Pain has no such inhibitions, and will push joy out of your consciousness if you let it.
Don't let it.
Joy is quiet, but it is there, embedded in all things beautiful. And beauty is as real and ubiquitous as the laws of gravity and light.
Beauty is the name mathematics goes by when we feel it rather than think about it. Everywhere that there is matter, there is math, and everywhere that there is mathematical order, there is beauty.
Beauty is everywhere, and your life depends upon it; the graceful dance of respiration, your pulsing blood, the electric poetry of your nerves.
You don't have to notice it. It will never force you to pay attention to it. But it is always there. You wouldn't be here otherwise.
Even pain has it's own peculiar beauty.
Beauty has it's own peculiar pain, too. You cannot escape pain, and unlike joy, you can't always ignore it either. But you can fight for joy and beauty anyway.
Pain is a much smaller part of my life now than it has been in the past. I've been getting to knows my body better, and finding lots of self-care techniques. With the right nutrition, my joints don't dislocate nearly as often, and when they do, I have a toolkit full of ways to deal with it.
But last night I didn't get nearly enough sleep. My feet hurt, my knees hurt, my elbows hurt, my fingers hurt, and my neck hurts. I ought to be grateful that I don't have any ribs out, but pain sucks even when it's less pain than you're used to.
So I'm fighting hard for joy. Here are a few things that help:
---Music.
Listening to other people's music helps some, and so does making my own music. The real magic is in making music together with others. I'm so glad my flute choir rehearses to tonight. I need it.
Prayer is in this category, too. It is a powerful thing to enter into the song of the angel choirs. My voice is fumbling and often cracked and out of tune, but they are very gracious, and welcoming to beginners.
(Come to think of it, my flute choir is rather like that too, welcoming and supporting and challenging musicians of all levels of ability. If you are in the DFW area and you play the flute, you should NOT miss out on the opportunity to play with us!)
---Light. We don't always have much control over how much light there is around us, but we do have control over how much we pay attention to it. We humans can't gaze straight at the sun without getting burned, but plants feast voraciously upon the light, and over it up to us in a form that can nourish us, body and soul. Every sundrenched leaf, every blade of grass offers up a gift of joy. It will never force itself on you. You have to seek it out. This is pretty effortless in springtime in North Texas, but in some times and places, looking for light is arduous work. It is 100% worth it.
---Smells. What we breathe matters. A lot. If you can smell it, it's affecting your brain chemistry.
I'm sitting here peeling and eating clementines as I write, and they are so, so good. I'm confident that the part that I eat will help me soon, but the fragrant oils from the peels are naturally wafting up to my nose, making their way to my brain, and lifting my mood right now.
Fragrance is always affecting you all the time, whether you pay attention to it or not. So pay attention.
A lot of us find Young Living's Joy essential oil blend very helpful. But although I absolutely LOVE the smell when I'm happy, when I'm discouraged I find it obnoxiously over-cheerful. (Same goes for the Stress Away blend, by the way.)
Blending it with frankincense makes it wonderful though. They smell sublime together, and frankincense is the sort of smell that knows all about pain. If frankincense can make friends with joy, well... maybe I can, too.
