Are You Having Fun Yet?
On my morning hike in the gorgeous Santa Monica Mountains that are my backyard, I was listening to a recent podcast with my mentor, David Neagle, from his Successful Mind Podcast. In it, he mentions there is a difference between excitement and having fun. It got me thinking about the difference and how I relate to them in my own life.
Having fun is a measure of how much joy and pleasure you’re willing to allow into your life. Excitement is a state of inspiration about something you’re doing or going to experience. Both of these are different skill sets that are important for us to have to achieve success in our lives. For myself, I have always been skilled at finding what excites me and bringing myself into a state of inspiration. When I’ve been feeling down I know the things that can help support me to quickly shift into an excited state. However, when I reflect upon the trajectory of my life, when I’m being honest, the majority of my days and years has not included much fun. I have to search back very far to find a time when my baseline state was one of joy and pleasure. I have embodied a seriousness for ages and can even sometimes get a little uncomfortable when other people are genuinely laughing and having a good time. Part of me definitely is programmed to believe that they’re not supposed to experience this much joy.
Do you relate?
Do you spend much of the day not having fun?
If so, why?
It is such a crucial question to meditate upon and listen for the answers that reside deep within us regarding our resistance to having fun and experiencing pleasure. Without allowing the full spectrum of joy to emerge, we are living half a life. When I sat with this question, my most fundamental answer was a feeling of guilt related to seeing the suffering of others around me. How could I justify having fun when others were not? This seed was planted when I was a young girl. Internally and unconsciously, I translated the way others were feeling around me as the barometer for what was acceptable. To be included and loved (a.k.a safe,) I needed to match this frequency and stay within certain parameters, never going to high or too low. As I molded myself to these guidelines, I began squeezing myself into a smaller bubble and dumbing down my joy. I did not want to agitate those around me and I certainly didn’t want to isolate myself. I became more and more serious. I eventually stopped embracing ecstatic joy and restricted my intake of pleasure. As a teenager, I became a rebel that resisted this constricting containment. I was angry, resistant, and reactionary. I wanted to prove that I could do what I wanted no matter what. And, the one thing I didn’t consistently choose was to have fun. This is a tale too frequently relatable, that of us making our joy and pleasure smaller and more palatable to the adults we are surrounded by to keep them comfortable, and in turn available to us. I even see the ways my 11-year old son has done this to fit into the unconscious framework of our family during his first decade of life. Refraining from expressing authentic joy and experiencing ecstatic pleasure is a chronic ailment devastating our culture. It is a centuries long punishment that has its grip hold on most of the members of our society. The particularly unfortunate part is that many people are numb to the reality that their ability to experience joy and pleasure is vastly limited.
Here I am, in my fourth decade, with incredible abundance in my life. I have two amazing children and an incredible house in gorgeous place. I am self-employed for over 20 years and love the work do. All of this, and I still wrestle with how to have fun. I have spent the past decade fervently studying and learning how to allow more pleasure into my life, learning to establish a new default setting that welcomes joy as a necessity. Throughout the years, I have sensed moments of how ecstatic life can be and more often than not I continued to pull back the reigns on my expression of pleasure.
Now, at this point in my life, I have had a grieving process around all the years I’ve passed rejecting having fun. Acknowledging the grief this limiting belief pattern has caused is part of the journey of re-writing our scripts and opening to more joy. Another path to pleasure is claiming the truth that our joy is more important than what others think of us. We may need to leave others behind, shedding the skins of relationships that cannot meet us in states of pleasure. This is Ok. It can be scary and sad to let go. Yet the cost of not letting go is far too great to accept.
Oftentimes our ingrained patterns sneak up on us in moments when we least expect it. Having a reminder system to cross check ourselves can be an easy solution for getting back on track. Set an alarm that asks, “Am I having fun right now?” If the answer is no, what can you do in the moment to let fun in? Regardless of what we are doing, joy and pleasure are internal states only amplified by external circumstances. They are not dependent on them. Asking ourselves, “What is preventing me from having fun?” will lead us to the truth of our resistance. If you have trouble hearing an answer, look back to a time when you can remember having fun for free. Now slowly move forward in time and pay attention to when this fluidity was severed. This is an excellent place to begin exploring. How are you different now from when you were able to express joy freely? What happened at the time you notice a shift? A part of you may need some nurturing and encouragement to trust that feeling joy is safe.
Finding answers to why we block pleasure and joy from bathing us in the magnificence of life will transform us at the core. From this renewed, reconnected state, life is fuller, more colorful, and extraordinarily inspiring. It is our job to give ourselves permission to let our desires come into form and not remain dreams inside our minds. Letting more joy and pleasure into our day-to-day experience is the fuel for manifesting our desires.
Dare to Desire!
Kristen