I don't believe in chasing happiness. I believe in creating joy.

When we talk about happiness, we often talk about getting our circumstances right.

Finding the right job. Having the right relationship. Going on holiday. Having enough money. Having people around us who treat us well.

And of course, all of these things influence how we feel. Our environment matters. The people around us matter. Our circumstances matter.

I am not saying that they don't.

I also think it makes sense to change things in your life that don't work for you. It makes sense to talk to your partner about certain behaviours and ask for what you want. It makes sense to create an environment that supports you.

But I don't want to wait until everything outside of me is right before I allow myself to be happy.

Because when I do that, I give my circumstances a lot of power over my inner state.

I am basically saying: I will be happy when this changes. I will feel good when this person behaves differently. I will be joyful when my life looks a certain way.

And this is what I mean when I talk about chasing happiness.

You are looking for something outside of you that will finally give you the feeling you want to have.

What I am much more interested in is creating joy.

And for me, creating joy means building my capacity to experience joy.

I have become much more aware of what joy actually feels like in my body.

For me, it is an expansion in my chest. I feel an uplifting sensation, almost like I am getting bigger around my chest and my head.

And when I notice that I am feeling joyful because of something that is happening around me, I can catch it.

I can notice, oh, I am getting joyful right now.

And then I can deliberately choose to stay with it.

I can feel the sensation.

I can allow it to become bigger.

I can allow it to become more intense.

And this is actually a practice.

Because we are often not very used to feeling a lot of joy for a longer period of time.

Maybe you see a friend and you feel really happy to see them. You feel the joy, and then you move on with your day.

Or something really beautiful happens and you enjoy it for a moment, but then you are already thinking about the next thing.

And I find it interesting that we can really want joy, we can chase joy, we can think that we would be so much happier if we had more joy in our lives, and then when the sensation of joy actually becomes very intense, it can feel uncomfortable.

Thoughts can come up like:

Maybe I don't deserve this.
Something bad is going to happen.
This is too good.
The higher you go, the further you fall.

And suddenly you are not really experiencing the joy anymore. You are already worrying about losing it.

You are somewhere in the future, thinking about what might happen next.

And I think this is where building capacity for joy becomes really interesting.

You can learn to be with the sensation of joy, even when it is intense.

You can get more familiar with it.

You can make it more normal for yourself to feel really, really good.

One of the places where I notice this very strongly is at concerts.

I love going to live concerts, especially open-air concerts.

I love being in the crowd and feeling the energy of the crowd and the energy of the band. Everybody is there, dancing and singing along, and there is this feeling of being with so many other people and being completely in the experience.

It brings up a lot of joy for me.

And I used to be much more self-conscious about that.

I would look around and notice that maybe the people around me weren't as excited about the music as I was.

And then I would become aware of myself dancing and being in my own world and maybe feeling like I was having too much joy.

So I would check what other people were doing and adjust my own level of joy and expressiveness to what I was seeing around me.

Over the last few years, this has changed for me.

I have practiced feeling my joy.

I have become much more aware of what is happening in my body when I feel joyful, and I have become much more comfortable with the sensations.

And I also started to prioritise joy because these moments are precious to me.

Sometimes when I am at a concert and I am dancing and listening to the music, I get into this kind of trance, almost a meditative state.

I am experiencing myself in a way that is very different from my normal day-to-day consciousness.

And I am curious about that.

I want to explore where this can take me and what it is like to experience myself in ways that I haven't experienced before, or maybe to go deeper into something I have already experienced.

So now I don't want to leave that state after one song.

I want to stay there for a few songs.

I want to allow myself to really go into it.

And I don't want to make my joy smaller because somebody around me isn't expressing the same amount of joy.

I want to experience my joy.

I think this is part of creating joy.

Not only creating the circumstances that make joy more likely, but also becoming more capable of receiving it when it is there.

And this doesn't mean that I don't plan for things to go wrong.

I can absolutely think ahead and ask myself what I will do if something doesn't work out as planned.

But there is a difference between planning for adversity and worrying about feeling bad again.

Planning can be useful.

Worrying about when the joy will disappear takes me out of the joy that is actually happening right now.

And this is why I don't want to spend my life chasing happiness and waiting for the outside world to finally give me the feeling I want.

I want to build my capacity for joy.

I want to recognise it when it is there.

I want to allow myself to feel it.

And I want to become more and more comfortable with feeling a lot of it.

Maria