I spent the better part of last month being stirred up.
The work on forgiveness had been real and necessary. But letting go of old pain turned out to be, strangely, more painful than the original pain. And as the days grew colder and darker, I felt it in my body. Cold and dark too.
Opening the module on joy and equanimity felt like cracking a window. Not because it promised to fix anything, but because it reminded me that peace is possible even inside life's inevitable changes and losses. That reminder alone was worth something.
What I've been practicing
I want to share a framework I've found genuinely useful, developed by psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson. He calls it HEAL.
Have a positive experience. Enrich it by bringing your full attention to it, noticing that you're having fun, that this brings you joy. Absorb it by getting curious about the physical sensations. What does enjoyment actually feel like in your body? Then Link the positive experience with a painful one, connecting what Hanson calls the "salt" of life with the "fresh water" of joy.
That last step is the one that surprised me. The point isn't to use happiness to escape pain. It's to hold both at the same time, using what the contemplative traditions call the two wings of mindfulness: clear awareness and compassion. You look at the joyful experience, then you look at the difficult one, and you let them exist together.
During the holidays, which carry real grief for a lot of us, I've been practicing this deliberately. I plan something genuinely fun with people I love. While I'm in it, I close my eyes for a moment and find the felt sense of it. The warmth. The ease. The simple pleasure of being with people I care about. Later, when I'm alone and a difficult memory surfaces or a depressive thought starts circling, I recall the earlier feeling and I link them. Not to cancel one out. To let them be part of the same life.
What I've learned about joy
I cannot force it. There are days when I reach into my chest and find it empty, or thorny, or simply tired. My old instinct in those moments is to scold myself for lacking gratitude or imagination. That always makes it worse.
What actually helps is returning to the most basic teachings. Suffering is natural. Everything changes. I am not alone in this. These aren't consolations. They're true. And when I can actually feel them rather than just recite them, something loosens. A spaciousness opens up. And spaciousness, I've found, is where joy can eventually find a foothold.
A few things that reliably bring me back to that ground. Being with other people, even briefly, even strangers, reminds me how universal all of this is. My suffering isn't a personal defect. It's just what being human feels like. Reading and listening to teachers I trust zooms me back out when I've gotten lost in what's missing or wrong. And moving my body, through yoga, dance, a long walk, takes me out of my head and back into the present moment. Once I'm there, once the anxious scanning has quieted, it becomes much easier to simply be.
The hardest lesson
Jack Kornfield said something in this module that landed hard: "Your happiness and suffering depend on your actions and your thoughts, and not my wishes for you. You realize that you can love someone tremendously, but you can't love for them. You can't fix them."
I have spent a significant portion of my life believing the opposite.
As a child, I learned that my behavior created emotional outcomes for the adults around me. Good behavior made peace. Bad behavior caused pain. If things were already bad, it was sometimes my job to fix them. I was very earnest about this responsibility. I carried it well into adulthood, which meant I also expected others to carry it for me. I looked to friends and partners to generate happiness I couldn't find on my own. That's not love. That's a transaction. And it caused a lot of harm in both directions.
Equanimity is teaching me, slowly and repeatedly, that this was always a lie. Not a cruel one. Just a fundamental misunderstanding of how suffering and happiness actually work. No one can fix me. I cannot fix anyone else. The attachment that comes even from genuine love, if it insists on a particular emotional outcome, creates more suffering than it relieves.
I don't say this as someone who has resolved it. I say it as someone who keeps learning the same lesson and finding it slightly less devastating each time.