Welcome to The Daily Ascent. I'm Molly Carmel and this is the podcast I always wish existed. A bite-sized on-the-ground spiritual note that can shift your thinking and your outlook on life to help make us all a little bit more awake, alive, and ascending. So today I want to talk about something that came up for me recently while I was in a yoga class and I was thinking about why I'm so loyal to this teacher and this practice.
And why sometimes the most radical thing we can do is give ourselves permission to have fun even when everything feels heavy. So I was in my favorite yoga class the other day with my yoga teacher Greg, you know, and I am a groupie. I always go to Greg's class. I never miss it.
I never miss it if I can help it. And while I was there, I started remembering the story of why I'm so committed to his classes and it's not actually what you might think. So I met Greg about maybe two years ago or so and I was in the middle of a dark patch. I was fighting for like money from this woman, this marketing woman who swindled like a bunch of money from me and I was thinking about I was going to take her to court.
I mean, I just moved back to Connecticut and I didn't quite have my sea legs yet. I was just finding my way and it was winter. It was just dark and messy and everything felt really heavy and hard and uncertain. And I remember one night after talking to a lawyer, I was like, I need to go to yoga.
Like I need to relax. I need to go inward. I need to get quiet and I need to get clear. So I like signed up for this yoga class that was really, really close to my house and it was Greg's class and it was just in it was anything but that.
It was the opposite of that. It the lights were on in the class and Greg was walking around and chatting with people and cracking open a cell service just like it was like a summer barbecue like casual, relaxed, everyone was just like having this bouncing good time. And I was like, no, I was like, no. I wanted it a totally different way.
I wanted dim lights and silence and that like serious reverent yoga energy you like see on TV. And I sort of made that clear. Well, at least I made it clear with my energy. I made it clear with my energy that I wanted it another way.
I was sighing. I was huffing. I was glaring. You know, I was energetically clearly so annoyed.
Like if I'm honest, I was just being a brat. And as Greg started this class, I was still huffing. I was going to die on my huffy hill. Let me tell you, I was still annoyed and just radiating of my like, this is not what I came here for energy.
And then Greg looked over at me and locked eyes with me. He just did the simple move. He just shrugged his shoulders, stared at me and said, hey, we have fun here. And like, he couldn't have cared less what my response was in the best way possible.
He wasn't asking for my approval. He wasn't negotiating with my mood. He wasn't trying to like get a good customer survey. He was just stating a fact about the space that he was created because he was a teacher.
And it's always sat with me. I mean, first of all, the idea that he set a boundary with me and wasn't scared of my energy was just so wonderful. What a great container to sit in, right? He didn't shrink or apologize or change his vibe to accommodate my mood.
He just held his ground like very easy breezy. But also what he was holding his ground about, right, that this class would be relaxing and uplifting but also like fun, right? It's just something I've never forgotten because here's the thing. I kept going back, like I'm going back for like two years pretty religiously week after week like I needed what Greg was selling.
And in the middle of all that heaviness in my life, I needed someone who was going to hold the space for lightness and I had no idea. I needed permission to have fun even when everything else felt so hard. And so that brings me to today's pocket stage and Lamont. She's great.
She's a writer and a spiritual teacher. She writes with so much humor and humanity. And this is from her book, Traveling Mercies. We read this book together before in pocket stage, but here's what she writes.
Laughter is carbonated holiness. It is the sound of God's delight bubbling up through us. And sometimes the most spiritual thing we can do is stop taking ourselves so seriously and remember that joy is not a luxury. It's a lifeline.
Let me read that again for those of you in the back. Laughter is carbonated holiness. It's the sound of God's delight bubbling up through us. And sometimes the most spiritual thing we can do is stop taking ourselves so seriously.
And remember that joy is not a luxury. It's a lifeline. And I love that line. Joy is not a luxury.
It's a lifeline because that's exactly what Greg was offering me in that moment, right? Not escapism or like going inside just like a beautiful lifeline. And so today's word of the day is playfulness. Playfulness isn't about being silly for the sake of being silly or certainly playfulness is not about denying reality or pretending everything's fine.
When it's not that spiritual bypass, we don't do that here. Playfulness is about remembering that we're allowed to experience lightness and joy even in the middle of hard things. Because you know, a lot of the time the world tells us we have to be serious all the time when things are really, really serious, right? And we have to earn our rest in order to have joy and that if things are hard, we should just match that hardness with hustle, right?
Hustle and energy. Playfulness is kind of a rebellion if you think about it, right? It says, I can be going through, I can be going through something difficult and I can have a giggle, right? I can hold pain in one hand and delight in the other.
So it's not about escaping reality. It's actually about staying human in the middle of it. And here's what I learned. I mean, and I have to learn this again and again and again, like we need fun the most when things are hard.
We need lightness the most when everything feels heavy. Like when I feel like crying, I sort of need permission to laugh. If that makes sense to you. And when I walked into that yoga class, I was trying to match my outer environment to my inner turmoil.
Everything felt so dark and uncertain. I just, so I decided I should have the lights dim, right? I wanted a serious class because I felt so serious. And I was like thinking, well, you know, I'll just, I'll go do a serious yoga class and then I'll feel okay.
But Greg just had a whole different story in mind. He was like, we have fun here. And that's really what he meant, right? He was like, you know, you don't have to carry everything so tightly, Molly.
You can relax. You can laugh. You can have fun even if life is hard. You'll stay in here for an hour and then go back to your hard life.
And can I just say, this feels especially important right now because we are living through very heavy times and there are absolutely real things to be vigilant about. That's what it is to be awake alive and ascending, right? We have some real fights to fight real injustices to address and we need to show up for those things. But hear me out.
We can't stay vigilant if we're depleted and we can't fight this good fight if we're drained of all lightness and joy, right? If we don't rest or laugh or have fun, we can't sustain the work. And I really needed what Greg was selling. I needed that permission to have fun and let go in the middle of so much heaviness.
I needed to remember life was around me, right? I needed to refuel so I could keep going. And here's the other thing that Greg taught me, which is that setting boundaries around joy is really an act of love. He was like, we have fun here.
He was also saying, I'm creating a space and you can join it, but I'm not changing it to match your seriousness. And I really needed someone to hold that boundary for me. I needed someone to say, you don't get to make everything heavy just because you feel heavy. And sometimes we need people in our lives who refuse to match our darkness, who hold space for lightness, even when we bring heaviness, like who give us permission to have fun, even when we've decided that we don't deserve it or we don't need it.
And sometimes we need to be that person for ourselves. So my reflective question for you today, what joy are you denying yourself and what would it look like to open your heart to a different experience? And listen, denying joy is all around us. So if you're someone who has been denying yourself joy, especially if you struggle with emotional eating and binge eating, I want you to know that spirituality and joy are actually essential to healing from those maladies.
And in my program, The Stop Starting Over System, we devote an entire week to just spirituality and joy because without it, it's almost impossible to break free from the patterns that keep us stuck. So if you're curious about that or working with me, I'm obsessed with chatting with you. So you can learn more, schedule a free call at mollycarmel.com and you can get all of that information in the show notes. And regardless of that, I want you to remember, I am right here with you asenders, learning that playfulness is not a luxury, but it is a lifeline, right?
And it's always available to us if we give ourselves permission to receive it. We rise together. Until next time, my friend.