Increasing Your Capacity to Experience Joy and Ease

With both exercise and working with the nervous system, we are working on increasing capacity — capacity to do more, to get stronger, or to increase flexibility.

More capacity can be achieved by teaching your body to learn a different range of motion or movement pattern. Over time, it can be lifting heavier weights so your body is stronger and has a greater capacity for load. It can feel like having different sensations that change your relationship with pain and discomfort. It can be learning to sit with the discomfort of big emotions and staying present with the sensations that go along with those feelings.

We build capacity to get stronger, to be able to better navigate hard experiences, and to learn to enjoy and be present with joyful and pleasurable experiences. 

If you’ve experienced a lot of pain, emotional stress, hard times or trauma, our brains and nervous systems learn to overly focus on scanning for danger. In this process, we become focused on what isn’t working. This comes from your nervous system trying to keep you safe (thank you, nervous system!). As we work on shifting this pattern, we want to build the capacity to notice where there is ease and safety. This can be as simple as bringing your awareness to areas of the body where there is less discomfort or a more neutral experience or sensation. This allows your body to sense how it feels when things feel good. 

Spring is the perfect season to experience this. The days are longer, the birds are singing, flowers are bursting, and the seasons are moving from a place of darkness, cold and constriction to a place of expansion.

One way to play with this is to notice how you feel in your body. For example, you could look at a flower (or a tree or some other thing that brings you simple joy) and notice what you like about the flower. Is it the colors, the shape, the way the sun shines on the petals? As you notice what you like about the flower, notice what you feel in your body. Is there a feeling of softening? Does your breath change? Does your body feel heavier?

As you become aware of these changes, see if you can stay with them and allow your cells, your muscles and your nervous system to take in the feeling. This experience and experiences like this, over time, build capacity to enjoy the good stuff in life.