Radha Agrawal on How to Find Joy and Community

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Rota Aggrawall. She's the co founder and CEO of Daybreaker, the Morning global dance, music and wellness movement in five continents with a community of almost a half a million people around the globe. Rata and her team recently launched a science backed platform called Dose by Daybreaker, and it's a first of its kind membership to practice joy using its method connected to

the eight virtues of Joy. Her book Belong answers the questions how do I find my people and how do I create large and meaningful communities in the real world. Hi, Rota, Welcome to the show. It's so great to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to have you on. We're going to talk about all the work that you do with your Daybreaker project, your Dose project, your book that's titled Belong, and we're really going to focus on joy as one of the themes of this.

But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second.

She looks up at her grandmother says, a grandmother, which one wins, and the grandmother says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah. So, first of all, as a new mother, I have a two year old daughter, I can just imagine myself sharing the story with her very soon, and as her lights are turning on, and she's just so verable and so curious and inquisitive to

share this parable. I'm so excited to do that. And then I think for me, you know, in the work that I do, which is all around feeding your joy, self, feeding yourself that chooses to unlock the eight virtues of joy which we can get into, I just feel like it's such a perfect parable for the times, especially post COVID, to not live and feed in our stories of isolation and loneliness, but live in the story and feed the

wolf that is kind of running towards possibility, running towards community, warning, towards belonging, which takes so much courage. And wolves are courageous. So I really really love all the sort of elements of this parable. Yeah, and wolves running packs, they are not alone. If you find a lone wolf, you have

found a wolf that is sick. That's right. And it's interesting because, especially in this country, we sort of celebrate this concept of the lone wolf, the concept of rugged individualism, the concept of go at your own chart, your own course, and so it's, um, it's really nice to be on a podcast that celebrates this concept of wolf pack com unity, connection and how important collective joy is to really raise

a vibration of our planet. Yeah. A friend of mine who's a zen teacher, he's actually in your neck of the woods. I don't know if he's in Brooklyn or but he's in the greater New York City area. When he was on the show, he told a story about when he was eighteen, he was riding a bus and there was some wise woman sitting next to him and she said, oh, you're a lone wolf, and he inside was very proud like, yes, that's me, I'm a lone wolf.

You know. He was feeling proude and she's like and then she turned around and said, yeah, well, lone wolves are always sick. He just tells that story at such a moment of sort of breaking through that ego extance of like I stand alone and realizing like Oh wait, that's not the way to be. And you talk a lot about this in your work, but we're starting to realize the real costs of being isolated and alone. That's right. So, yeah, one in four Americans have zero friends to confide in.

And his number has gone up after COVID, but it's tripled last thirty years. I mean, it's crazy, all the while things that happened to your body. I mean having poor social connections as a harmful to your physical health, as being an alcoholic, you know, twice as harmful as obesity. Um, we are more prone to depression and anxiety, all of sort of disease. Were more prone to violence, or more prone to not listening to one another, to cancel each other.

There's so much that connects with I don't belong and um, the lack of safety and the lack of joy. And I think that's really what I am so excited to connect is the dots between belonging and joy and how you can't experience happiness joy if you don't belong, and you can't belong if you don't practice and feed your joy. And so it's so important to remember these two connections. Yeah, I wanted to ask you a question because the work

that you do is very interesting. You probably emerged in this space and correct me if I'm wrong, but for launching Daybreaker, which was a series of early morning, non substance abuse fueled right no substances, early dance parties that brought people together. So is this very high energy type

of connection. And it's interesting because most of my belonging has happened in much more subdued sort of settings recovering heroin addict, so twelve step programs and the belonging that I got from there, or certain therapy groups I've been part of where there was a deep sense of belonging, and yet you're sort of coming in at belonging at this slightly more energetic level. And as I was sort of reading about you and looking at your stuff and me,

I was like, there's a little difference there. But I thought it would be helpful to start because I would probably and I think a lot of people listening to the show would identify the say, well, I'm an introvert, right. I don't know that I would identify that way. I would actually identify more the way you're about to say, which is, you know, what's a more freeing way to

identify than introvert or extrovert totally. So just caution is to label ourselves right as, I'm introverted, I'm extroverted, I'm socially anxious, I am angry, I'm depressed, I'm shious, I'm you know, whatever, anything that we start labeling ourselves, all of a sudden, we put ourselves pigeon ahole ourselves in this label. And the more we tell ourselves that we are this thing, I'm unlovable, i am unworthy, i am all of these things, we begin feeding it just like

the wolves do. Right, So labels are no different. So when we label ourselves introverted, we're actually removing the possibility for the moments that we are feeling more social, we aren't feeling more extroverted. So in my book or as I write, and as I think about and sort of dream about, what would be the most freeing label, I call it metavert, which is, there's some days that I feel more introverted, there's some days that I feel more extroverted.

And let me give my beautiful, multilayered human self the opportunity to be either introvert or extroverted and allow both

of those energies to enter my space. And I think that we can find comfort in that because you know, as I've been interviewing lots of extroverts, interviewing lots of introverts for so much of the research I'm doing in our joy practice, you know, one of the meditations that I have them do and we've uncovered is close your eyes and really imagine a moment in your life when you felt mothered, or when you felt embarrassed, or when you felt rejected, or when you felt um like you

didn't belong. And those moments in your life steer you in a direction of Oh, being in social environments are scary, or being one on one in this very kind of angry environment is scary. So I feel more safe in a group environment. Therefore I'm extroverted. I feel more safe in a one on one environment because I was bullied

in an extrovert environment. So all of our histories actually move us in the direction of these labels, and um, I found so much peace and safety and solace when I was in group moments, in soccer, in the playground, in all these spaces, because I was athletic, and I found myself very afraid often in my one on one moments, because you know, my Indian father was sometimes ang read,

sometimes happy, sometimes excited, sometimes violent. It was just like there's all these different sort of one on one moment that as I'm actually even unpacking this with you, you know, I'm realizing that's probably where I found so much safety and being extroverted. So I think so much of our labeling comes from the first formative moments in our lives that moves in the direction I'm actually curious to hear.

Is there a moment in your life that you can recall um as a child that you might have felt maybe mothered or pushed out or rejected, or something in a group environment that made you feel unsafe. I'm sure there was. I have a terrible memory, like I just remember almost nothing, but I do know from very early on. I mean I can remember as early as first or second grade trying to see could I stay in a

recess and hang out with a teacher? Got it? Because I think for whatever reason, the social aspect of the playground intimidated me. Let's unpack that. The more so, why did it intimidate you? Were there moments at the playground that you felt like you weren't allowed to plan this swing because where someone said go away, or or some of the moments scary. I think that's the part for me that's harder, as I can't really recall any experiences that I would go, oh, that's it. So this is

why we get into our bodies. This is exactly why I would get you up. And that's what we do our joy practice, which is getting our mind to remember through our bodies. Because our bodies remember, then our bodies begin to tell us, oh, I feel better with my teacher, I feel better in one on one environments, I feel better and quiet spaces because we often will cut our experience off by the neck and not actually move that feeling into our body to get in touch with that.

My whole thing is actually, how do you practice joy in our brain and our body and bring the two together to really create a practice that is gentle, but that moves you to unlock past traumas, to unlock past stories to be able to live your most joyful life. And so be very curious to do that with you and see what would come up there, because sometimes we block out the most painful memories. I would be very

interested in doing something like that. There's so many things in what you just said there that I'm not even quite sure where to dive in. But where I'm going

to start is this idea of labels. And it's very interesting because, like you said, the downside of labeling is I put myself in a pigeonhole and I and I'm going to think about this through the lens of alcoholic or addict for a second, because I think it's interesting because on one hand, that label can be very restricting, and on another hand, that label is very helpful in that it gives me a sense of what some of my and I like this word better than I am

this and I would say what some of my tendencies are because I think we all have tendencies. And you made a very good point that our tendencies are shaped by our past experiences. It's not who we are, it's just what's happened and the way we've chosen to interpret it. And so I think these sort of labels introvert extrovert, like introvert is a useful construct to the extent I think it's useful to construct to the extent that I go, Okay, I do know that I need to honor my need

to get refueled with quiet time. But if I then label myself as introverted and think that's the only way that I get refueled or the only way that I can react, then I'm really limiting my possibility. So I find this idea of labeling and knowing our tendencies as helpful.

And somebody does a lot of coaching work with people, I always find there's this how do we balance that of Like, I don't want you to label yourself that way because that's limiting, and yet it's helpful to see patterns and the way we traditionally respond so that we can work skillfully with that. Yeah, And I think that's the art, right, that's the art of being being human. But I also think that if you feel filled up in that quiet time, that feels good for you, and

you have to honor that. And humans are spectacularly social creatures, and if we stay inside of that quiet space, we will become sick like that lone wolf, right, And so to really honor the balance of the internal joy and the collective joy. And this is in my studies, my research and in my practice and how I teach as well, Um,

how to be more joyful. We really look at sort of this concept of going in and practicing internal joy to excavate our past traumas or past experiences, our past histories, to look at our labeling, to look at the energy with which we show up to events, community spaces, our families, to do an energy audit all the things in our lives that are limiting us or supporting us, and to

just highlight that in this sort of joy audit. Right, And you know the reason why we practice joy inside and practice personal development, why we read all these books, why we show up for coaching sessions, is to work on ourselves to better relate to others. Right, Like, It's not just for our own Oh I feel better and quiet, It's not just about that. It's to better relate to others. When you come out of that moment of re energizing refueling, you can better relate, better show up for your friends

and family, better connect with your peers. And so it's to refuel to be able to connect more with others. And I just think that we forget that. I think in this sort of trap of oh I need to be alone to be refueled, we forget we want that so that we can come back with more joy, right, And I just think that that's where we get caught up, and that's where we continue to go further and further

out of collective joy and into social isolation. This is where again, like the concept of collective joy has become such a foreign term. You don't hear the concept of collective joy as often as you would. You hear the concept of mindfulness and you know, and being okay being alone and being okay with deep presence and awareness and all of that. But collective joy is actually where we

shift the consciousness of the planet. It's where we can collectively decide, wait a minute, we are making mother Earth sick. As a collective. If we can be joyful, we will want this planet to be more alive, more sacred, more thoughtful, more thought thought of. And we're going to do better in the way we live in our lives. And collective joy also inspires euphoria, inspires awe inspires play, It also inspires better. Actually, immunity by community inspires more intelligence. We're

actually more intelligent when we're around other people. What are five senses are being activated, not just our two senses on zoom, just listening and watching right, Like when you actually activate all five senses in a community, you're smelling someone's perfume, you're talking to someone, you're touching someone on their arm as you talk to them. This actually makes smarter, It actually makes us more immune to disease. It actually

makes us more collectively awe in awe enjoy. And I just think that we need to spread that message so far and wide, especially in a post COVID when the number of friends of mine who consider themselves quote unquote extroverted are calling me and saying, hey, I feel weird around people. Why is that? And I just think that we just have to practice and continue practicing joy, which is why I started Joy practice. And I did it

for myself because I found myself wondering too. And I start doing the Joy practice every day, and it changed my entire courageous outlook, my entire reason for wanting to get up and connect with other people, to make eye contact with my mask on, to smile with my eyes, to connect with body language versus just my face in my in my mouth, to really understand that we cannot survive as a species or thrive as humans without practicing collective joy and that's what I'm here to share on

as far and wide as possible, not just through our practice, but through thought leaders like yourself who can really spread that to other people too. It's funny because when I started this show, I thought the primary lesson was going to be go inside and work your business out, do your meditation, have your awakening right. And I thought that was primarily what was going to be the main thing that happened or that I learned or that we talked about.

And certainly that's a big component of it, but equally important has been this sense of we have to connect with others, we have to have community. And it's funny that I didn't think of how important it was, considering it saved my life twice by the time I started this podcast through my recovery right being recovery was the people there who saved my life, you know, it was

that community. But I've just become more and more convinced of that the more of these conversations I have and the more research I've done, and the more I've worked with people like we've got to build strong communities. How did you move past your trauma story? How did you move into a space of courageous hope, and I don't want to be heard in addict anymore. I want to

live a different life. I think unpacking that also is so telling it how do you go beyond your I'm an addict or I was an addict, or I'm a recovering addict, into I am a citizen that does this or I'm a citizen that does that, instead of living in the comfort of the story of I was an addict, how do we go in between these two worlds with grace, hope, encourage. I'm curious. That's a great question that would take longer

than we have to fully unpack. But the very short answer is being a heroin attic just burnt my life to the ground, and I had some things that happened that were fortunate that allowed me to get into recovery and be in recovery, go through treatment twelve step programs. It was the people, it was the support, it was the hope that I found. But the last part you said there, I think is the really interesting part to me, and it's what eventually sort of made me, at a

certain point in twelve step programs feel limited. And it was this constant thinking of ourselves as people who were sick, and I just hit a point where I felt like, that doesn't describe me anymore. Right, Like, I'm not saying that I'm suddenly now I can go have a drink. That's not it, right. I actually think, for whatever reason, something about the way I'm wired up me and substances, it doesn't work. And I've tried it several different times

since I first gotten recovery. That doesn't work. But beyond that, in twelve step programs, people used to say a lot, there's us and then there's them, or it's the alkys and the normies. And at a certain point I went, that does not resonate with me anymore. I don't feel different than the average person. I feel connected kind of with everybody. I think we all share very common challenges.

And yes, maybe if you want to measure on the spectrum of addiction to substance, I'm out on one extreme a little bit, but on thousands of other measures, I'm just a normal, average person. And so that's where twelve step programs saved my life. And I hit a limitation point where I felt like, you know, that doesn't describe me anymore. I don't still feel sick beautiful. And I think the best coaches and the best coaching wants you

to have a sunset right with the coaching program. They want you to come in, have your recovery, and then leave. And when you leave, you can create healthier relationships. You create healthier friendships that aren't limited to my friendships are

just inside of my program. And I have so many friends who we had this discussion around, you know, one was a recovering overeaters anonymous person and she said that the only way she found her friends initially was through Overeaters Anonymous, and she felt like when she became kind of healthier and she got her way under control, that she started over eating again just so that she can be part of this club because she found her friends

there and she didn't want to be mothered. And we just begin to pathologize or make our trauma part of our social life and our sense of belonging, and that's where it becomes extremely dangerous. And I think this is what's happening in America right now, is we're saying and we're pathologizing, and I mean, I'm having a bad day into a mental health crisis. I'm having a difficult conversation with my partner, and all of a sudden, I'm in a traumatic moment where I need meds to help me.

And all of a sudden, we're allowing the little list things in life to take us out of courage, take us out of possibility and abundance, and into these trauma stories because it's so normalized and it allows us to join this club of I'm struggling, you know. And I know that that was my story in my twenties, and I was just, you know, always living in My father was a strict Indian, which is all kinds of different things I would say, and I would just live in that and I was angry and I was just angry.

And when I just stopped living in that story, and I'm like, I'm a joyful person, i am as a be around. I'm going to live in the future possibility, not live in my trauma story. My entire life change. I found love, I have a daughter. I found financial abundance, I found community, I found everything that I ever dreamed of having. From moving from a place of living in the comfort of my trauma story, living because it's comfortable and it's safe to live in the trauma story sometimes

then the fear and the not knowing. In many ways, death is that like I don't know what's gonna happen after death, but the not knowing of what can be if I live out of that story, what can be when I'm not in my I'm this type of person. And when I did that from my own life, when I began to say, I'm not an angry person, I'm not an unworthy person, and I'm worthy of love. I'm worthy of this, and of course that's still listening that we work on every single day. And this is why

we practice joy. This is why we practice courage, you know, which is put one of the eight virtues of joy that we identified. But it is a daily practice to again feed that wolf, feed that new possibility. And I think that's why we're so on the same team, because it's who do you feed? Is it that trauma story or the future potential? Is it the future friends that you can have, not the friends that are shooting on you or the friends that aren't kind to you, or

the friends that you've brand fathered in. What are the friends that you can actually invite into your life, that you can call in based on the quality that you're looking for, you know, that could be a completely different type of community. And so all of these things are things that we think about through the lens of community and the lens of joy, and they're so deeply connected. Again,

there's a ton in what you said there. And I think it's fine in this line because there are people where mental health is a real thing and we need real treatment, and I think it's an end right, that's true, and we can really get stuck there, And I agree with you. I see a lot of times we argue for our own limitations. That's exactly what I'm saying. We don't realize how superhuman we are. We don't realize our

own superpowers. We don't realize how our brain is just begging for us to tickle or having nero chemicals open, How our brain is just waiting for us to learn how to tickle them open. Our brain is just waiting for us to access these liminal spaces that we don't

know we can. And that's all I'm saying. Of course, there's deeper traumas that require deeper support, But I also really believe that if you came to me and you're having a deep moment of I don't know if I can ever do this without without men's, without anything that I would love the challenge of getting you to realize just how superpowered you are, just how brilliant you are, just how deeply supernatural, superpowered, super everything that you are to be able to unlock that side of yourself and

and to your point, addiction is real. And I read about that in my book, is that we are addicted to everything. We overeat, we over drink, we over binge on on Netflix, we over binge on our phone social media way then we over bange on alcohol and drugs. I mean, we are a binged out world and community because of commerce, and the world of commerce has pushed us into wanting more and more and more, buy more and more and more, throw more ads in your face, let me throw more things for you to need that

you don't actually need. And so we're trained to binge. And again it's on us to begin to develop boundaries and moments like you're doing for yourself, to say, look, if I binge on alcohol, this is what happens to me, then let me actually have the courage to control that, Let me have the boundaries to control that. And I just think that once we recognize that we are all binging in one way or another, we will never get

out of the cycle. And so I just think that, um, yeah, this conversation is so special because we are doing so much of the sad alone pathologized wolf, and we want to get out of that and feed the other one before we run out of time. I want to turn our attention to what you were sort of saying about tickling this joy or bringing forth this joy, because I think in my own life I've done a really good job of relieving a lot of suffering, a lot of

the suffering that I had in my life. I have really banished, if to a large extent, you know, at least the unnecessary mental suffering that I caused myself with unhealthy thought patterns. Again, I'm not saying I'm perfect, but I've done a really good job at that the place I've not done as good a job, and I'm I'm working on and I'm sort of realizing really in the last year, I'm like, Okay, I want to turn the

dial up on. This is more joy. Yes, let's go. Yeah, so we don't have a ton of time here before we run out of time, But I'd like you to hit a couple key points to sort of really increasing our joy. So the first thing is, we can't just live in our heads. And I think so much of again the wellness space, the person amptment space with just sort of like either in your head or all in your body. Let's get six pack ads, let's sculpture body. Let's you know, compete and shred and all of that, right,

or let's work on mental health. But what if we brought the two together, and what if we actually practiced joy? What are all the most potent joy practice that exists on the planet. And that's what I set out to do in my own life and what I wanted to bring to our community of day Break, our community members around the world. And it's just like, in this time of COVID and post COVID, how can we actually find

the most potent joy practice that exist? And you know, one of the things that we've done for seven years is actually teach people how to dance without alcohol, without substances, to break the codependence in order to have fun and party and dance I need to be drunk or high, And so our entire Rezon Detrick for the last seven years has been how do we actually break that codependence and let people recognize their self expression, come home to

their movement, come home to their self expression. I mean, I have hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have never called themselves dancers, who have always said I need to drink to dance, or say I'm so embarrassed of how I look, which is why our joy practice is very much often blindfolded. Half of our class. Our joy practice that we have is blindfolded because you remove seventy of your inputs, which is from your eyes. And your eyes are a gateway to judgment, gateway to self loathing,

gateway to perfectionism, gateway to so many things. When you remove your sense of sight and you throw a blindfold on it, so our blindfold is in our equipment for dose and our joy practice, you begin to connect to the other beautiful senses that you have. You begin to again recognize that the movement in your body that wants to happen. When you remove judgment, when you remove the sense of comparison of how do I look compared to other people, you allow yourself to move to the music

are true natural state. Every baby, my daughter I was just with her two hours ago with her two friends are all two years old, and we just put on a song and I just watched them move and it was their own movements, their own sense of expression, and it was just magical. And if we can get back to the dancer inside of us, the tribal dance, the collective joy, which is what I'm studying now whether you see Berkeley in the Greater Good Science Center, which is

what is collective dance doing to our brains? That we're doing a whole, first of its kind study on not just individual dance, but what happens to your brain and your body when and your court is all your stress hormones, you're tickling your joy chemicals open when you're dancing in a community. So dance is one of them. Breathwork is another movement. Meditation, which is what dose our method is. It's not dancing necessarily, just like fist pumping to rave music.

It's like dancing as a meditation. So with blindfolds on low, slow and then flow, you know, so we're like really allowing you to find movement again, get your elbows move and get your risks moving, just finding the beat with your nose, like what happens when you invite your nose to dance, What happens when you invite your hips to move the way they want to um. It just tickles your oxytocin, your sense of trust, It tickles your endorphins open,

It tickles your dopamine when you listen to music. Dopamine is a beautiful release when you listen to music. Serotonin, you know, sense of gratitude, a sense of ease happens when you're actually moving to dance. Right, So there's every one of our neurochemicals are actually triggered when we allow music, dance, movement, gratitude,

all of these elements into our practice. And that's why we've combined these eight virtues of joy into this method that is mostly blindfolded to go inward into this joy practice, and then you take the blindfold off to then reintroduce this sort of new version of yourself that's going to come out to be ready to dance with others figuratively and literally. Our joy practice online is very much as individual blindfolds on. Let's come home to our self expression,

to our bodies. Let's move our trauma from our bodies into our minds and release it. Let's get into flow state. Let's find inspiration, Let's find kindness for ourselves and for others.

Let's find connection, let's find all, let's find play all these virtues of joy that we uncover, and then we have Daybreaker I r L are live events that we're coming back finally made twelfth in New York and then relaunching our other cities so that you can then go and practice collective joy in real life with other people, intergenerationally, across all ages. And that's one big core value of our two is how to practice joy with other age groups.

Like as a forty two year old, I had a lot of judgment for a long time to hang out with people younger than me because I felt kind of insecure about my gray hair and feeling too old and you know, all of these things. And and then I met my husband, who's like in his twenties, and all of a sudden, here I am learning and realizing my own hubrist, my own judgment, my own self loathing, my

own limitations of being a woman, an aging woman. When in tabloids and in the world of press and media were taught to look younger, we're taught to put botox

in and inject ourselves and all these things. So it's just practicing how to be in collective joy across all generations, people older than you, people younger than you, with children, with our master citizens, what I call our community above the age of sixty five, those who have mastered what it means to be human and really practice courageous collective joy across the spectrum of all ages and genders and sot ecomic backgrounds and all of that, which is just

so important. It's not just about the individual, but about coming out and tickling collective joy together. So I invite you Eric to come to one of ours in New York or l A, or Chicago or San Francisco all over the world. Yes, I definitely want to attend one. I think you have one happening virtually this weekend sock r exactly. We have Chubby Checkers the number one song of all time with The Twist. He's coming on and perform live The Twist. And we have ten thousand people

who have r s VP for this one. It's one of our lowest R s v P events. We've had up to twenty tho R s v ps for our events with boys two men. We've had Um Gloria Estefan, Gloria Gainer, We've had the Gypsy Kings and village people. All these amazing artists come on to lend their joy, practice their dance, their music, their gift of getting people to get up and move. Dion Waro came in saying what the world needs now is love and it's free

this weekend as well. It's a free party, so I hope everyone who's listening can join us yep and just listeners out of making your life easier for you. By the time we release this, that event will have happened, but there will be plenty of other great events I'm sure that they're having. And were I not going to be in a car driving to Atlanta that morning, I might want to really check out Mr Chubby Checker because that sounds like a lot of fun. A so cop you can come on from them from the car if

you're not driving, obviously, if someone else is driving. But yeah, we often have tons of people tuning in from their car and just dancing in their car seat, you know. Yeah, for everywhere it's for seated. It's for if you can't get up and dance, you can stay seated and dance. Joy is for all levels of physical ability to you know, it doesn't mean you can't practice joy if your legs don't work right, like you can practice joy if your

arms are working or if your breath is working. The joy of singing is one of our Joy series and so it's like singing together. Singing is such a beautiful joy practice. So lots of different ways to practice joy, and we have you know, fifty different styles of practice

on our platform. As I was sort of preparing for this and reading your work and and thinking more about it, and I just got the idea of dance in my head and made me realize that a real source of joy for me for a lot of years, and this talks about this individual versus collective was playing music and bands. As a musician. I haven't done it at all in years now. I play my acoustic guitar and I really love the finger picking and it's beautiful, but it's not

the same thing. It's not the same thing as that connection with other people and making music and moving together. And it really made me think about like how much I missed that, how much joy that gave me. That's exactly right and so I think that's the first audit that I would do is just like, what are you interested in? What gives you joy? Let's look at your history and see what moments in your life gave you

the most joyless. Write them down and when you see it, you're like, wow, Okay, dancing was so much fun for me. I was so joyful making music, not just in a band, but performing in front of a small audience with fifty people on the crowd, creating that collective joyful moment for others, even if it's twenty people fifty people who cares, it's just about the collective experience and then wrapping a non

alcoholic cocktail afterwards and and connect over music. And I think those are the things that we want to audit in our lives of just like, not just things that calm us down or things that give us ease or bring us like you said, like take us out of trauma, but what are all the things in our lives and our past that made us the most joyful? And for me, that's travel, it's like going on adventures, it's music festivals,

it's dance, it's listening to bands and singing. Even if I have like kind of a husky, you know, not the best voice in the world. I just love to sing. So when my friends get together, um, when we sing together, it just brings me the most amount of joy. And I'm just so excited to begin making practicing joy as ubiquitous is brushing your teeth, or practicing yoga or practicing meditation.

It's just so important to raise the vibration of the planet. Well, thank you so much Roda for coming on the show. I have really enjoyed this conversation and I feel like we could do another hour of it, but we don't have time for another hour. So this has been lovely. Eric, It's so good to meet you, to connect with you, to just experience the joy and your energy as well in your eyes and your expression. I can just sense that is just so in you, and I'm excited to

play and explore more of that together. So wonderful. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now We are so grateful for the members of our community.

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