What Full & Plenty Joy Means To Me (and 5 “Shoulds” I’m not into according to the FPJ Key Channels of Change )
The Origins Story:
When I was first conceptualizing my work in this world, I had an overwhelming sense that the way I had been taught to orient to living life was not the full picture I was seeking.
What I had been told about living a good life included:
Being happy
Working hard
Staying healthy
Living a long life
Getting married and having children
Some of you may be reading those bullet points and wondering, “what’s so wrong about those goals?” My answer being threefold:
The goals themselves are quite linear ways of approaching life that have become less and less helpful to me on my spiral journey. Intentions and fluidity feel more supportive today. Part of that process being checking in with myself to recognize when am I pursuing an idealized image of something whether it be a relationship, an image of health or fitness, or success.
At first glance many of those “goals” seem harmless from an individualistic perspective, but when we investigate them further - namely the unconscious beliefs driving them, we may find they are rooted in conditioned beliefs upholding violent systems hurting other people. I personally do not find value in participating in beliefs and systems that don’t move us towards black liberation, indigenous sovereignty and collective liberation, and many of these traditional ways of viewing life I am quite skeptical of their potential to help us evolve in the ways we are being called to in these times of great crisis. If they truly were aligned, wouldn’t we be in a different situation than we are now?
I’m not big on the religious binary of “wrong” and “right”, “good” or “bad”. So most simply, those inherited approaches to life are just not it for me and here’s why:
FREEING EXPRESSION: Happiness is just one of multitudes of emotional expressions and experiences. Pursuing it as the ultimate goal, quite honestly just always felt, well..rather boring to me. Rather surface level to me. That just “being happy” would actually make me not so happy, ironically enough. After recovery, it also just felt unrealistic once I learned about the normalcy of big emotions - the comfortable and uncomfortable. Pursuing happiness just felt like a handed-down belief from my parents generation that needed more investigating, at the very least.
ALIGNING DREAMS: Working hard is another ancestral lineage handed to me I find value in when balanced and when taken out of the relentless spinning wheel of Capitalism - a system inherently rooted in anti-blackness, ecocide and ableism. I have a stellium in Capricorn - my rising and four other planets, so you could say I am very down to work hard and build. But today I orient to that work from a place of service, of contribution and “working” in a way that is coming from my authentic magic rather than something I am forced into doing for survival or to receive approval from people valuing a certain image of “success” I don’t believe in. I’m much more interested in building new worlds, but doing so from a place of ease, connection, pleasure and magic.
BECOMING EMBODIED: Staying “healthy” has become yet another idealized image set forth by dominant institutions rooted in Colonization, White Supremacy and Capitalism that comes often at the expense of marginalized folks actually not getting the medical care they need due to fatphobia, racism, and abliesm. As well as at the expense of our anxiety (stress which the ACES study shows causes “negative health outcomes”) and relationship to food and body. So much disorder comes from the products, approaches and corrupt funding of “ob*sity” studies that keep folks in a perpetual loop of orthorexic, healthist, restrictive beliefs and behaviors keeping us small, afraid, judgemental and exhausted. After I went through recovery, learned about Health At Every Size and read Dr. Sabrina Strings’ book, “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia” I had all the evidence I needed to validate the gut feeling I always had - that “health” as we know it today is just another social construct created by those with power and objectives not aligned with collective liberation, and thus deserves solid investigation from every person.
TENDING SPIRIT: For as long as I can remember I’ve heard people older than myself, media or doctors talking about their goal of “living a long life.” At first glance, I’m like sure! Of course we want to live, but again, for me, it comes down to at the expense of what? Others wellbeing by hoarding wealth like many of my ancestors have done? At the expense of my own wellbeing by rigidly and anxiously following a regimented diet and exercise program so I can later on live long? At the expense of taking risks, having experiences of pleasure and pain, or avoiding the inevitable decay, disease and death that I will experience in this lifetime? I don’t know if those sacrifices are worth it to me anymore, let alone believing that living a long life is what’s best for the collective. Now I don’t want to live a short life either! BUT by accepting my inevitable decay and death, it actually allows me to LIVE, NOW, and not for a future (like retirement) that is 1) not promised to me and 2) doesn’t even seem particularly enjoyable. My grandmother of 94 years passed in 2021 from COVID-19 while at a nursing home in the State of Georgia that didn’t count her death as caused by COVID until my family called it to be counted. I watched her for at least a decade exclaim at how painful it was to be at her age. I witnessed her in her internal conflict of both fighting against death to live, while also feeling trapped by very old age. And she was privileged enough . Knowing her and her experience has given me great pause with the inherited belief that living a long life at all costs is an aligned pursuit for me. Letting go of this attachment provides me so much spaciousness to live and BE, and greater balance and comfort with my relationship to death.
BREAKING CYCLES: Have you heard of the relationship escalator? It’s this escalator we’re conditioned and expected to step onto and steadily climb when we get into a relationship - whether it be monogamous or ethically non monogamous. You know the deal…dating, becoming exclusive, moving in together, getting married, having children, and then…well that’s when many folks experience mid-life crises or empty nester grief. As a queer ethically non-monogamous person I am not a fan of this escalator or of the idea of hierarchical relationships. All my relationships platonic or otherwise are sacred to me. The relationships I have don’t need validation from an institution rooted in misogyny. Now I am not anti-marriage or anti-having children - that is 100% a persons individual choice of what works for them, but all I offer here is the space to examine why that automation exists and if it works for you. For me, it was just another idealized image and pressurizing system making me feel scared and unworthy.
So what DOES Full & Plenty Joy mean?
FREEING EXPRESSION: Full & Plenty Joy means feeling ALL of it - all of the expressions that come along with the experience of living in an earthly body, including the conditions of oppression and the opportunities for boundless joy. When I finished my intensive ED treatment years ago and was in what we call “early recovery”, I remember telling people my goal in life wasn’t to be happy…it was to FEEL everything, the easeful and uncomfortable, the expanded and constricted, the wibbaly-wobbaly-grayness of both/and and every color in between. To me full and plenty joy means, full, free and infinite expressions of self in relationship to the full, free and infinite expressions of the world all around us - that we are a part of, inextricably.
TENDING SPIRIT: Full & Plenty Joy means connection (especially ancestral magic ones) - do you remember Kermit the Frogs class rendition, “The Rainbow Connection”? (Perfection). He sings about finding the rainbow connection - a sacred mystical power that all lovers and dreamers long to find. He sings about how rainbows are authentic and vulnerable by having “nothing to hide”. Full and Plenty Joy is all about connection - connection to self, connection to others, connection to ancestors and spirit and land and a collective vision of full, prosperous, harmonious freedom of all.
BECOMING EMBODIED: Full & Plenty Joy means finding pleasure in the feeling of FULLNESS. Allowing satisfaction to take root in the physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual feeling of fullness. Of not being afraid of fullness and plentiful ness in all its forms for all the beings of this earth. Being an ED survivor and person living with ARFID, I cannot tell you how much I now loathe the feeling of hunger and how much I genuinly now enjoy the feeling of fullness - a feeling many of my clients struggle with and experience great distress over when first feeling it again (much of this being the result of conditioned fatphobia and health mongering). I believe this reclamation of feeling full, both viscerally and symbolically, are powerful rebellious acts against centuries of Puritanism Christianity, Colonization and White Supremacy teaching my body and mind to restrict itself. To make itself smaller. To feel LESS. To even be ashamed of the fullness of feeling abundant and in deep pleasurable heaviness. Full & Plenty Joy is a call to give ourselves permission to find pleasure in feeling full in all the ways.
BREAKING CYCLES: Full & Plenty Joy means intentionally rewiring our heavily conditioned fear brains to instead orient to safety, to pleasure, to joy and to the everyday magic of being alive in an infinitely mystical and beautiful world begging for indigenous stewardship and embracing death - the fear of the unknown and our ever-changing lives. It means being able to find resource in a single moment of magic - like seeing a rainbow - taking it in, feelings its medicine fully in our bodies, and remembering it in our minds. A sacred well to return to whenever needed. An ancestral way of being in relationship to the world around us - in wonderment, in awe, like a child, discovering magic all around us, even in times of great crisis.
ALIGNING DREAMS: Full & Plenty Joy means prosperity for all. It means being rooted in our authentic magic as individuals - taking up the space we are meant to like Redwoods, but not competing, stealing, or appropriating others magic. Standing in our own and deeply interdependent on others like the Redwood Grove so we may all create and receive the abundance that universe - our north node - our destiny has put forth for us to become over our lifetimes. When we do this, our cup overflows and into other cups - and other cups flowing back into ours. Cups interconnected like a mutual non-hierarchical reciprocal web of life. Full & Plenty Joy is about life and truly LIVING it during times of widespread death and destruction. To be with death is to live life. This is what our ancestors teach us. This sacred acknowledgement propels us forward to a future where we can all just BE.
This ultimate state of just getting to be - Ancestral wellBEing, is what Full & Plenty Joy wishes to help us all remember how to do.
How to just be. Be in our bodies. Be in our magic. Be with our discomfort and dying processes. Be with our ancestors and the truth of the present moment.
To literally just be.
What if that was all we had to do?
How would you just be?
What does Full & Plenty Joy mean to you?
