you can have beautiful colors in your food and, of course, that also indicates a wide range of antioxidants and beneficial compounds. When you make your salads, you can mix in all sorts of beautiful carrots and purple cabbage and radishes, and all these beautiful stimulating colors.

Kimberly: 13:56 Also, the clothing that you wear. It’s so funny because I used to wear so much black and when I look at my closet now there’s still these different black outfits, and I just wear the sole rarely now, but I don’t have the heart to let them go, some of them anyway. So, just the way that you dress, I would say wear colors that make you feel really good. And in the context of our subject today, which is joy; joy, again, there’s an individual individualization here. Because if you’re someone that feels very anxious, blue may be the color of joy for you because it helps you feel soothed and in equanimity. But if you are working to elevate your energy and you’ve actually felt quite depressed quite down over the past few weeks and past months, you may want to start incorporating more of that orange and that red, yellow, which will help you feel elevated and has stimulating qualities to it.

Kimberly: 14:56 So your clothes, the food that you’re eating, the space that you’re in, surrounding your home with colors that feel good to you and that bring you joy; there’s so many different ways to bring color in, so think about it for your own life. It’s just another everyday practice, the practice of being mindful about colors, that can bring you spark of joy.

Practice #6: Making everyday routines celebrations

Kimberly: 15:21 My next practice is making everyday routines celebrations. This means that when you drink your hot water with lemon in the morning, or you’re having your tulsi tea at night, it could just be another humdrum transactional moment in the day, but if you create a ritual around it, meaning you use a beautiful teacup or you find one that is your favorite or feels very just intriguing or beautiful to you, it just adds a little bit of a sparkle.

Kimberly: 15:53 For me, there’s my one favorite mug and then I have these amazing cloth coasters that I got in Japan, got them in Tokyo last time I was there a few years ago, and… Well, first of all, Japan is the land of tea ceremony and it feels really special when you just add a little bit to that ritual. It brings me a lot of joy. I sip on that tea and it becomes an experience. I’m not even leaving my house; I’m not even leaving my kitchen, but there’s something about the intention, again, of making it a magical experience that it does. Every day we have to brush our teeth, you have to spend time in your bathroom, so maybe you make this practice more joyful by putting a bamboo, or a orchid, or something in your bathroom, that brings in nature, it makes you feel joyful, it makes you feel connected to the natural world. Or something else like a beautiful crystal or something that makes the ritual of brushing your teeth a little bit more fun.

Kimberly: 17:01 For me, I recently hung this hanging plant in my bathroom in the corner with a… I don’t know if I say this word right… macramé. Is that right? It’s the woven, hanging, beautiful rope; or you can put a hanging plant in and it comes down. I have to tell you guys, every time I go in the bathroom, I have a stare at this plant. It makes me really joyful and, yeah, it’s just a different energy in there. So again, these little everyday things that we do just to shift the energy a little bit, and this is about finding joy now, and these practices can start to add up in bigger and bigger ways.

In Closing

Kimberly: 17:42 So, those are actually all of my practices. For a minute, I thought there was one more, but let me review them for you again: make raw almond milk for the energetic reasons, the Pranic reasons, the nutrition reasons. Number two, simplify your life: find the ways that you can that feel good to you right here, right now in your current life. Meditate more because real joy is found within. Joy in, joy out. Be very discerning with what you are consuming from a visual, sensory, media standpoint and cut out anything that is not making you joyful.

Kimberly: 18:20 Next, is using color in your clothes, in your home, in your space, in your food, and working with those colors to help elevate joy. And lastly, making everyday routine celebrations, whether it’s your tea cup, or a plant in your bathroom, or a crystal on your desk, or lighting a little bit of Palo Santo when you meditate, just adding a little bit of flare to what you’re doing in these little everyday moments to just keep bringing your energy to it. I also find that these little practices make us more present with our everyday little interactions and that presence is a quality of joy as well.

Kimberly: 19:07 So, I hope that you enjoyed our solocast today. I’m going to leave you with a thought of the week, which is something I’ve said before, but I love to say this because I think it’s an important reminder, which is that small, simple steps add up in a big way. Sometimes we think, “Oh gosh, I just got to go full force and lose these 20 pounds,” or, “The only way I’m going to be happy is if I get a completely new job or I get into a different field,” or something like that. But those things are, of course, things we can work on, but these little everyday things, you’d be surprised again how they start to add up in a big way.

Kimberly: 19:47 There’s a wonderful book out there called MicroShifts and it’s by Gary Jansen. He talks about how think about how… Think about the Titanic. It swerved off course towards that iceberg, but if they had just kept… he explains this better than me… but if it had been these little micro adjustments had been made all along, then it would never have hit that iceberg, just little, little ways it was steering the ship ended up in like a big result. Right? So think about that in your life as well. Little things, this little way of simplifying, boom! You open up energy. A little change here, “I’m going to make my own raw on the milk. Wow! My body feels amazing! Oh, I’m going to spend more time meditating today. Oh, I feel so light. I feel so good.”

Kimberly: 20:36 So again, just remember that these practices are meant to be consistent and regular, the more you do them, the better you’ll feel. As our thoughts says though, these small simple steps can really add up in a big way. Thank you so much for tuning in. I send you so much love. I will be back here Thursday or… yeah, Thursday for our next Q and A community show. Till then, take great care, and sending you lots of love.