Hi friends!

I loved this week’s podcast conversation with Stanford Professor Kelly McGonigal: Her latest book is Joy is a Risk Worth Taking. I think our chat is really substantive and heartening and I hope you’ll tune in. (Episode page is here: “Joy for People Who Aren’t Happy,” you can find the episode on Apple, Spotify, etc.)

Kelly gave this community a homework assignment: Ask someone what brings them joy. As she explains, “A couple things happen. When you ask someone about what brings them joy, you are sending a message to that person that their happiness matters, that you care about them, you're interested in them.”

Next, ask yourself the same things. You can think about it in the context of the last 24 hours. Just one thing.

The assignment is short, it’s easy, it’s helpful—we need to remember what’s beautiful and alive and compelling when things are hard. Too many of us think, “It’s hard, I must match that frequency.” And then we burn out and despair.

if you feel compelled, please share your joy moment in the comments below (they’re finally turned ON). Alternately, bring your joy to this Saturday’s Office Hours with me, at 10amPT on ZOOM. We’re going to talk about good girl programming, and we’re also going to talk about joy—because sometimes we get scared to share what’s going well when things are going so badly for so many. You can register here.

(My joy moment: A fun dinner with fun new friends where I was reminded how many smart, interesting, and multi-varied people there are in the world who all have very different vocations.)

Kelly told me that when she was thick in the process of getting her book through production, an email from me landed in her inbox, and it felt like a bit of a synchronous god wink, as it correlated with many of the points she makes in her book. She was at that despairing point in her publishing journey where she was thinking, Is anyone gonna care? Well, I care; we care. Joy is an essential energy to get us through these times. The newsletter was behind the paywall, so I’ve republished it below. I sent it in January when things were feeling especially grim—things might be feeling slightly less grim (maybe?), but it all still stands.

I spent this past weekend in beautiful Northern California, mostly convening with groups of women. These were pre-planned events, scheduled around On Our Best Behavior and Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, though I’ve come to understand in the past few years that regardless of what’s on the menu, attention and nervous systems will likely be pulled by unfolding catastrophes across the globe. It is a very intense time to be alive.

This week, it’s ICE’s compounding and terrifying actions in Minnesota and the slow-trickle of horrific news emerging from an internet blacked out Iran. And it’s simply too much. (It also feels like too much to hope that they are respective tipping points, that the Iranian regime could topple and that the U.S.’s strides toward authoritarianism might be curtailed.) It’s very important to note: As shocked as we are in the U.S., events here are incomparable in terms of the scale of devastation—reports are still preliminary, but it appears that more than 20,000 protestors have been gunned down and burned alive in Iran during this recent uprising. As I wrote two weeks ago, though, it does feel like we are watching the beginning and the end of the same movie.

Last Summer, when ICE was focusing its efforts on Los Angeles and Trump had commandeered the National Guard from the State, and sent them in to police citizens, I sat with Thomas Hübl, with whom I’ve collaborated on half a dozen podcast episodes. Thomas wrote Healing Collective Trauma and Attuned and specializes in helping groups process energy—whether it’s their own trauma, or inherited from ancestors, or just stuck and present in a physical place.

I asked him for guidance, as I feel like many of us (myself included) find that our nervous systems are flooded with hyper-awareness and hyper-arousal. One antidote to this is to take action, even if it feels small: Call your representatives, donate to on-the-ground causes (here’s a comprehensive list for Minnesota), support journalism, and re-post on social media (not for virtue signaling, but to boost virality in algorithms as news is often suppressed from peoples’ feeds—this feels particularly important for a currently voiceless Iranian people). But while actions—even small—are helpful and important, it’s still overwhelming: We’re not able to metabolize this much information, this fast.

I’ve spoken to a lot of therapists, healers, and activists about this, but the way Hübl framed his response has stuck with me, as I think it speaks to a deeper cord in the collective, particularly for women. Last Summer, he had just returned from a massive trauma conference for healers where this had been one of the main subjects of conversation: How do we keep people regulated in a dysregulated world—particularly because regulation and dysregulation are contagious. If we can stay regulated, we can hold a higher vibration—or at the very least, lower the temperature just a tiny bit. If we can stay regulated, there’s less chance of kicking up other peoples’ PTSD and trauma responses.

And then he offered that self-regulation is the mature response, and this response requires a lot of self-work, because many of us believe that “when the world is very volatile, I also need to be in this volatility to be loyal to this state.” Translation: I need to match the emotional tenor of the moment. If I am not freaking out, or feeling acute distress at the same intensity as the most distressed, then I am not a good person and I don’t care. I need to demonstrate how much this hurts me, too.

Can you relate? I can.

(You can listen to the full conversation here: “When We’re Committed to the Most Extreme Reaction.”)

The problem with this, of course, is that this is not sustainable—and it’s actually not helpful. Empathic distress burns us out: We can’t maintain this much dysregulation and still capably response. This is why it is incumbent on all of us who are not immediately imperiled to have and experience our good days, to laugh, to take breaks from the news, and to find joy. And when we are immediately imperiled, we still need to find an opportunity to do those things, too. (As Loretta Ross writes in Calling In, “I admire how Americans generously respond to natural disasters by reaching out to help without thinking to ask if victims deserved what happened to them. I want us to feel that way in response to man-made tragedies as well. Fighting hate should be fun; it’s being a Nazi that sucks!” (p. 123))

I spent this past weekend in beautiful Northern California, mostly convening with groups of women. These were pre-planned events, scheduled around On Our Best Behavior and Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, though I’ve come to understand in the past few years that regardless of what’s on the menu, attention and nervous systems will likely be pulled by unfolding catastrophes across the globe. It is a very intense time to be alive.

This week, it’s ICE’s compounding and terrifying actions in Minnesota and the slow-trickle of horrific news emerging from an internet blacked out Iran. And it’s simply too much. (It also feels like too much to hope that they are respective tipping points, that the Iranian regime could topple and that the U.S.’s strides toward authoritarianism might be curtailed.) It’s very important to note: As shocked as we are in the U.S., events here are incomparable in terms of the scale of devastation—reports are still preliminary, but it appears that more than 20,000 protestors have been gunned down and burned alive in Iran during this recent uprising. As I wrote two weeks ago, though, it does feel like we are watching the beginning and the end of the same movie.

Last Summer, when ICE was focusing its efforts on Los Angeles and Trump had commandeered the National Guard from the State, and sent them in to police citizens, I sat with Thomas Hübl, with whom I’ve collaborated on half a dozen podcast episodes. Thomas wrote Healing Collective Trauma and Attuned and specializes in helping groups process energy—whether it’s their own trauma, or inherited from ancestors, or just stuck and present in a physical place.

I asked him for guidance, as I feel like many of us (myself included) find that our nervous systems are flooded with hyper-awareness and hyper-arousal. One antidote to this is to take action, even if it feels small: Call your representatives, donate to on-the-ground causes (here’s a comprehensive list for Minnesota), support journalism, and re-post on social media (not for virtue signaling, but to boost virality in algorithms as news is often suppressed from peoples’ feeds—this feels particularly important for a currently voiceless Iranian people). But while actions—even small—are helpful and important, it’s still overwhelming: We’re not able to metabolize this much information, this fast.

I’ve spoken to a lot of therapists, healers, and activists about this, but the way Hübl framed his response has stuck with me, as I think it speaks to a deeper cord in the collective, particularly for women. Last Summer, he had just returned from a massive trauma conference for healers where this had been one of the main subjects of conversation: How do we keep people regulated in a dysregulated world—particularly because regulation and dysregulation are contagious. If we can stay regulated, we can hold a higher vibration—or at the very least, lower the temperature just a tiny bit. If we can stay regulated, there’s less chance of kicking up other peoples’ PTSD and trauma responses.

And then he offered that self-regulation is the mature response, and this response requires a lot of self-work, because many of us believe that “when the world is very volatile, I also need to be in this volatility to be loyal to this state.” Translation: I need to match the emotional tenor of the moment. If I am not freaking out, or feeling acute distress at the same intensity as the most distressed, then I am not a good person and I don’t care. I need to demonstrate how much this hurts me, too.

Can you relate? I can.

(You can listen to the full conversation here: “When We’re Committed to the Most Extreme Reaction.”)

The problem with this, of course, is that this is not sustainable—and it’s actually not helpful. Empathic distress burns us out: We can’t maintain this much dysregulation and still capably response. This is why it is incumbent on all of us who are not immediately imperiled to have and experience our good days, to laugh, to take breaks from the news, and to find joy. And when we are immediately imperiled, we still need to find an opportunity to do those things, too. (As Loretta Ross writes in Calling In, “I admire how Americans generously respond to natural disasters by reaching out to help without thinking to ask if victims deserved what happened to them. I want us to feel that way in response to man-made tragedies as well. Fighting hate should be fun; it’s being a Nazi that sucks!” (p. 123))