As people relating with other people, especially as parents or heath care providers, we can nourish one another by facilitating joy.

Joy is food for our self-healing abilities; it is the fuel for our learning abilities. Joy is what gives us resilience. If we lose track of the joy in our lives, then it becomes harder to heal from everyday living. We need joy to recover from traumatic events. Recent research by the HeartMath Institute has shown that while meditating can help us feel more calm and safe, feelings of joy and delight are what make it possible to heal and renew.

One of the most important conversations I have with my clients is about resources. I use the word resources to refer to the people, places and things that nourish or foster joy. I ask them “Where do you find joy in your day?” Some people can access joy easily. They know where their joy is and can access it well. Others sit quietly and slowly realize that it has been a while since they have felt joy. Maybe it has been so long they aren’t sure where to find it. In the movie “City Slickers” Billy Crystal’s wife tells him to “Go find your smile” when he appears to have lost track of his joy. Other people respond too quickly: they assume their joy is in the same places they have always been, or maybe where they think they should be, but is that really where they find joy today?

My resources can be my husband (sometimes), my kids (sometimes), my dog (almost always), my cats (almost always), and quilting (usually). But small animals, babies, beautiful sunsets, and watching bugs pollinate my garden always bring me joy and delight. These are my personal sources of the joy found in delight.

We also need social resources. The feeling of being in a supportive community, part of a clan, or a contributing member of a team can provide a profound sense of the joy felt in satisfaction. We can play as we dance, sing, cook and eat together.

Health care providers become a social resource for the client. As I begin a treatment, my hope is that my caring demeanor and loving hands allow the client to feel safe, creating the opportunity for their body to settle deeply long enough to allow them to access their joy.

I use the example of a bucket when I talk about replenishing our body’s resources. We all have a bucket that represents our capacity for handling the difficulties/stresses/traumas that come our way. Some people have small buckets and some people have large buckets and most of us are somewhere in between.

Costly feelings, such as anger, disdain and sadness, deplete the resources in our bucket, they activate our sense of “not safe” and cause our body to fight, flee or freeze.  They are not “bad” feelings. Indeed, they are necessary for our full participation in life, but they do cost us resources to experience them.

Neutral feelings don’t change the resources in our bucket. We feel safe in the moment, calm, peaceful and meditative. While I would hypothesize that, if we experience neutral feelings as a discipline over time (like a meditation practice) then that discipline can make our bucket slightly larger and sturdier, according to HeartMath neutral feelings don’t replenish our resources. They also don’t use them up. We could say that neutral feelings prepare the way for joy.

Replenishing feelings like joy, delight, happiness and gratitude refill the bucket. They allow our autonomic nervous system to reset to levels that allow healing and repair activities to function efficiently.

When we are looking at another person, it is important to see them as a whole. If all we notice are the parts that aren’t working well, then we are missing the vast majority of the person: the parts that work perfectly 24/7 like a well-tuned machine. Holding this wellness in our awareness, while noticing the parts that might need some assistance, is a way of acknowledging the person’s resources. Instead of asking “How can I fix you?” We might ask, “How can I be present with you in your experience in a way that allows your healthy parts to give resources to the parts that are feeling overwhelmed?” This does not mean that we only allow “good” feelings, it means we are there to be a resource for the person as they process the difficult feelings. They can feel the joy of being cared for as they also feel sadness or grief or disappointment.

Maintaining a broad perspective allows us to see more than a small piece of the person. When we allow ourselves to see the whole person (not just the part with a complaint or a part we find lacking) we gain access to resources that are nurturing to the whole person. When we see the whole person we tap into compassion and the joy of connection, allowing us both to deepen into greater well-being, refilling the bucket.

Given our child's present ages/needs/desires, how can we facilitate their growth? We are on a train that is constantly moving. As soon as I figured out how to take care of my newborn, she became a creeping infant, then a crawler, then a toddler, then a preschooler, then that blessed age between 6 and 11 where they can take of themselves physically, but oh no! she has problems with reading (or math or social skills or a physical problem or needs extra attention because of a family situation), then we tear headlong into puberty, the declarations of independence, first jobs, driving, college apps or exploration travel and then, maybe, helping her set up her own independent life. It never stops.

So we must be attentive and flexible. We must honor our own needs as well as meet our children where they are. We must be open and honest about who we are and how we can be of help to our kids. We must be willing to share our children with our close community and the community at large. I am so grateful that my girls have many extra parents that they call when they need help.

When kids need more structure, you can try adding one small thing. Try thinking about it as rhythm instead of scheduling. How do you want to live? What is important to you? How are you allowing kindness into your family life? Is your life an act of kindness to yourself? What is preventing you and your family from living the way you want to?

One of the traps I noticed myself falling into was comparison. I would lose track of my one family. I would see all of these amazing families with amazing kids and amazing resources and feel badly that we weren’t doing all of those amazing things and being those amazing people. As a family unit we were pretty darned amazing, but if I compared us with the sum total of all the other families, then I was holding us to a ridiculous, unattainable, exhausting-just-to-think-about-it standard.

When I was hurriedly running around trying to be like other people I was prone to crankiness and a general sense of failure and running behind. When I thought in terms of purpose, love and kindness I felt satisfied. This is a personal practice that requires clarity and discipline. How can we expect our kids to embody clarity for themselves if we don’t have it to model for them?

We continue to grow together. My community continues to be my inspiration for being the best person I can be. I worried that once Maggie and Elsa lived elsewhere I wouldn’t have that drive to keep learning how to be my best self, but I discovered that my love for my friends drives me just fine. My constant question continues to be “Given our present ages/needs/desires, how can we facilitate each other’s growth?”

When you see a picture of a pride of lions lolling about on the savannah, do you think, “Wow, such lazy creatures!” Of course not. Lions are smart. They save their effort for when they really need it.

As parents we are all asking, given our child's present ages/needs/desires, how can we facilitate their growth? When my daughters were very very small, a friend of mine chastised me for not signing Maggie up for preschool. She scolded, “You are not doing your job. How will she learn how to stand in a line and sit in a circle?” I was amazed by her questions. Really? I had to pay a lot of money (that we didn’t have) and deal with carting them about and taking part in activities, just so they could learn these basic things? My kids were already involved in two unstructured playgroups that were teaching them everything they needed to know at 2 and 4.  Just like the lions, our cubs practice in their play the same skills the adults use to survive.

Because our family sees the choices we’ve made as living choices, not schooling choices, we still ask the question, but the answers have changed drastically over the past few years. After being completely independent for a couple of years, Maggie decided to go to grad school, so we supported that goal by allowing her to live with us and being generally supportive as she completed her goal. Now that she is finished and employed, we helped her move out and now we encourage her to come home to visit and do laundry. Elsa lives in Columbus, so our ways of being supportive to her look very different.

How does this relate to being lazy? I don’t believe in creating more work for myself or anyone else. Life continues to present me with difficulties I choose to endure cheerfully because I really have no choice.  I have plenty of hard work to do in addition to all of the parts of my life that full of ease. And, for me, all of my parenting choices were about finding a way to meet our goals with ease and without unnecessary effort. Breastfeeding, family bed, child-led weaning, finding families to walk with on our journey, consulting families with older kids when I felt stymied; these are all ways that I found more ease-full than more conventional choices.

We live in a world that values striving, hard work, sacrifice, suffering and deprivation. If you’re not sweating with exertion then you’re not “fulfilling your potential.” In this world it is a chore to do everything and people will exhort you with their struggles, victories and busy-ness as badges of honor. One of my brothers-in-law said that his son needed to learn early that life was hard, that’s why he and his wife put their son in a rigorous kindergarten.

It is hard enough to be a parent without inflicting more difficulty on ourselves and our children. Believe me, life will throw back-breaking challenges at you regardless of what choices you make. Illness, a child’s learning differences, job problems, housing struggles, etc. will give you and your family plenty of opportunity to practice discipline and fortitude. Hard times also help us learn about community, strength and gratitude. We don’t have to avoid difficulty, just not feel obliged to undergo additional hardship because that’s what other people are doing. Education should be every child’s birthright, but it doesn’t need to be toilsome. As a parent, I found the school lifestyle arduous (we tried it for short periods when the girls were curious). When people exclaim, “How did you do it? That sounds like so much work!” I reply, “Having them in school was much harder! How did you manage?”

Almost all homeschooling parents went to school. We need to allow ourselves to be deschooled. That feeling that this can’t possibly be enough stems from the indoctrination we all continue to receive that traditional schooling must be a good and necessary thing or we wouldn’t spend so much time and money on it. I think my kids would have some interesting things to say about their own perceptions of “having got away with something” because they didn’t invest as many years in schooling as their peers did, but they would need to speak for themselves.

So how is my lion pride? In our family I can report that none of us are perfect, but we seem to be functional (for the moment). We all require help from others at times. We all appear to be mature adults capable of holding down a job, finding friends and community, and keeping reasonably healthy habits. We all have the ability to run fast after a wildebeest if we see one that we need. And when we’re not running, we know how to rest and play. Sounds like success to me.

Originally written for the Lilac Children's Garden Newletter, 1999

"Doing work that has to be done over and over again helps us to recognize the natural cycles of growth and decay, of birth and death, and thus become aware of the dynamic order of the universe"

-Fritjof Capra


What a favor we do for our children when we show them the joy of everyday tasks. Young children love to mimic us in our daily routines. Sharing the rewards of our daily work now will help them enjoy their maintenance duties when they get older. It may also teach them that the goal is not to be finished, but rather to determine the right balance of work, play, and rest. About six years ago I realized that even if I could afford a cleaning person, they would not organize my things, do the laundry or do the grocery shopping. I was amazed to discover that even if we were “rich” I probably wouldn’t want someone else doing those things. (Ahh, but a great vegetarian world cuisine low-fat chef, that would be wonderful!) I got the unfortunate impression as I grew up that household tasks were chores. Somehow I picked up that housework and other daily maintenance were not a “real” activities.

There was no joy or sense of accomplishment in housework. It was drudgery I had to get done so I could do something I enjoyed. I have carried that sense of housework as drudgery into my life and it has been regrettable. As soon as I started living on my own I realized that I was solely responsible for the maintenance of my surroundings. And I resented that once a task was finished, such as dusting, it would simply have to be done again. I was never DONE! As the years have progressed I have learned that I (as an adult) am also responsible for maintaining my health, my family’s health, friendships, relationships with family members, my car, etc.

In short, “Life is Maintenance”.

So, if life is maintenance and I’ve been taught that maintenance is just the stuff you have to do before you get to the real living, how much real living can I get to in a day, especially as a mommy? This negative view of the mundane has given me a lot of stress. I have been tempted to “enrich” my life and look outside of myself for the good stuff. The fact is that the good stuff, the real stuff, is in my sink. It is in the laundry pile. It is in my refrigerator and on my kitchen floor. It is in cutting my kids fingernails, shopping for their clothes and shoes, and arranging for their many classes and social visits. It can also be in classes or at my computer, but it is most real here in the dust bunnies under my bed.

Just as there is a heady excitement to infatuation, new people and career opportunities, the true sustained contentment in life comes from the everyday. It has been an ongoing challenge to give my children a sense of joy in maintenance, and I feel tremendously inept. I don’t believe in pretending with them about my feelings (I’m too transparent), so I’ve had to address my dread head on. But I have been buoyed by the belief that this is important to their well-being as adults: To see the rewards of a clean kitchen, stacks of neatly folded laundry, a shoveled driveway. And, thus, to learn that the kitchen gets dirtied, the laundry gets worn, more snow falls on the driveway. These repetitive tasks do teach us the “natural cycles of growth and decay”. We work a while, we play a while, we rest a while. Each activity is worthy, joyful and necessary to our well-being.