This week's question pretty much cuts to the heart of the matter, and it's from just wondering. And she says, are we ever gonna feel good again? It seems like the whole year and maybe next year is just struggled up calm. Can we ever feel good? And she did include her birth information. So I am going to take a peek.

At just wonderings, birth chart, but I really wanted to talk about this subject because it's deep and it's real, and so many of us, so many of us around the world are really struggling. We are struggling because of how scary living through a global pandemic is, especially in a global world. We are scared for ourselves.

We're scared for the health and welfare of others. It's economically frightening. The very nature of this crisis is terrifying. It can feel like it is robbing you of your joy. Now, just wondering, I was really glad that you asked this question in the way you did. You didn't ask me about happiness. You asked me about joy and joy and happiness are different things.

The differences between them are subtle, but meaningful. The thing about happiness is that happiness is kind of an emotional response to what's happening. Right, it's, I got this pressie and I'm happy. I got an a on my test and I'm happy. The state of joyfulness is not dependent on what is happening. It is essentially a choice.

It is a state of mind. Now, you know me. I am not a huge fan of positive vibes only, and I actually don't think that happiness is a prerequisite to a life well lived or being spiritually, psychologically, or emotionally successful. Some people aren't hard wired for happiness. It's not their like life's goal or it's not the most important thing for them.

And I want to say that that is totally different than joyfulness. Totally different. Now there's crossover obvi, but it's different from joyfulness. Mother Teresa, you may have heard of her, said where there is love, there is joy. Joy is a feeling that Springs forth from aligning with love. And for some people at some moments it's ecstatic and for some people at some moments, I would say for all people, at some moments it's peace or it's calm or it's satisfaction.

Joy can be embodied in many different ways, but it is a really important part of the human condition. And especially of the part of our human condition that has peace and has repose and is resilient, right? There is the resiliency that comes from trauma or from pressure. That resiliency of like, I got kicked down and I'm going to get back up again.

I'm going to fight. There's another level or layer to resiliency that I think kind of gets talked about less, which is that of joy, that of love. One's capacity for. Resiliency requires that we are willing and able to feel all of our feelings without losing contact with joy and love. And that is hard. It is a life practice and if you are finding through this global pandemic that you are not naturally good at it, that's cool.

You've got a lot of company, my friend, a lot of company, we're all struggling with this and I say we're all struggling with this, but if I'm honest, I am getting. A lot of questions from you guys, like a lot of questions and a lot of the questions I'm receiving are actually from people who are experiencing joy.

You are experiencing more relief and more calm and more joy. You're quite satisfied with your lives right now and you're writing me being like, what the F like how is this happening? And I think it's really important to recognize that if you are privileged enough to be safe. And to be healthy and to be secure.

Then in some ways, this period of this pandemic has stripped away distractions and even obligations that have been been imposed upon you by society or maybe are self-imposed right. TBD. I don't know what's going on with you personally, but this is a period where you may be finding that you have actually some space to connect with what truly matters.

Now, that is not the situation for everyone, and it's important that we, without guilt or shame, acknowledge that that is a privilege and it is a beautiful privilege. Feel good about that. I think it's especially true for people who are naturally introverted. What a gift to introverts. If you have enough privilege to be safe and secure and healthy at this time, what a gift.

There's a pressure to get out there and get it done. You can stay in here and get it done and that's nice, but I am getting even more questions from you. Struggling, struggling of course with situations, but also struggling with yourself. Struggling with what am I doing with my life? I'm in a partnership.

Why in the world am I in this partnership? I want to burn my whole shit to the ground. I want to burn it all to the ground. Getting a lot of questions like that. That's normal. That's healthy. That's, that's okay. It's your psyche trying to cope with something that nobody psyche is really wired to really cope with, which is feeling so deeply out of control and frightened.

And everywhere you look everywhere is out of control and frightened. Right? And so it's really important that. When we look at the concept of joy, when we look at the emotional, spiritual, and psychological pressure that we are all under to say nothing of the physical pressures, right? It is really hard, but absolutely valuable to focus on aligning with joy.

To look for it in the little things. If you have never had a gratitude list or you once did it and you're not doing it now, girls started today. Everybody just started today. And a gratitude list can be really deep and it can be really shallow and you know, if you're going to do it long term, it will probably be a little bit of both.

And you want to keep it succinct and what this is, if you once a day. Take pains to write, I dunno. Six things that you feel grateful for. What it does is it repetitively aligns you. With what you have to be grateful for with the abundance that you have within your world with the privileges and luck and resources and gifts and potential that you have.

And by doing that, you don't ignore the negative. You just add to the noise that is in your head. You add to what your psyche understands and experiences as a real. And we need that. We really need that. I personally have taken greater pains since this whole thing started to be a lot more conscientious about what I follow on social media.

I'm, you know, looking for positive stories more than I ever have before. And I'm also reading more news than I ever have before. So for me, the answer for joyfulness is having balance. It's not about less news for you. The answer might be less news for a period of time. Just don't let it be no news. My friends just don't let it be no news.

Now I've gotten off track of, of joy. Now I saw something on my Instagram feed by a woman named Mel Robbins, and she said, stop saying I'm stuck inside and start saying I'm safe at home, and if you are safe at home, I want to really just share that reframe. I thought it was a really beautiful reframe.

Aligning yourself with where you can be joyful. Doesn't mean you're happy. It doesn't mean that the pandemic is cleared up, but it means you are choosing where your energy goes and pools. I am a huge fan, and I'm sure most of you, if not all of you, have read Kellyville Gibran the prophet, and he has this really beautiful piece of writing on joy and sorrow, and it is something that if you haven't ever read it or if you haven't read it in a long time, look it up. Get the book. It is amazing. What he says is that your joy is sorrow unmasked. And essentially this is kind of the flip of a concept I've talked about a lot on the podcast over the course of time, which is that every light casts a shadow. That your grief is really the underside of your love. If you feel grief for humanity, it is because you love humanity.

If you feel grief for someone that you know kind of distantly, who's struggling right now, that is because surprise, surprise. You love them. You experience love for them. And this idea that we have that I'm only in love with my partner, or like my crush or my mom or whatever, that's, that's a misunderstanding of what love is.

That's one form of love. That's a very intimate form of love, but there are many forms of love. And they are joyful and part of our grief is kind of the shit side of that love. But you know what? We can't have one without the other. I don't want to sound cheesy and I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna, but I do want to say rejoice, that you are capable of so much love and that your grief and your sadness.

It is actually the part of you that cannot help but know that you love humanity, you love others, and even you love yourself and your own life, maybe more than you knew now that you feel grief over what you are fearing or losing. This really got me to thinking a lot about this thing I always talk about of how light cast shadow all light casts, shadow the very nature of light, not talking.

Woo. I'm talking like scientifically and obviously I'm not a fucking scientist and I'm not an expert in science, so if I get this wrong, I want to pre apologize. Okay. But. As far as I understand it, the very nature of light is particulate and wave. It is energy and it is matter. Right. And the nature of darkness from a scientific perspective is fascinating because from a scientific perspective, there is actually no such thing as darkness.

What. What? It's relative and it's subjective. It is a stillness. It is an opening and so is our joylessness. So it was our grief. So it was our suffering. And if we can realign and reconnect with where and how we love, that doesn't mean we'll be happy. But we can be in a state of joyfulness, some measure of peace, fullness around our feelings, and that organically brings us in greater resonance with light.

Now obviously I'm talking woo and not science. So all of that said. Now, just wondering, I wanted to pull up your chart and just wondering, was born on March 29th in 1983 at 3:29 PM in San Paolo, Brazil? You know what struck me when I pulled up your chart is that you in your birth chart hop a moon, Pluto, Saturn conjunction.

Now Saturn and the moon are quite far apart, but Pluto is like as a kind of connective tissue between your moon and Saturn. And they all form an opposition to your needle Mars. And so for you, feeling trapped and feeling limited is associated with depression. It's associated with pain. And what I want to encourage you to do, my dear, is to stay in the stillness practice being emotionally present in the stillness.

And that's it. Oh God, I know. It sounds way too simple. I know. But whenever Pluto is involved, the more simple the approach and the more patient we are with our execution of that approach, the better. Now I'm talking about whenever Pluto is involved in terms of psychological and emotional and spiritual development, what this would look like is getting still.

Once a day. And if all you can tolerate is 30 seconds a day, that's success. And if you can tolerate three minutes, mazel Tov. But what I want to encourage you to do is set, let's say for 30 seconds and breathe and keep on feeling your body and locate your feelings in your body. So that is likely to feel like unrest.

Or pain or distress physically, and my advice to you is to simply sit with it, continuing to breathe into that part of your body or those parts of your feelings and be kind and be present. Don't abandon yourself around those feelings. Be in the stillness with yourself. Be in the stillness with yourself because actually in the stillness, there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of feelings kind of buzzing around, but the stillness is just that.

It is actually a state of stillness, and if you can be present with that, it is the greatest kindness. His greatest kindness you can offer yourself. And this is not going to change the global pandemic. It's not going to change your fears. It's not going to change the world around you. But what it will do is start to give you moment by moment coping tools.

It will give you inner resourcing that over the course of time will meaningfully change how you feel and how you cope with how you feel, and that's your best move. And that move will support you and having more joy, or at least being able to recognize when you forgotten to choose joy, when you've forgotten to align with joy and when you forgotten that you are actually a powerful being.

You are a survivor with all this stuff in your chart that I'm looking at. You are a survivor, but you know, you're also an Aries with a sun mercury conjunction in Aries trying to Jupiter, Uranus conjunction and Sagittarius. So in other words, you're really, really impatient. It is easy for you to not locate yourself in that stillness and in your feelings, but there's nothing but time.

Right now, my dear friend, there is nothing but time as much as you are able choose joy.