What Keeps Us from Joy?

It’s a complex business, being human.

The other morning, I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. The light was coming through the window in that soft, slanted way it does in the early spring here in Vancouver, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air like tiny, golden galaxies. For a moment, a wave of pure, unadulterated joy washed over me. It was simple, profound, and utterly unexpected. It felt like a homecoming. And then… just as quickly, another voice chimed in, a familiar, tight little hum in the back of my awareness. You don’t have time for this. You should be answering emails. Look at that smudge on the window. And didn't you say you were going to meditate this morning? You're already failing. The joy—that beautiful, expansive feeling—flickered, and the familiar hum of low-grade anxiety returned, pulling me back into the well-worn groove of doing, planning, and worrying.

Does this sound familiar? That fleeting moment of peace, of simple happiness, quickly eclipsed by the running commentary of our own minds. It’s a question I sit with often, both for myself and for my friends I work with in my healing practice: what is it that keeps us from joy? Not the grand, fireworks-in-the-sky kind of joy that our culture seems to demand, but the quiet, steady, life-giving wellspring of it that is our birthright. The joy of being, simply, here.

We often think of joy as something to be pursued, a destination to arrive at if we just work hard enough, fix ourselves enough, or achieve enough. We treat it like a prize to be won. But what if joy isn’t something we need to find, but something we need to allow? What if it’s already here, waiting for us, underneath the layers of conditioning, unconscious beliefs, and deeply grooved neural pathways that tell us we are not safe, not worthy, not enough? What if the work is not one of striving, but of remembering?

The Groove of the Default Mode

Here’s a very good thing to know. Our brains are wired for efficiency. They are magnificent organs of survival, and to conserve precious energy, they create shortcuts, habits of thought and reaction. One of the most fascinating of these is a network of brain regions called the Default Mode Network, or DMN. The DMN is what’s active when our minds are “at rest”—when we’re not focused on a specific, external task. It’s the seat of our self-referential thinking, our daydreaming, our ruminating on the past and worrying about the future. It’s the storyteller, the meaning-maker, the weaver of our personal narrative.

Now, the DMN is not the enemy. It’s essential for creativity, for planning, for weaving a coherent story of our lives. But for many of us, especially those who have experienced trauma, chronic stress, or grew up in environments where it wasn’t safe to feel good, the DMN can get stuck in a negative, self-critical groove. It becomes a relentless rumination machine, replaying old hurts, rehearsing future disasters, and critiquing our every move. It’s the inner narrator that insists on smudging the window when all you want to do is feel the sun on your face. This is when the brain operates in a higher-beta brainwave state, a state of active, anxious thinking. The hum of the DMN becomes a roar.

This isn’t a personal failing. It’s neuroscience. These patterns are deeply etched into our neural pathways through a process called Hebbian learning: “neurons that fire together, wire together.” If our early experience has taught us that life is a struggle, that we must always be vigilant for the other shoe to drop, then our default state will be one of anxiety, not joy. We unconsciously sabotage our own happiness because, on some deep, biological level, the familiar misery feels safer than the vulnerability of joy. The body remembers. It holds the score of every time we were told we were “too much,” every time our spontaneous delight was met with disapproval, every time our world felt unsafe. And so, the body learns to contract, to brace, to keep the joy at bay, because joy, in its expansive, open-hearted state, can feel terrifyingly vulnerable to a nervous system conditioned for threat.

The Stories We Carry

These neural pathways are not just abstract connections in our brain; they are the architecture of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible for us. These stories often begin in childhood, whispered to us by our families, our culture, our experiences. You have to work hard for everything. Don’t get your hopes up. It’s not safe to be seen. Good things don't last. These beliefs, often operating completely outside of our conscious awareness, become the energetic blueprint of our lives, shaping our perceptions and creating our reality from the inside out.

I worked with a woman once, a brilliant artist, who could never seem to finish a project. She would create stunning, soulful work, and then, when she was at the final 10 percent, a mysterious paralysis would set in. She’d find endless reasons to avoid the studio. As we gently explored this pattern in her system, a memory surfaced. She was a little girl, maybe five years old, proudly showing her father a drawing she had made. She had poured her whole heart into it. He glanced at it, and said, “It’s good, but you missed a spot.” Devastating. In that moment, her young, sensitive nervous system created a story: to be safe from criticism and the pain of imperfection, I must never be finished. Her pattern of self-sabotage wasn’t a flaw; it was a brilliant, protective strategy her younger self had devised to stay safe. Every pattern has served you. Every single one.

To heal is not to condemn these patterns, but to meet them with a vast and tender compassion. It is to recognize the innocent wisdom of the child who created them. It is to place a gentle hand on our own heart and say, I see you. I see how hard you have worked to keep me safe. Thank you. But I am grown now. I am safe now. And I am ready to choose something different.

This is the work of transformation. It is the work of conscious awareness, of bringing the light of our presence to these unconscious corners of ourselves. It is the practice of what the Tao Te Ching calls wei wu wei — doing by not doing. It is not about striving or forcing, but about softening, allowing, and creating the spaciousness for a new possibility to emerge. It’s about moving from the anxious beta brainwaves of the DMN into the calmer, more creative alpha and theta states, where neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change itself—is enhanced.

The Gentle Return to Joy

So how do we begin to create these new neural pathways? How do we teach our nervous systems, cell by cell, that joy is safe? We start small. We start in the body. The mind can spin its stories for eternity, but the body… the body always tells the truth. It is the gateway to the present moment.

Perhaps you can try this, even now. Pause your reading for a moment. Feel your feet on the floor, the solidness of the earth beneath you. Feel the support of the chair beneath you, holding you. Take one slow, conscious breath. Notice the sensation of the air entering your nostrils, cool and fresh. Follow it as it fills your lungs, and notice the gentle, softening release as you exhale. That’s it. That’s the practice. A single, conscious breath is a revolutionary act. It is a portal out of the ruminating mind and into the living, breathing present moment. It is an anchor in the here and now, the only place where joy can actually be found.

What would it be like if, just for today, you made a conscious choice to notice moments of simple, sensory pleasure? The warmth of your tea cup in your hands. The sound of a bird outside your window. The feeling of soft fabric against your skin. The taste of a ripe strawberry. These are not small things. They are the building blocks of a new neural reality. Each time you consciously choose to place your attention on something pleasant, and—this is the key—savor it for 10 or 20 seconds, you are firing and wiring a new neural pathway. You are carving a new groove for your brain to follow, a groove of presence, of gratitude, of… joy. You are teaching your body, in its own language, that it is safe to feel good.

This is not about pretending that the pain and the struggle don’t exist. It is about expanding our capacity to hold both. To acknowledge the smudged window, and also, to feel the sun. To honor the stories of our past, and also, to write a new one, moment by precious moment. The 30th chapter of the Tao Te Ching reminds us, “What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job?” It speaks to this integration, this wholeness. The light does not erase the dark; it illuminates it, holds it, and transforms it with its presence.

May you be gentle with yourself on this journey. May you find the courage to meet your own resistance not with force, but with a boundless and curious compassion. And may you allow yourself, even for a moment today, to feel the simple, profound, and ever-present joy that is your truest nature, waiting patiently for your return.

With infinite love and support on your journey, Susan