Reconnecting with Delight When It’s Been a Rough Week!

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Hello everybody. Anna Gatmon here, Expanding with Expansive one more week of sharing stories, teachings, and I want to focus today, I’m going to really be flowing today. My word for this year is flow. And so I wasn’t sure what to talk about today. And I looked at the posts and they’re all about delight and I’m not feeling that delightful.

I’m feeling more soulful, feeling more, I’m feeling many more complex emotions than just delight. So I wasn’t sure what to talk about and I’m just going to be spontaneous here. So on Sunday there was a post that I posted. It says “Listening is an attitude of the heart a genuine desire to be with another, which both attracts and heals.” So I thought I would just be, I would just listen to where I’m at and share this with you and then see how we can connect it to delight. We’ll flow with it.

The focus of today is finding delight when it’s been a rough week. It’s been an intense week and you might’ve had an intense week or you might have an intense week, or you can relate to a time when you had an intense week.

So I’ll give you a few examples of what has been intense, soulful, emotional, and it doesn’t exactly fit with delight because delight and that’s another post that I posted on Monday. “Delight is everything you touch becomes luminous and joyous. Everything you do is blessed and comes alive.” So there’s something very light about the word delight. I love to say that delight is de light of the light. So there’s something very, very, very kind of luminous and light about it. So how do you find delight when you’ve had a rough week week?

So a few things, the spiritual community and education center, and ecovillage where I had my spiritual awakening in 2004 Findhorn, which is in Northern Scotland, they just had someone from within the community, burnt down their central community center, where all the meals happen, as well as their main sanctuary, their meditation sanctuary. So clearly that is a, it put me in a soulful place. They were just about in a month or two to open their doors slowly after a year, over a year of COVID and here this tragedy occurred. And yet they’re so resilient and they have set so many spiritual resources that they’re already they’re both morning and moving forward. They don’t have a choice in a sense, right? So I was reminded of that those two weeks when I was there in the community center above on the second floor and having this workshop and this one particular meditation guided meditation, I’ve done many of them before, but this particular one, just all my notions of spirituality crumbled. And I just had this awakening that took time over time, but it was this workshop with one of the original co-founders would change the course of my life and my work and my calling. So here is this tragedy and I was feeling soulful. I was feeling gratitude. I was feeling love and I could even feel as I am moving from tragedy to talking about soulfulness and remembering that delightful experience of that meditation. It was a medition where I was just high, I was so high on life from the instructions that I could barely contain it. And so it had that delightful luminosity. And so here I am flowing in real-time. Shape-shifting from feeling, this is a tragedy to feeling grateful, soulful sadness. I could even tap into anger during the week about, well, the person who did this for their reasons, their own disturbances, it’s not relevant right now for here, but here I am in delight also because what I gained is how easy it is to tap into delightfulness and that workshop was delightful.

So here I am in real time, kind of shape-shifting emotion shifting from tragedy to delight. I want to give you another example. I am teaching a graduate course in a school of psychology nearby.  It’s all online. So it’s on zoom and in an online platform. And the topic that I’m teaching the course is called the psychology of power and privilege. So we’re dealing with privilege, power, oppression, all the isms. And it’s an intense course. And the students are so brave and soulful in their exploration of their internalized oppression, their privileges, belonging to different categories and the position that it puts them in either to be marginalized or privileged in society. It’s an intense course with intense reading, videos, and they also have an exercise where they have to dig deep inside to see their own marginalized parts and oppressed parts and privileged parts and oppressive parts. And so it’s not a delightful process. It really is a soulful process.

There are moments where I just want to cry because it is so touching the work that these students are doing. They are brave and they are dealing with their wounds, but they’re fighting to liberate a piece of energy that has been trapped in some cultural drama and trauma in a personal trauma that comes from cultural norms and oppressions. So they’re really, they’re birthing their soul reclaiming a piece that has been stifled, wounded, shoved aside that it wasn’t safe to bring into the light. And as I am saying that I am beginning to feel delightful because what they are fighting for in a sense, or what they are inquiring into is how can I bring this part that I have left outside, that I have negated in me into the light and become part of me without having to apologize or to be scared, but just to bring it with delight into the room, if it’s women who want to connect to their power without apologizing or men who want to feel their fullness, their femininity, their masculinity, they don’t want to be ashamed of any part of who they are, class issues, whatever it is. They’re actually wanting to be able to bring that part that they have disowned because it wasn’t safe. And to bring it in, in a delightful way without having to apologize or be apprehensive or any of that.

Now, my most vivid memory of what a delightful moment is, an delightful enjoyful moment is, is my son who is today 27 years old. When he would go to kindergarten, we parked the car, we’d go to the kindergarten. So in the morning or in the evening, and he would skip from the car to the kindergarten in the morning. And then when I pick him up, he’d skip from the kindergarten to the car. And I recall just enjoying watching him skip. He was just in pure joy, in pure delight. And that has remained. It’s a vivid feeling that I can tap into right now. That’s just pure sense of innocence, joy, delight.

That is what we are fighting for. Although I don’t like to use the word fight, but that is what we are wanting to have on this planet to enjoy the wonders, to delight in them, for everything you touch, to become luminous and joyous, everything you do to be blessed and to come alive. And so I guess the connection between delightful and feeling sad and grieving, or soulful, which I felt a lot of this week in other things that have happened in the news and with my family, different events are that in the morning, in the grief, in the soulfulness, we are all trying both personally, and socially, collectively to liberate energy that has been stifled, wounded, neglected, denied. We want to bring it into the light and when it’s in the light and we have healed and we don’t feel as scared to bring it out, just pure energy of joy, and delight of wonder, then we can be in delightfulness. And so I think that that is where the two come together. There’s a time to mourn, and there’s a time to grieve, and there’s a time to be soulful. And there’s a time to just be in this pure joy. But if we don’t do the work personally and collectively, and we don’t stand for what is right, for what is our highest self, our most noble self, and we don’t do the inner work that we need to do. And we don’t stand collectively for what is right for justice. No justice, no peace. That is the truth. There cannot be peace if there’s no justice and it’s not vengeful justice, it’s rightful justice of the heart, the right thing to do for yourself. For yourself and for others. And when we can release that, when we can heal that, when we can have the justice, then we can have moments of just pure delight and joy and just experience the luminosity of everything.

And so this has been my improvised kind of sharing. There’s no outline. I just kind of tapped into what felt right as I was sharing it as I’m sharing it now. I hope it’s useful. And I hope you try to shape shift from soulfulness to delightfulness from being there for yourself, to being there for others, from being sad, to being joyful from feeling heavy and bogged down by the horrible things happening in our planet, on our planet, in our human world, and then feeling the lightness and the wonder of nature and human ingenuity and human love and care for each other.

And, you know, even as I say it, I can feel the difference between feeling the heaviness and feeling delight and wonder. And so try shifting from one to the other and see what delight means for you and how you can tap into delight when you’ve had a rough week, how can you find delight? And find luminosity and love and joy in things that feel sad, heavy, challenging, and rough.

So I leave you at this point with pure joy and light and luminosity of delight, and I’ll be back next week with another Expanding on Expansive weekly tips and teachings.

Blessings.