emotional maturity

Feelings VIII: The Sense of Joy

A couple of blogs past we offered Feelings VI: It’s All About Hurt, and then paradoxically offered Feelings VII: It’s Not All About Hurt in which we suggested that the feeling of joy is just as important as the feeling of sadness, which is the heart of “hurt.” Today we would like to unpack this business of joy and try to be practical about how we can experience and express more joy in our lives. Keep in mind that the emotion of sadness and the emotion of joy are on a continuum of love. In other words, we feel joy and sadness singularly because we love something: joy when we have it, sadness when we lose it. We have written extensively in several venues (blogs, papers, and our book, The Power of Positive Sadness) about the importance of sadness, which we yet think is the heart of most difficulties people have in life, like relationship problems, anxiety, depression, and anger. But today we would like to look at the other side of the “love continuum,” namely the side that is about having something that we love, which brings some kind of joy to us.

Joy is most easily recognized through one or more of our five senses, but also comes through intuition, cognition and fantasy, which we are daring to call our “sixth sense”. We will start this discussion by examining the ways joy enters our system through our five physical senses and then proceed into the murky waters of intuition. As we examine the various ways that we experience joy, consider your own experiences with joy, whether recent or long past.

Joy coming through the sense of smell (olfactory)

This might seem an odd way to begin our discussion of the experience of joy in the five senses. When we think of smell, we generally think of bad smell, rank, rancid, or disgusting. So, while smell might not seem the most obvious way to start a discussion of joy as experienced in the five senses, it is actually the most important place to start because the sense of smell is our most basic sense. Consider the animal kingdom, whether it is a bear sniffing the air for the scent of pray or your dog sniffing telephone poles and certain portions of other animals’ anatomy, and you will see this most central sense operating in nonhuman animals. Smell might well have been the first sense developed, at least by mammals. Furthermore, there is an interesting thing about smell that most people don’t know but that contributes to many addictions. With all the other four senses (sight, touch, hearing, and taste) information that comes into the sense organs goes through a transfer point in the brain before we actually have cognition of it. But smell goes through no transfer point, and instead goes directly into the cerebral cortex, which then creates some kind of thought or action. It seems that this most primitive sense remains primary, at least if we see how smells are processed in the brain. Interested readers might rea about pheromones, which are chemicals that trigger a social response in the animal kingdom including humans. It is the smell of something that immediately enters our brain, much more quickly than the other four senses. Consider the aromas that entice you, like flowers, new mown hay, meat cooking on the grill, the stew simmering on the stove or the smell of fresh air in the autumn.

Joy in hearing (auditory)

Something heard might be offensive, but actually most of what is heard is on the pleasant side of the spectrum of like/dislike. There are many kinds of sounds that reach our brains through our ears. Music is one of the predominate vehicles for experiencing joy through the sense of hearing.  Music is universal from tribal drums to Gregorian chants. Music is described often as “moving” “Being moved” is a way of describing this indescribable experience we call feeling that connects us to either a memory or evokes a sense of ease and peace internally. What pleases you when it comes to music: Christmas cantatas, a bit of sax jazz or maybe the Spanish guitar?  The choices are as varied as there are people in the world. The feeling that one has with music is what we want to discuss in our continuing attempt to get at what “feeling” is all about.

What does it mean to be “moved” by music? This “being moved” is a “feeling,” including emotion but it is more than emotion. One person can have a profoundly positive experience and another a significantly negative one, all to the same music. Once at a men’s workshop, I played Pacobel’s Cannon, to which Deb and I were married, and which I find to be quite “moving” in a positive way. I enjoy hearing the Canon. However, when I played the Canon, one of the men in the group said, “I hate this piece of music.” Both his feeling and mine were genuine, both were valid, and both needed to be expressed but not to incite an argument. Bob and I took turns talking about our feelings about the Canon and in so doing, learned about each other.

While the most dramatic, music is not the only auditory experience that can bring positive feelings. Pleasant auditory feelings can be nature-created: wind through pines, the cardinal’s song, water lapping and rain on the roof. Human made sounds can be just as wonderful: Distant train horns, office laughter, the giggling of young children, engines operating at peak performance, or even the ticking of a clock.

Note the sounds in your life that bring you a sense of pleasure, which is that “feeling” coming to you when you hear something wonderous or satisfying. How often do you comment on these favorable sounds compared to the honking cars, barking dogs, or screaming children that you find offensive?

Joy in touch (kinesthetic)

As music is first to come to mind when we think of pleasurable sounds, sex usually comes to mind when we think of pleasurable experiences of touch. Certainly, sexual contact in its many forms is nearly universally a good feeling. There are, of course, many people, for whom this is not the case, not the least of which are those who have been molested early in life. For the larger majority of people, sexual touch is gratifying and brings this good feeling, “good feeling” being a term we have used for the many experiences in life.  One of the components of sexual or intimate touching is that it is generally reciprocal. It is the exchange of touch the give and take that adds so much to sexual or intimate pleasure.

“Just touching”, that is the simple act of tactile engagement brings a multiplicity of pleasure. The first jump of summer into a cool lake, brushing your hand along ancient monuments,  stroking your pet or ruffling the hair of a child, grasping your favorite fountain pen or the warmth of your morning coffee mug.  For some, like artisans, the touch of their tool can actually ignite their inspiration. A carpenter can pick up a block of wood and sense what to do with it. I know an artist who describes the picking up of her brushes as a “holy sensation”. We all know the wonderfulness of touching our pet or feeling them brush up near us, to hug a friend at the airport when they arrive, a good strong and secure handshake at the end of a successful business meeting and of course, the pleasure of when your grand-daughter slips her little hand into yours is that “good feeling” that is only experiences through touch.

Touching and being touched can reach deep inside of us and may even reach our core self. If I am touched by a person familiar to me, that touching can be quite spontaneous as well as particularly pleasant, partly because the touch was unexpected. At that moment, you can feel something special, something of a connection, something safe even though the touch was simple and short. This simple and short positive experience can also occur when you touch something, whether living or nonliving. What happens in moments like this is that this person or thing has had an enhancing effect on you. You feel yourself, and also you feel better in some way. Do you acknowledge the pleasure, contentment, connection, or safety that comes with certain kinds of touch?

Joy in taste (gustatory)

Similar to the olfactory senses, the sense of taste provides the greatest variety of good and bad feelings. “Good” and “bad” may be due largely to acquired taste. Who immediately liked coffee when you first tasted it as a child? Who didn’t like ice cream as a child? It appears that the sense of taste, more than any of the other five senses, appears to develop over time largely with familial and cultural influences. I am impressed with Mexican and East Indian folks who can pop hot peppers into their mouths and enjoy the flavor when some people might become seriously ill with such ingestion. Consider the taste of sugar, meat, fruits, vegetables, alcoholic drinks, and a glass of water with a fresh slice of lemon or lime. Which are to your liking. Which feel right? My wife loves to prepare green bean in drizzle of olive oil, a well sliced onion and a good splash of white wine and wonders how anyone else wouldn’t like her prep.  Our grandson doesn’t like green beans at all, and probably wouldn’t even if grandmother coated them in sugar. Taste is about as individual as there are people on the planet.

Joy in sight (visual)

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? I continue to find that true even as my preferred mode of communication is with spoken or written words. Sight is perhaps my weakest sense, at least somewhat due to the fact that I am color blind. When Deb points out the roses on a wild rose bush we pass on the road, or the tomatoes on the vine as we are walking from the office to the house, I am always at a loss to see such things. As we speak we are in the last of summer where everything is lush and green, perhaps my least favorite color because I often cannot distinguish green from red, brown, or gray. Where Deb uses terms like Kelly green or chartreuse, or when I read something like “very verde,” I am bemused because all these colors are simply green. Driving home from our cabin up north last week the forests were alive with color and shape for Deb, the shades very distinct. I can appreciate a sunset and the like, and I even commented to Deb on how we might have a full moon next week, but I am not moved by things visual the way so many people are.

People who are more gifted in matters visual are a gift to the world. Such people are those who create visual things and those who appreciate them. Clearly, artists of all visual forms are those who use their talents to enhance the visual beauty of the world. There is something special in the artist who often feels compelled to create visual art. Michelangelo reportedly “saw” David before he carved him and only needed to chip away the marble from what he “saw.” Artists certainly have an appreciation for art in its many forms, perhaps especially in their chosen modality, but appreciation of art is something that many people have. Things that are seen include the created art of painting, natural art of the Colorado Mountains or Niagara Falls, or the simple beauty of two young girls dressed up for a dance recital. In everything seen, there is potential for joy or for disgust. Consider how many times you have spoken of what you have seen noting the frequency of your comments about what is beautiful.

There are many more things seen that are quite beautiful, often only to the eye of the beholder. Once while playing basketball, I was lucky enough to catch a “baseball pass” from a teammate and make a layup. A few minutes later another teammate graciously said my play was “a thing of beauty.” There are many such things of beauty that the “eye of the beholder” might see that others might not including shapes of objects, like elements of nature, human-made objects, or the human body. Use your imagination.

With all of the senses we are discussing, consider if for you it is easier to focus on the negative compared to the joyful. Then you might just share this joy coming from one or more of your senses, or you might be just as pleased to recognize it and remember it.

Further reading

Previous 7 blogs on Feelings

Forthcoming Feelings IX: joy from the sixth sense (intuition)