What is Joyful Practice

a personal manifesto

Last week, at the age of 48, I earned an ADHD diagnosis. Arriving at a new understanding of my brain has been transformative, and I wanted to write about that here, but I’ve been having trouble finding the words for it.

Next week, Sarah and I will begin our 8-week virtual workshop, Joyful Practice for Dark Times (still a few spots left!) and as we’ve fine-tuned our planning, I keep telling myself lean into the Joyful Practice part of the title. (The Dark Times part is taking care of itself.)

I realized that to lean into Joyful Practice, I had to define it for myself — to wrap my hands around the shape of this thing I’ve been trying to grasp.

Joyful practice, for me, has been my life’s project over the decade broadly and over the last two years in particular. Two years ago, on a dare to myself, I traded my stable, full-time job for a flexible part-time role. I quit because my kids needed me, but the deeper truth is that I needed me. To put it another way, there was room in my life for my kids and my job, but there wasn’t much left over for me.

I wanted to trust that I could cut back on work, live close to the bone, and a new path would emerge. Saying I wanted to trust is different from saying that I trusted. I was scared. I’ve been scared. The new path didn’t emerge quickly. But luckily a magical stubbornness emerged in me. I did the following things:

I took out a loan and bought a tiny house from a friend. It immediately became my sanctuary, a place for me to have restorative quiet. I’m in here now typing and looking around at my favorite things. I didn’t know how much I needed my very own space until I had it.

I’ve worked steadily on my own volition, putting daily energy into things I want to do. I’ve sent out pitches and submitted essays. I’ve built a small portfolio of picture book drafts. For some strange reason, I haven’t worried or lost heart when my work lands in the void. The void is a hungry place, I guess. It needs feeding. I’ve not concluded that I’m on the wrong path or unworthy. I just keep returning to the work I want to create. I keep believing in it.

Sometimes I encounter opportunities that, practically speaking, I should pursue—things that don’t inspire me but would provide some measure of security. I watch those opportunities gather dust. I notice that I’m not pursuing them, that I feel solid about not pursuing them, and I think, Wow, okay. That’s new.

I don’t believe in grit anymore. I don’t believe in discipline. I don’t believe in making people do things. My Autistic kids have taught me that. My own neurodivergence, now that I’m listening, has taught me that. I don’t believe in forcing myself do things.

I do believe in hard work when it’s driven by the heart and the body. I believe in slowing down and showing up. I believe in noticing what’s hard and letting it be hard.

I believe in resilience insofar as it means staying alive and attuning to the self. I reject any notion of resilience that means conforming to the demands of a broken system or coming back for more abuse.

For me, joyful practice has meant letting go of things I’ve clung to out of fear. It has meant understanding that things can go wrong, but still taking risks.

Joyful practice means that in the morning, when I put on Democracy Now and Amy Goodman reads the day’s horrific news, I dance to the funk music that plays in the background (the track is “Need to Know” by Incognito and I swear it was designed for this), not because the news itself is joyful, but because I need that information to move through my body rather than festering in my joints.

Joyful practice means celebrating queerness, rejecting the gender binary, and inhabiting forbidden spaces.

Joyful practice means remembering that laughter is a tonic.

Joyful practice means pursuing friendship with animals and honoring their sovereign intelligence.

Joyful practice means plunging into the cold sea.

Joyful practice means attending to the energy of money, noticing where it feels good to give and receive and where money gets stuck in entropy. Joyful practice means withholding from the oligarchs.

Joyful practice means seeking out stories and music by elders who have endured and claimed claimed their space in the world. It means watching this clip of Patti Lupone:

and this performance by Big Freedia:

Joyful practice means seeking stories and music by those who are younger than me and driven by the wisdom of youth:

Joyful practice means witnessing myself claim space where I once would have hidden.

Joyful practice means that when I sit down to write, I ask my brain what it wants to work on and I listen to its answer. We have a daily dialogue (my brain and I) about which projects feel exciting and generative, which ones are asking to go on the shelf.

Joyful practice understands that “pushing through” is overrated, that when you’re tired it’s better to rest and restore than to try to keep driving on an empty tank.

Joyful practice is the liberation of my ADHD brain: the unbridled enthusiasm and curiosity I experience, the every-which-way my brain wants to go, not because I have a deficit of attention, but because I have a surplus of curiosity, because I’m wired for hypervigilance, and therefore I require some extra quiet time, some stillness, some gentleness in my life.

Joyful practice is a way of being that has slowly been coming into focus for me. I want to practice it in solitude and in community.

Yesterday morning, I sat on the couch with my partner and told her that Joyful Practice was the name of my new philosophy. Like me, she’s a little scared of the word joyful, because there’s nothing more vulnerable than joy. But I’ve come to see it as an expansive word—adjacent to happiness, yes, but also to the whole range of human emotions. Joyful practice means letting your body be a conduit. It means letting life move through you rather than happen to you.