Greetings! 
I've been thinking a lot about being joyful lately - what it means to feel joy, how to create it from the inside and how to keep it present even when life throws you a gazillion curve balls.
As some of you know either from experience or association (you are our pillars of support), having a child pushes you to your absolute limits; the deepest frustration, deepest love, most overwhelming impatience and utter self-doubt. And yet through it all these small beings manage to swing along one vine at a time, making their way moment to moment, amid the tangle of wonder that is our life.
My son, Charlie, is spectacular. It amazes me every day how he can be so in the moment. No matter what the moment is, glorious and ecstatic or tired and painful. One moment life revolves around his left shoe and the next he's wholly committed to eating a banana.
So, I've been taking my lessons on joy from him. How do I cultivate joy and maintain it even when life feels like it's weighing down on me? How do I stay connected to this gut feeling of happiness even when Charlie is refusing to sleep, eat or get in the car...when we are already late? Is it possible?
Recently I read an article by one of my favorite teachers, Phillip Moffitt: "Beyond Happiness". As he so often does, he writes gracefully about the subtle relationship we can learn to have with joy and how it can be sensed through our bodies.
"Gladden your mind," he writes. The idea is to become aware of the delightful moments you've experienced. How do you respond to them? What do they feel like in your body?
In this, it is also important to recognize, he says, that these moments pass, "...that all conditions change and that the positive feeling you are having will eventually be replaced with a less pleasant one. That may sound like a downer, but it really isn't. What happens when you acknowledge that this happiness is temporary? Rather than diminish your happiness, your acknowledgement puts it in a context that allows you to appreciate it more.
Finally, pause to appreciate that in this moment you have a sense of well-being. Notice the effect of this. Does the gratitude lead you anywhere? Many people report that after doing this gratitude practice a while, they start feeling a desire to share their good fortune."
And so, it is a practice like everything else - the deeper more subtle work of finding and appreciating the joy that exists in you regardless of what the outside world is like. It is the utter connection to the physical sense of well being that can keep brining us back.
It is not easy, I know. But let me just say this: every time I walk into the studio, think about all of you, am preparing for a class or session I am struck by one of the greatest senses of joy and contentment I have ever felt.
Even when my days are long and I am tired, the feeling in my body, in my gut says "Thank You. How wonderful my life is to have this."
So, I thank you for helping me to cultivate my deeper sense of sustained joy. I only hope that we, the space and the work that you here can give a little piece of that back.
All my best, Chantill and all of us at Pilates Collective
