Have you ever felt exquisite joy and then sudden sadness?
I can jump from one intense feeling to another and here you can see it caught on camera.
It’s amazing what changing your thoughts can do, how powerful the emotion can be that one thought can create.
Foreboding Joy is a term Brene Brown uses to describe the moment when we experience a dress rehearsal for tragedy. It’s imagining or preparing for the worst even when things are at their best.
It takes courage to open yourself up to joy. Kids are generally more willing. We’re afraid if we open ourselves up to joy we’ll get blindsided by disaster or disappointment.
In the mountains, generally I’m in a state of awe, wonder, pure joy & exploration. On this hike, I slipped into foreboding joy, but thankfully jumped right back into my mountain mental zone.
I’m generally fully present & connected & feel so rejuvenated & healed even though (and often because) it includes hard physical exercise.
As soon as the mountains started turning red I started planning how to get up to where it was brightest. I knew it would take a steep long hike to get there, but I was excited.
It was a new area I hadn’t explored! My favorite kind of adventure!
This clip is when we finally got to the very spot I’d been waiting for. I had imagined how amazing it would be to get up that high and be in the middle of all the leaves. It was right after 2.5 hours of continual steep uphill of 2,687 feet elevation gain. The whole hike/run was 7.9 miles.
It felt like being in heaven, I was SO happy!
And suddenly I was crying tears of sadness!
Gay Hendricks calls this the Upper Limit Problem. It’s the brain’s subconscious way of staying in the safe zone and avoiding being vulnerable.
It can also happen when you feel guilty for being successful, ruining an amazing experience with negative thoughts, deflecting a compliment or sabotaging yourself as things get amazing.
So, be brave and vulnerable to experience more joy!
To do this, practice gratitude and fully step into it with all your senses.
Step into fear and discomfort and also layer on the self compassion and celebration.
Increase your capacity to feel happy and break success limits you’ve placed on yourself!
