My Joy Research Project

Two of my closest friends were getting their PHDs and I wanted to embark on a thesis of my own, exploring a question with answers I was hungry to learn.

May 08, 2026

Last spring, I decided to conduct a radical and personal experiment. I called it my Joy Research Project. Two of my closest friends were getting their PHDs and I wanted to embark on a thesis of my own, exploring a question with answers I was hungry to learn.

It had been a long anguishing cold winter of shadow work and shedding in near isolation in the woods in a small cabin I’d just moved into with my husband.
Doing the blood and guts work of trauma healing and pattern excavation, I unearthed a truth that once seen, I knew I could never unsee again. A truth that would haunt me like a wraith if ignored it. The truth that there was another version of my self calling me to another life just beyond my reach, a life I had visited many times in fantasies and daydreams. My soul life. My mythic life. My Big Life. The one that my insides were screaming for, the life my highest self came here to live.

I had no idea how to make it happen or what would come after I moved out of my house or separated from my husband—I just had a knowing and when I felt joy, a wild, ecstatic inner recognition.

I’ve had no plan or map but I have something more important: a compass and my intuition. I set my compass to Joy again and again. When the dial spins around to desperation or survival or fear or grief, I slowly, painstakingly bring it back to joy again. I owe my life to the guidance and love of women in 12-step recovery, the divine feminine, my mother, my friends, healers, holy women, therapy, and medication. Whatever it takes to bring myself to equilibrium, so I can focus on joy again.

I’ve sought the woods, the river, afternoons wandering in the sun. I’ve sought dance communities, forest bathing, festivals, and celebrations. I’ve sought ceremony and ritual, art, writing, adventure and creation.

Setting my compass to joy does not mean the path is an easy breezy one. There are mountains and valleys and crevasses and crashing waves and raging storms and gauntlets of faith to traverse. Old patterns and addictions rise to the surface asking for healing again and again. I’m still confronting bouts of pain, confusion, and dysregulation.

But I’m also churning these painful emotions into compost, a rich soil I can plant seeds of joy in.

Here are a few things that have brought me joy recently including the bonfire at Fertile Ground, candles I made, Cosmo, the Scorpio full moon and a note from my Lover!

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