Join us for a walk on one of Central Massachusetts' many trails to explore the nature of joy, through nature. We'll spend 90 minutes together. Our journey will take us roughly 1.5 miles into the woods (and then back out), walking relatively flat terrain, with pauses to be in and explore through joy. Along our journey we'll pause to connect with the Earth, the flora and fauna, and each other.
BRING ON THE JOY!
The Joy Gym is a place where we come together as a community to practice cultivating and strengthening the muscle of joy, to learn to build awareness and to gain tools and techniques for shifting our energetic patterns.
Playful Living, our signature series, and Joy in the Wild train and strengthen different brain and heart “muscles” that support joy and emotional well-being in our lives. Our gym equipment and tools include mindfulness, meditation, reflections, writing, discussions, and working out some of the knots in our lives.
THE JOY MUSCLE?
At The Joy Gym, we’ll focus on strengthening the “muscles” (awareness around mindstates, vibration, and frequency) that cultivate and nourish joy, ease, and contentment in our lives. We’ll explore and cultivate our capacity to notice feeling tones (satisfaction and dissatisfaction, pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant) and bring awareness to thought patterns that are unwholesome and unbeneficial for maintaining movement towards happiness.
Similarly to how one muscle doesn’t do all the work to help us move our body, our happiness is supported by many “muscles” and nourished by awareness. Muscles we’ll explore include joy, play, imagination, peace, ease, simplicity, hope, equanimity, compassion, connection, gladdening the heart and mind, contentment, lovingkindness, flow, bliss, happiness, generosity, gratitude, and appreciation in our lives. We’ll explore how to build these muscles, their near enemies, and the challenges or blocks we encounter along the way.
Simply put, we can cultivate suffering or we can cultivate joy. We choose joy. We want to live in a world that values joy, connection, ease, peace, and balance. And that’s a world that values healing, awareness, and self-reflection. It’s also a world that is soaked in play, imagination, and openness to new perspectives.
The Joy Gym allows us to be mindful of and release lower vibrating energies, such as shame, guilt, fear, and isolation, while actively cultivating the higher vibrating energies, such as joy, gratitude, acceptance, love, and contentment.
We believe that modeling joy and the skills that have brought us so much joy already can have a valuable impact on others. Joy is infectious. We don’t just want to be more joyful--we want to surround ourselves with people who are cultivating this energy in their lives. Waves that come together in the same frequency grow exponentially.
Negative conditioning can make the world hard to navigate, where it’s easy to get swept up in an eddy of lower vibrations. There is tremendous value to being in a community of like-minded individuals who are practicing the tools to navigate life’s hurdles and to allow ourselves to marinate in joy.
Joy is our jaM
BENEFITS
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Trainings, tools, exercises, and techniques that support the cultivation of joy, wisdom, and emotional well-being
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Community workouts and support
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Experience more joy, lightheartedness, laughter, ease, spaciousness, and mental and emotional flexibility and stability
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Develop deeper levels of awareness that ripple out much farther than simply supporting joy in your life
TYPICAL SESSION
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Short guided meditation to arrive and ground into our time together
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Warm-up: often a quick check-in focused around of topic of the week
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Intro to workout: A brief lesson on this week’s particular muscle
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Workout: An exercise, practice, or activity
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Community Reflections
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Home workout instructions and check-out
TIME
Joy Gym session vary from 30-minutes to 90+ minutes. Playful Living, our signature series is currently Wednesday from 7:00p-8:00p (ET).
We will offer at-home practices to try out in the real world each week.