Written by Anna Choi, Energy Master
Anna Choi is an Energy Master, Qigong Tai Chi Instructor, and Taekwondo Black Belt. After burning out from her wealth management and event consulting business, she hit rock bottom. She met her two enlightened energy masters, transforming her life into a singer-songwriter performance artist, 2x TEDx speaker, & Amazon No.1 International Best Selling Author as Founder of SolJoy with Anna Choi SPC.
In a world filled with challenges and uncertainties, joy might feel elusive or even conditional. Yet, choosing joy is a powerful act of self-liberation, rooted not in circumstance but in perspective. This article explores how embracing joy as a conscious choice can transform our outlook, relationships, and daily experiences.
It took me years to realize I waited for joy to come from outside circumstances.
Waiting for my son to laugh to bring a smile. Waiting for an experience or song to move my body. I am waiting for my husband to say thank you for the dinner I’ve cooked. Waiting for my client to say, “You’ve changed my life. Waiting to go on a trip, traveling to a meditation retreat to feel joy.
The better question is: If you stripped away everything and left with nothing, would you still feel joy?
Or be a hot mess?
Does an infinite source of joy even exist?
I’ve sat with this inquiry and can now say with confidence that infinite joy does exist.
It simply must be cultivated as a habit.
Joy as a habit
What?! Joy is a habit. Yes. That’s what I’ve discovered.
While you have the power to create circumstances that will likely bring you joy—we’ve all been in those situations where we should feel joyful, but we’re not. Or those times when you shouldn’t feel joy because of crappy circumstances, yet you do.
We just explored this in a recent Activate Joy event where I spoke at for the ShiftUp community. Here, we are practicing joy in the body by smiling for one minute, followed by laughing for one minute.
Awkward. Yet super effective for your well-being.
In Ron Gutman’s TED talk on the Hidden Power of Smiling, he shares how a simple smile has a measurable effect on your well-being, from firing off the same reward mechanisms in the brain to receiving $25,000 cash or eating 2000 bars of chocolate.
He shares how “Unlike chocolate, smiling can actually make us healthier. It reduces the level of stress-enhancing hormones cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine, increases the level of mood-enhancing hormones [endorphins], and also reduces blood pressure.”
If you want to cultivate joy as a habit. Give it a go and smile and/or laugh for 1 minute to your favorite song. Notice how your mood shifts before and after. Then, like any habit, create consistency for even just 3 days in a row to start setting an alarm to randomly laugh and smile for a minute. You may feel dumb initially, but I promise it gets easier.
When I did this practice many times over 3 days, I found myself laughing out loud randomly while brushing my teeth. It was as if joy was just bubbling out of me for no reason and it felt so good.
Joy assessment
Here are some questions to assess where your joy comes from:
On a scale of 1-10, 10 being joyful, how joyful do you feel on average over the week?
Think of what brings you joy. Do you depend on an experience to give you joy? For example, once I travel to that dream place, I’ll feel joy. Once I have solid friends and family relationships, I’ll feel joy. Once I make enough money in my business, I’ll give back and then feel joy.
Is what brings you joy a desire of the ego or soul? Check-in with your body to help you discern. Does your body feel more expansive, love, light, and bright or heavy, contracting, and fear-based?
Joy practices
Once you get better at discerning true joy from within that reaction-based, if-then joy, you can start to practice joy in unexpected areas of life.
Most humans don’t like change. The uncertain unknown sucks and we try to find control in it. Instead, lean into the transitions of life as a home to discover joy anyway.
Make it a game. See if you can find joy in the most unexpected places: wounded relationships, pain in your body, or triggers. I do Somatic Mindful exercises to sometimes connect my body movement with my emotions so I can release those and get into a state of joy.
It’s not that you need to feel joy 24/7. But by cultivating and practicing joy as a habit, you then have a choice. If joy can be a choice generated for no reason, what might open up in your life?
Consider that your life circumstances have zero bearing on the degree of joy you feel. Imagine the liberation of being able to walk into any fire and the power of being able to choose joy (if you desire) or not. That is true freedom.
I implore you to choose to smile for no reason. Laugh for no reason. Smile at yourself. When I have done this, life gets a lot less serious and more fun and light.
Read more from Anna Choi
Anna Choi, Energy Master
Anna Choi is an Energy Master, Qigong Tai Chi Instructor, and Taekwondo Black Belt. After burning out from her wealth management and event consulting business, she hit rock bottom. She met her two enlightened energy masters, transforming her life into a singer-songwriter performance artist, 2x TEDx speaker, & Amazon's No.1 International Best Selling Author as Founder of SolJoy with Anna Choi SPC.
SolJoy serves high-achieving, impact-driven, mindful community leaders, entrepreneurs, and executives to shift from burnout to brilliance, unleashing their soul's joy. Serving thousands of students, SolJoy specializes in somatic mindfulness, moving meditations, and healing martial arts to tap into boundless energy for more health, happiness, and peace.
