Sympathetic Joy and Easy Rock Ballads
And an announcement of an adoptee practice group
Hello! I’m Logan and I help folks integrate complex identities via mindfulness practice, workshop facilitation, and private mentorship.
This piece on mudita, cultivating sympathetic joy, is the fourth installment in my series on the Heart Practices. This series is written with adoptees in mind.
Key Points:
Joy is cultivated by intentionally turning the mind toward ease.
Mudita refers to shared, sympathetic joy.
Envy and exuberance can masquerade as mudita.
Adoptee communities can be wonderful!
…so let’s make our own. An invitation to an adoptee meditation group is at the bottom, along with takeaway practices.
The Washing Well Wenches
A story about two battling wolves, sometimes given Cherokee attribution, represents a (usually moral) dichotomy. When asked which will win, the wise elder says, “the one you feed.”
The Washing Well Wenches at the Renaissance Faire ended my theater drought. The all-female cast performs as lusty “washing women,” drawing men to stage for bawdy activity. The first consented to one washing woman using his fingers as a whistle while the other blew raspberries into the crook of his elbow, his shoulder, and his torso. Together, they produced a version of “Ode to Joy” out of fart noises and whistles.
70% of me was irked about the humor of gender, class, and stratified education. I felt anger when, later, one of the men forced his mouth onto the actress’ to a cheering crowd and despite repeated caution from her co-performer. If he does this in front of an audience, what does he do behind closed doors?
About 30% of me enjoyed the shouting crowd, getting soaked, laughing at their physical comedy. Their timing was excellent. Their ability to play off each other and to the crowd was impressive. The weather was great. I felt physically safe.
I didn’t have a fiver to put into the performer’s overflowing bra, but she tipped her braids as I dropped my singles into the bucket.
Against my own habit patterns, I chose the wolf to feed.
The Heart Practices: Mudita
Whereas the Noble Truths guide much of Buddhist philosophy, the Four Heart Practices help us live with greater ease.
LovingKindness (Metta) - An attitude, orientation, or action to honor our inner goodness and that of others.
Compassion (Karuna) - Action amid difficulty, distress, despair.
Equanimity (Upekka) - The wisdom to see our options, the courage to decide on a path, and forgiveness when things don’t go as planned.
Sympathetic Joy (Mudita) - The ability to feel and express pleasure for someone else’s good fortune.
Joy doesn’t require a ticket to the Renaissance Faire. There is ease in every moment, but it takes practice to notice, and the will to focus.
Pema Chödrön writes: “By taking care of ordinary things--our pots and pans, our clothing, our teeth-we rejoice in them. When we scrub a vegetable or brush our hair, we are expressing appreciation: friendship toward ourselves and toward the living quality that is found in everything.”
Life contains some unsatisfactory times. Peace activist and monk Thich Nhat Hanh casts joyful practice as resistance against the idea we were born to passively suffer.
Life is both dreadful and wonderful...How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural--you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow. There will be joy. And the difficulty we will be facing for the remainder of our lives is real, too.
Joy provides momentum to remember we are more than the shitty things life throws at us. Somatics expert Kelsey Blackwell cautions against self-denigration: “In a society that’s prescribed so many avenues for ‘project-ifying’ ourselves, our joy is regarded as the ‘reward’ for our dedication to healing. But our connection to our joy isn’t a reward; it is the healing itself.”
So one place to begin is recognizing moments of joy in the first place.
Moments of Joy
Here are a few things that bring me joy or ease.
When a glance is understood
Overcast jeans-and-a-t-shirt days
My nightly practice of singing Mr. Big’s “To Be With You” to my cats
Okay, I don’t sing that every night. But look at that hair. That hair gives me joy.
Sympathetic Joy
While joy falls on many Buddhist lists, mudita is meant to be circulated: feeling joy, sharing it. Or hearing of someone else’s good fortune and feeling happy for them.
My Los Angeles-based adoptee group is thriving. One friend is doing adoptee stand-up in a couple weeks! She’s been working on her set and I’m excited to see her perform. Another got a full ride to an MFA program to hone her writing practice and network with other creatives.
My friends from NorCal came down to LA for the first time in years! We danced, hiked, and spotted Awkwafina (I listened to “Mayor Bloomberg” on my way to meet them…WILD). They’ll be going to Brazil and Mexico for the summer for a much needed vacation.
Friday morning I exchanged handwritten notes with
, multimodal dialogue wrangler. It’s fun to be analog. Also, of graduated. The world is winning with this one—check out her most recent post, “Religious Belief and the Pursuit of Truth.”
If you feel you don’t have anyone to share joy with, it’s really okay. I’ve felt that before myself. Meditation teacher Tuere Sala’s recipe for joy: someone, somewhere, is about to ask someone else to marry them. It’s bound to be happening somewhere at any given moment.
She doesn’t worry about what response the question receives or if divorce is in the cards. That’s on them, later.
But for us, now, we can imagine the anxious anticipation of having the ring in the pocket, of planning the ask, and feel joy.
The Enemies of Mudita
Each of the heart practices have things that could look like each quality but are not. For example, per ancient texts, self-pity is not self-compassion. For mudita, I’ll cover comparison/envy and exuberance.
Comparison and Envy
An offering: Instead of comparing yourself against other people, consider giving yourself credit for what you’ve accomplished so far. Remember the principle of metta—we are all inherently worthy.
Someone I recently met is preparing for the LSAT but struggling with reading comprehension. Their anxiety kicks in as they look at the question on the practice tests. “If I didn’t have ADHD, I wouldn’t need to work this hard. I have no clue how to read.”
Life can be unsatisfactory. Self-denigration and comparison makes things harder, because they block the circulation of joy.
Funnily, the answer to each “enemy” of the heart practices can be handled with another one. In this case, the metta may help my mentee elevate her sense of self and, therefore, allow herself to circulate joy more freely.
Give yourself credit.
Exuberance
An offering: amid any extreme emotion, whether “positive” or “negative,” check in with where it is emerging in the body and how. Christopher Willard offers the acronym CALM—Chest, Arms, Legs, Mouth—as an awareness practice.
Ungrounded exuberance is not the same as the deep, non-attached joy that mudita represents. Advertising and social media has trained many to think anything less than “big” joy is…well, not joy. The wide-mouthed excessive excitement bears only a superficial resemblance to mudita. For example, salads are great but personally, I don’t know anyone who gets this excited over iceberg lettuce. Without context, and avoiding projections about “authenticity,” I might think I just don’t know how to like salads.
Mudita involves an appreciative joy arising from others' happiness, without the need for intense emotional highs. Equanimous, centered joy, is mudita, rather than the fleeting nature of exuberance tied to external circumstances.
According to Sam Wolfe, exuberance
involves tying up your joy to those of others, which means you can feel a sense of deprivation that causes you to grasp at pleasant experiences. […] our energy can overwhelm other people, instead of giving them a sense of supportive accompaniment […] the exuberant person makes the success of others more about enabling their own joy rather than sharing the level of joy that another is truly experiencing.
Emotional abandonment through exuberance is culturally systemic. “Won’t you be so happy to acquire?”
Several of my graduating students recently went to Las Vegas on a Senior’s trip. Upon return, one said it made them “depressed,” since “everyone” was gambling away money they didn’t themselves have and wouldn’t be making anytime soon. They “should” feel happy about graduating, but they couldn’t match the Vegas energy, knowing that they’d be moving back in with their parents in a couple months.
It can also be interpersonal. Last year, I met someone who bought a season pass to Six Flags. They do not like roller coasters. Under the impression joy “should” look and feel as intense as anger, observing their partner’s giddy jubilation at the theme park felt like it approximated “happiness.” So they ritualized the visit to feel “vicarious” joy.
Joy can look like that exuberance, sure, but it’s rarely mudita. And expecting jackpot-winning, peak-o-the-roller-coaster levels of excitement trains us to overlook accessible everyday joy. Equanimity, traditionally the fourth heart practice, would be a remedy.
What’s more liberating than channeling a degree, even a smidge, of happiness during the most boring-ass mundane moments?
Adoptee Joy
A post-it note inside of my bathroom mirror: “happy isn’t something you are, happiness is something you do.” Joy is not a commodity. It’s a practice.
I’ve had two conversations with adoptees semi-recently on the topic of happiness. Both aligned self-care with spending money and struggled to see themselves as other than human commodities. One said “the whole made in China thing” made spending money on themselves difficult.
The Buddha said, "I teach suffering and the end of suffering.” Stated differently, Katherine Morgan Schafler writes,
Get it out of your head that the only way to grow is through suffering. You can grow just as profoundly through joy. “Doing the work” is not solely about learning how to recognize and speak our sadness, our anger, and our angst. Doing the work is just as much (if not more so) about learning how to recognize, speak, and celebrate our joy. So often, the latter is in fact the more challenging work.
It’s all practice to uncover, recover, or discover our inner worth and reclaim our bodies.
Mudita can generate metta, compassion, and equanimity, leading to self-acceptance.
One place to begin would be…
Adoptee Communities
The “gratitude override” of emotions that denied many adoptees room to grieve their biological parents or even their own childhood, means many struggle with naming emotions at all. Several studies show adoptees are more likely to live with alexithymia, with one suggesting 71% of adoptees experience moderate-to-high difficulty identifying their own feelings. Many subjectively report an amorphous sense of loss that many feel can only be safely explored in a community of people who can empathize.
I previously shared my piece “Anthem,” in praise of Sara Easterly’s Adoptee Voices writing group. Writers would receive a range of prompts, choose among them, spend about an hour writing, and then share in small groups. The focus was on adoptee storytelling and it was empowering to be in community.
Communities can help us be “somebody” part of a larger group. And this is important. Awakening from the “adoptee fog,” as some call it, and recognizing the impact of adoption, is a lonely and jarring journey. Adoptee spaces can be life affirming.
Shared Values and Social Movements
Queer of color meditation teacher La Sarmiento says something similar: “You need to be somebody before you can be nobody.” We must interface with who we are before we can dig deeper and become more.
A couple years ago, I met with a queer Korean American adoptee, “J,” who said what makes adoptee communities great—being immediately understood by other adoptees—can make them problematic.
J said, “I used to go to [an annual adoptee conference] every year, until I realized I was bonding over unprocessed trauma.” Over several annual reminders about the lack of awareness, respect, or representation of our primal wounds, J’s feeling about the community went from empowering to wallowing.
What I appreciate most about Adoptee Voices is that we were doing something—writing—more than being adopted together. But the biggest and most well-known adoptee spaces are primarily the latter, because they are the most established.
There’s space for all and much more.
compiled 100 quotes from transracial adoptees. An offering from M. Seol stands out:As a community, we often connect over our trauma and pain. What would it mean to build radical joy, love, and abundance? I have found that joy outside of the adoptee community by connecting with other movements where I can share new perspectives as an adopted person. What would it mean for our adoptee community to join broader movements for social change and add our voices to them?
Hark!
Rejoice! Community Practice
Let’s do something. Let’s sit together.
Starting Sunday, July 23rd, I’m launching an online monthly adoptee-heart practices sitting group. The sessions will include a 20-minute sit, breakout rooms or other dialogic heart practice, and a re-group. To begin, each session will last about an hour.
Additionally, in July, I’ll run a workshop on queer adoptee ancestry and chosen lineages. It will be affordable or free, as I hope to evolve this based on your feedback. Subscribe to get updates!
Takeaway Practice
Practice going through the day jotting down things that are easy, goodwill generating, or joyful. What small things make you happy? Gather a list.
Personal Aside
Thank you to my new subscribers! As anyone who subscribed because of my last post would know, the end of this school year has been quite something, so apologies for the delay getting this one out. I’m honored to be in your inbox/feed.
Currently Watching
The Wilds. When I started it, it felt like a Yellowjackets wannabe with really inelegant gender politics, but came to see the story as about friendship and relationship repair, rather than survival cannibalism and cults. I gotta say I ended up really liking Fatin and Kirin.
Bio and Mentorship Info
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a mindful integration mentor offering 1:1 sessions and group workshops.
What is mentorship? Mentorship is my current word for coaching without commitment. Drop in for thirty minutes, we’ll chat. I’m currently looking to build testimonials and a practice community, so all of this is F-R-E-E for now. Schedule a chat!
Recent sympathetic joys:
1. Hearing you have new subscribers from your last post. I'm glad there's a growing community around your writing because I continue to learn from it and I know others will get value out of it too!
2. One of my close friends is getting married this weekend. I'm so glad he found a life partner!
3. I went to a coffee shop and learned that their weekly roast rotates between using coffee grounds from all of the other local businesses. It brings me so much joy to see the ways all the local businesses support each other.