Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome back to Joy Lab.
Aimee Prasek: And I am Aimee Prasek. So we are in our month of Awe we're focused on authenticity all month. Last episode, we talked about some obstacles to authenticity. Three, really: development of false self for ourself externally, also not letting authenticity, being our true self be so intimidating. And this practice of awe, you know, that this path [00:01:00] of finding our true self is for all of us, and it shows up just kind of day to day.
Henry: Yeah. I want to, I wanna take a crack at summarizing this process of, of becoming oneself. This is, uh,
Aimee Prasek: Wow.
Henry: I'm just gonna try it.
Aimee Prasek: So are we done then? Our authenticity episodes are done after this? You're gonna summarize it all?
Henry: Yes. Just, just give me one minute.
Aimee Prasek: Yes, please.
Henry: Gimme two minutes.
Aimee Prasek: All right. Let's do it.
Henry: Okay. So here's my, here's my brief summary. I think that the process of becoming oneself has mostly to do with letting go. Letting go of the things that we took on without realizing that they're not ours. Such as those masks we hide behind the personas that we aspire to, even the good, good ones, you know, our heroes and mentors. Or the responsibilities that we carry thinking they're ours to [00:02:00] carry, but they aren't often. So it's kind of like the metaphor of shedding one's skin. It's got to happen before that fresh and slightly raw but truer version of ourselves has a chance to emerge.
Aimee Prasek: I love that. Yes, a great summary. Also, you're noting letting go as the key, which is so hard. So there's lots of episodes that will, will help us get after this. So the summary's great and then the practice is hard.
Henry: The practice of letting go can be really hard.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, so we'll get into that too over these episodes. Also, last episode, we use that Merton quote as inspiration. And today we're gonna kind of keep going with that quote to shift our attention from acknowledging obstacles and start getting more into the now what. Those next steps we can take to uncover [00:03:00] our authenticity, to let go, to shed our skin. So here's the Merton quote to start us off again. I'm gonna add more to it or more of what he said. "Finally, I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am, that I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself."
Aimee Prasek: All right, so there's this piece of just acknowledging, as we've highlighted here as, as we acknowledge the obstacles of authenticity, it can really help us in that first step, I think as Merton noted, "coming to the conclusion that my greatest ambition is to be what I already am." Okay. So we've come to that conclusion. I'm realizing that I've [00:04:00] maybe been putting on a lot of masks, I have people pleased in ways that sacrifice my own wellbeing. So those realizations, like those can be really powerful. I love Carl Jung's wisdom here. Actually. He wrote, "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
Henry: Hmm.
Aimee Prasek: Oof. So we get conscious, wake up, we realize that there's something else. We have to not just acknowledge and realize, but there are some new practices, patterns to prevent those obstacles from tripping us up again and also to, I think as Merton notes, to fully accept ourselves to fully accept ourselves, which can be a lot. Full acceptance of what and who we are right now. So we've done some great episodes on self-acceptance, and I'll link those in the show notes. But [00:05:00] Henry, do you wanna add anything here about how self-acceptance open us up to our true self?
Henry: Yeah, I'm thinking of how to use this very act of, of kind of awakening to true self, to use that as an opportunity for self-acceptance. So just this very, very initial step that happens when you realize, for example, you've been wearing a mask, gives you an opportunity for self-acceptance. So let me try to get deeper into that. So it's like a starting point because it's right there. It, it just comes up right away as soon as we get to this point that we're not being our true selves, because as soon as we realize that for many of us, the very next knee jerk reaction is to judge ourselves.
Henry: For having done that. Okay, [00:06:00] so just as an example, once you, if you realize you've been following a career path that's not really yours to follow or not really what you wanted to be doing, you did it, I don't know, for whatever reason, please, somebody else, then that automatic reaction might be to say to yourself, what was I thinking?
Henry: I just wasted five years, or maybe it's 10 years, it could even be 30 years of of my life doing something I didn't really like, just because I thought it would make my parents happy, for example, or because we thought we needed a certain lifestyle. Whatever the
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: reason, as soon as the awareness rises right behind it, there's often this reaction to feel badly about it. Specifically to feel badly about yourself.
Aimee Prasek: Yes.
Henry: So there's the opportunity. It just comes right up, right in front of you. Opportunity for [00:07:00] self-acceptance and like anything that is really of value, self-acceptance is built brick by brick, moment by moment. So start where, where you are, right in that moment of realization.
Henry: Whatever masks you took on, whatever turns you took, that, that took you away from yourself, you were doing the best you could at that time. If you can accept that, then you've really got a good starting point for following your own true path.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah, we can all relate there. I think
Henry: Yeah.
Aimee Prasek: Um, What a great way to start. So this acceptance, this whole full acceptance sets us up, for this next part of Merton's wisdom that once we accept ourselves, then we can surpass ourselves. And so when Merton [00:08:00] says, surpass ourselves. don't think he's saying that each one of us individually is necessarily like "getting better", in quotes there.
Aimee Prasek: I'm doing, I think Merton is reminding us that self-acceptance, you said Henry, it's like the start position. Awesome to get there. You gotta get there. You're in the race, you get in the race, you're in your life, and then there's more. You can surpass that. But instead of just getting better, you can get bigger.
Henry: Mm-hmm.
Aimee Prasek: And yeah, so bigger in such a way that you surpass yourself, that you go beyond this hyperfocus on yourself and start to work in this bigger space of connection and support where so much more is possible. And Henry, you talk about growing a bigger container. We talk about this a lot in the Joy Lab Program here at the Podcast too, and I think that's what Merton is getting at here. So. [00:09:00] would you agree? Do you wanna,
Henry: Yeah, I think, uh, I think that it's referring to what, what is often called the small self or the small sense of self. Or you might just say the ego self, you know, the, the part of us that feels we need to protect ourselves, to take care of ourselves, nurture ourselves, because nobody else is going to do it.
Henry: And we're kind of, you know, going through life just on our own and having to do all this to just to take care of ourselves, keep us going. So the idea of a bigger container comes out of that notion that about how I think of resilience. So, you know, we do put so much effort into self-care. There are all these little things that, that we do kind of need to tend to in order to keep our resilience container more or less filled up.
Henry: You know, we need that to draw from, to just kinda keep ourselves [00:10:00] going. It's important, but it's so much more effective and, and frankly, a lot easier if we can find a way to tap into a bigger reservoir that we're not relying only on this, this small one that we carry with us. You know, that is important, but it's just so much more
Henry: limited. And then we're just constantly putting out this effort to nourish and protect ourselves. So I think that Merton is, is getting at the notion that if you accept yourself, I think, I think this is, uh, what he, what the quote said, if you accept yourself fully and in the right way, then you free up a lot of this energy that you had been using to nourish and protect yourself.
Henry: It's such a paradox because if you fully accept yourself, your [00:11:00] true self, then that small sense of self, the false self really just kind of disappears. It just goes away. And I think that's what he means by surpassing himself because true self is just a greater version of yourself.
Aimee Prasek: It's make me think as well that authenticity or that true self doesn't exist in a vacuum. I think that's what we're getting at here. Like, we're not living authentically if we give zero Fs about anything or anyone around us, and cause harm because we're like, quote, being authentic. Our authentic self is deeply and positively connected with others. So, you know, we are a thread woven into this fabric of everything around us, and there's just this fundamental aspect of authenticity that is like in cooperation with everything around us. That's how we're wired. Yeah. It's how [00:12:00] the universe functions. So we can't attack part of the web. We can't attack ourselves.
Aimee Prasek: We can't attack outside ourselves and not feel that harm as well. We are that web. One of my favorite descriptions of joy comes from, author Ross Gay. He defines joy as practicing or the practice of our entanglements. I think that's it. That's authentic joy. That's our authentic self. That's us practicing our true self.
Aimee Prasek: It is not in a vacuum. If we wanna tap into our true and joyful self, we have to get into those tangles. All the tangles that interconnect within and around us, those tangles can be gnarly we can work to create change to maybe untangle some of those tangles and we can still be in harmony and even joy amidst, all that because it's how we authentically function. [00:13:00] that's what we do every day here at Joy Lab. So As Merton would say here, I think, that is our greatest ambition in life. That's why we're here.
Henry: So this is reminding me of a quote. I'll try to get it right and it's a, it's a quote I admittedly don't fully understand, but I love to things I don't fully understand. So here it is. "Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9% of everything you think and everything you do is for yourself. And there isn't one." So that, that's attributed to the writer who went by the pen name Wei Wu Wei.
Henry: But what I take this to mean is that as long as we're trying to prop up this small sense of self to be something we're not, we're gonna be unhappy. [00:14:00] And why? Because the focus is all on yourself.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: That small sense of self is not who we really are.
Aimee Prasek: Right.
Henry: And when we realize that, it's just like you said, Aimee, we just naturally know that we are not really this separated, isolated human being that's going through life, having to, you know, just take care of himself, the way that we thought we were, we fit just right into this larger whole. And then there's just a sense of ease about it. It's effortless. To be fully yourself and take your natural place in the world.
Henry: Just effortless.
Aimee Prasek: . Effortless. I'm loving that idea that. our authentic self is this easeful, effortless [00:15:00] self. So we're gonna get into this over the next several episodes, like more strategies to overcome some of these obstacles, fully be yourself. So everyone in the Joy Lab Program, your experiments with awe will help you do that. But before we close that, effortlessness is making me think about the NBA finals. And I wanna go there. And the WNBA season is starting. I just, it's interesting. I just kept thinking about, defense and offense as it related to authenticity during the NBA finals, with Indiana and OKC. And I think that's because on this effortless easeful. Both OKC and Indiana had like a lot of scrappy defensive players.
Aimee Prasek: Oklahoma, completely known for that. And it is intense to watch like how hard they were working to slow down SGA, for example, for Oklahoma. And it's kind of frantic [00:16:00] when you watch it, that defense, that scrappy defense. Then you'd see SGA, like make a few moves, get to the key and take just a smooth fall away jumper. And it was so serene amidst this wild defense around like just a big contrast. And I'm not saying SGA wasn't working hard, but he was working different on offense. And I think that's what to do here with authenticity. Stay with me or if you like, I hate basketball analogies or metaphors, just fast forward 30 seconds or something. But I think we're trying to stop playing defense all the time, um, letting go as we've talked about a little bit to stop frantically guarding all this stuff, guarding all these aspects of ourselves that we've rejected, like just hustling from place to place, trying to grab having to adjust [00:17:00] ourselves,to show up different, to protect ourselves constantly based on who we're in front of. so these incessant defensive moves, they just keep us super busy, super tired, super exhausted, and it makes it impossible to like, come into our own rhythm, step into our flow. And so I think authenticity is like that. When we're living authentically, we are in the game and we're always on offense. because we're in competition, but because we always have the ball. We are empowered, we always have choices as we discussed last episode. when you're there you can shoot, you can miss shots, you can pass because you're part of a team, we can screw up, and we know we can get the ball back because again, we always have the opportunity to choose. To keep playing. [00:18:00] And we're not trying to be the MVP. Authenticity doesn't work like that. We're not keeping points. We can ride the bench, we can cheer, we can we can tend to the injuries. There's a million ways to show up authentically. But when we're searching for our self, so to speak, when we're authentic, i, I think the point here is that we're in the game. And like you said last week, Henry, we can choose to not be fully ourselves, to not live our life. And we can do that by just playing defense all the time. But also, and I think probably more common, we put the ball down, we just get off the court and we head to the stands. We grab some popcorn, we sit back and we just shout. We boo, we cheer, we armchair ref, we become a spectator in our life and usually a heckler for someone else's, right. I've been in those stands. Or [00:19:00] we might even be quieter about it, just like keeping a box score, silently analyzing, critiquing, but never playing. We're like out of our lives. We're not in our lives. We can't accept ourselves, let alone surpass ourselves when we're in the stands. There's just no growth there. It is the worst place to be just watching our lives go by. So if you're in the stands, get on the court. It can be super hard to exit the row. I know. Don't wait for a timeout though. Just get up. Don't overthink it. Put the popcorn down, head to the locker room. Find a random ill fitted jersey even, it's gonna feel uncomfortable, join your life and I think that is worth every bit of discomfort. Come here to Joy Lab to practice. This is where you can get those skills back that you are wired for [00:20:00] and I'll end my basketball metaphor there, I think before I keep going. I'm super into it, but let's get in the game folks. Let's do it.
Henry: Oh, I love it, Aimee. I have nothing to add to that. I'll just, I'll just paraphrase a quote from the show ted Lasso. Basketball is life.
Aimee Prasek: Oh yes. Basketball's life. Yeah, let's do it. Let's get, let's get on the court, let's start playing. We can practice together, get more confident in our skills. We are all athletes for this one. All of us. We are all wired for it, and we'll keep working through our Element of Awe. We will practice these strategies to really help us tap into our authenticity. So stay with us. To close, well, I'm gonna share some wisdom from writer and actor Tina Lifford. Here it is. [00:21:00] "When you know yourself, you are empowered. When you accept yourself, you are invincible."
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