Rediscovering Joy: A Remembering

The first thing you ever knew was joy.

Not happiness, because happiness is a weather system, the kind that arrives and departs depending on conditions, on whether the day cooperated, on whether people showed up the way you needed them to. Joy is something older and deeper than that. Joy is the ground the weather moves across. It was there before you had a single word for it, before the world handed you a list of things you had to accomplish before you were allowed to feel good, before life slowly and quietly talked you out of your own delight.

Before any of that, you were fluent in it.

You knew the way light could be caught in small fingers even when it couldn’t be held, and you knew how laughter could erupt from somewhere deep in your body like springwater finding its way up through bedrock, and you knew that miraculous ordinary moment when a soap bubble found your nose and the whole world dissolved into giggles that shook your tiny ribs like wind chimes in a storm you weren’t afraid of yet.

We begin as joy incarnate.

And then, slowly, life happens.

What the science is now confirming AND what indigenous peoples have carried in their bones and ceremonies for as long as anyone can remember is that the narrowing we feel is not inevitable. It is learned.

Trauma, whether it crashes into your life in one shattering wave or arrives as the slow, quiet drip of needs that went unmet across an entire childhood, literally reshapes the way your nervous system operates. There is something researchers call the window of tolerance. That interior space where you can feel fully and freely without being pulled under and when the body has learned that the world isn’t safe, that window quietly shrinks. Not because something is broken in you, but because something intelligent in you decided to protect you from a joy it wasn’t sure you could afford to feel.

That is not weakness. That is wisdom doing the only thing it knew how to do.

But here is the part that always stops me cold, the part I want to sit with you in for just a moment:

Some of that constriction isn’t even yours to carry.

Epigenetic research, the science of how our experiences shape the way our genes actually express themselves in the body is now confirming what grandmothers and griots and medicine people understood long before the laboratories caught up: trauma travels. It moves through bloodlines the way water moves through rock, finding every crack and carrying itself forward. The grief your grandmother learned to swallow in silence, the joy your grandfather couldn’t let himself feel because survival in his season required a much smaller life, the delight that was shamed out of a parent before they ever had the chance to pass it to you. These things did not disappear. They settled into the body. They whisper through the nervous system of a child who never heard the story, who never even knew there was a story to hear.

Which means you may be grieving a joy you were never personally allowed to have, and you may be reaching for something that feels like memory even though it belongs to a life lived before yours.

You are not imagining that longing. You are remembering something older than your own name.

Somewhere between skinned knees and student loans, most of us learned to outsource our wonder, to treat joy like a reward we’d collect at the end of a long list of achievements: the right job, the right relationship, the right body, the right version of a life that finally felt like enough.

We became like sailors drinking saltwater, endlessly thirsty, floating on top of a fresh ocean we had simply forgotten how to taste.

And the marketplace has always understood this about us, because it sells our own belonging back to us every single day: buy this and feel young again, go here and find yourself, achieve this and finally, finally be happy.

But indigenous wisdom, across cultures and across centuries, has offered a different and far more honest teaching, which is that joy is not a destination you arrive at but a home you return to, not something you find after enough searching but something you remember after enough stillness. The Lakota people speak of Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ (all my relations) a way of naming the truth that we are not separate from life, that we are woven into it, that joy is simply what moves through us when the illusion of our separateness falls away, even for just a breath.

This is not philosophy from a distance. This is attachment science dressed in ceremonial language.

What researchers in developmental psychology and neuroscience have found is that human beings are not built for independence the way we’ve been told: we are built for connection, wired for it at the cellular level, and our capacity to feel joy develops almost entirely through relationship, through the felt experience of being seen and known and safe with another person. If the relationships you came up in taught you that closeness was dangerous, that vulnerability would be used against you, that joy was always followed eventually by loss, then your nervous system learned wisely, protectively, at great cost to you to ration its own aliveness.

It was never trying to punish you. It was trying to keep you here.

And so healing is not about convincing your mind to think differently about joy. It is about slowly, gently, and often in the company of safe people, teaching your whole body that joy is allowed now, that it is safe to feel, that the story has changed even if the nervous system hasn’t heard the news yet.

I didn’t fully understand the weight of all of this until I spent years sitting at the bedsides of people who were dying, and what they taught me about joy in those rooms I could not have learned anywhere else.

There was a woman whose skin had gone thin like old parchment, whose IV lines tangled around her like jungle vines, who looked at the way afternoon sunlight was pooling on her hospital blanket as though it were the most extraordinary thing she had ever witnessed in her life. “Funny thing,” she said to me, quiet and certain, “I spent my whole life waiting for happiness at some finish line, and now I find it in the way my daughter’s hair smells when she leans in close.”

There was a man with trembling hands who showed me, without a word of explanation, how joy lives in the familiar weight of a well-loved book and in the sacred silence between two people who no longer need language to feel close. And there was a teenager whose body had been through things no young body should face, but whose eyes were still so luminous it stopped you, and he laughed telling me about sneaking out to the hospital courtyard just to watch the sunrise, still grinning when he said, “The nurses were pissed….but damn, those colors.”

None of them were pretending the pain wasn’t real. They were showing me something ancient and precise and true, which is that joy is not the absence of suffering but the hard-won capacity to hold both at once, the way the darkest sky is exactly what makes the stars finally visible.

That capacity lives in the nervous system, in the slowly-built circuitry of a person who has been met with enough warmth and enough repair and enough genuine presence to begin trusting that feeling is survivable. It is not reserved for certain personalities or certain kinds of people. It is a living skill, and it can be rebuilt at any age, in any body, in any season of a life.

The dying understood this not because they had studied it in any book, but because they had finally, mercifully, stopped running from it.

Your body already knows the way back, and it has been trying to show you.

Notice the way your hands still reach instinctively toward falling snowflakes, as though remembering a game no one ever had to teach you. Notice the way your breath catches when you witness something unexpectedly kind, as if your whole body is recognizing a frequency it was made from. Notice how you lean toward sunlight without even deciding to, the way a plant leans, obeying something coded so deep in its cells it doesn’t need a reason.

This is not metaphor. This is memory, cellular and ancestral, humming in the marrow of a lineage that survived every grief it thought might be the last one. Your people held joy through things you will never be asked to survive, and some part of that knowing is still living in you, waiting to be recognized.

This is what we mean at Nativ Elementz when we speak of remembering, not nostalgia for a prettier past, not the performance of being well, but the radical and embodied act of returning to what was always already there, beneath the conditioning, beneath the inherited silence, beneath every story that told you joy was something you had to earn.

So try this today. Not as an exercise, but as a small act of coming home:

Press your bare feet into the floor beneath you and feel how the ground still rises to meet you, how it has been holding you this entire time without asking anything in return. Notice the colors within arm’s reach, not just their names but their textures and their histories. That blue is not just blue, it is the faded denim of something worn soft with love, it is the exact shade of a summer sky from a day when you were young and the hours stretched out before you like an open hand. Place one hand on your chest and feel the rhythm underneath it, the one that has carried you through every joy and every sorrow you have ever known, that has never once stopped or abandoned you, not even on the days you forgot to notice it was there.

And on the days when joy feels not just far away but completely impossible, let the warmth of the shower on your shoulders be enough, let your coffee cooling quietly on the counter be enough, let the simple fact that you are still breathing through whatever this is be more than enough.

Because a nervous system that is deep in survival does not need to perform wellness. It needs one true and gentle signal that the world is, in this moment, safe enough to feel and that is not a small thing to offer yourself.

That is, in fact, everything.

Joy is not the absence of darkness. It is the stubborn and sacred decision to keep noticing the light, not because you are naive about the hard things but because you are awake, and because you come from people who kept singing even when singing was the most courageous thing left to do.

The next time joy finds you, in the way sunlight falls across an ordinary wall, in a silence you share with someone you love, in the strange and unrepeatable gift of simply being here at all, don’t waste a moment asking why it came.

Ask instead, with all the gentleness you have: “Oh. Where have I been?”

And then go quiet, and listen, because your pulse has always known the answer, and something older than your name has been waiting in the body you almost forgot was home.

Thank you for reading this far with me. The remembering is never perfect and never complete, but every moment we notice, we return a little, and every breath we take, we come home a little more.

And that, perhaps, is joy enough.

~Nativ Elementz