Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  What is love, exactly? What’s hidden beneath love’s surface? What does love create? How do you unlock more opportunities for it? The new science of love tackles all of these questions and upgrades our vision of love. In chapter 2, I examine your body’s definition of love in detail and describe love’s necessary preconditions. In chapter 3, I reveal the hidden biological underpinnings of love, and you’ll come away with an even deeper appreciation for what love means for your health. In chapter 4, I describe the vast array of benefits that love brings to you. Part II of this book is all about making changes. You’ve long admired people skilled at making genuine, heartfelt connections. They seem so perceptive and nimble, so resilient and generous. You’ve long imagined that being a “grown up” would bestow you with such perspective and grace. Yet age, measured as time since birth, provides no guarantees for maturity or wisdom. In chapters 5 through 9, I offer you explicit guidance on how to seed love more often and more effectively, love for yourself and love for others, through thick and thin, in sickness and in health. You’ll come away having learned that love need not remain an unpredictable and elusive state. With practice, you’ll find you can generate love anytime you wish. Love will become a renewable resource that you can tap to fuel your own well-being, and the well-being of all those within your radius. Love is our supreme emotion: Its presence or absence in our lives influences everything we feel, think, do, and become. It’s that recurrent state that ties you in—your body and brain alike—to the social fabric, to the bodies and brains of those in your midst. When you experience love—true heart/mind/soul-expanding love—you not only become better able to see the larger tapestry of life and better able to breathe life into the connections that matter to you, but you also set yourself on a pathway that leads to more health, happiness, and wisdom. CHAPTER 2 What Love Is LOVE IS BRIEF, BUT FREQUENTLY RECURRING. —François de La Rochefoucauld As you check out of the grocery store, you share a laugh with the cashier about the face you see peering up at you from the uncommonly gnarly tomato in your basket. On your way to pick up your mail, you happen upon a neighbor you’ve not seen in a while and pause to chat. Within minutes you find yourselves swapping lively stories with each other about the fascinations you share. At work, you and your teammates celebrate a shared triumph with hugs and high fives. On your morning jog, you smile and nod to greet fellow runners and silently wish them a good day. You share a long embrace with a family member after a trip that has kept you apart for too many days. What Love Is

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  After days and weeks of “conversating,” as they called it, these twelve lowest-achieving students bonded in Jeremy’s math class. Along the way, he encouraged them to celebrate one another by sharing what they found interesting in one another’s stories. He also encouraged them to help each other through difficult steps on math problems and cheer on one another’s successes, however small. Then, instead of mumbles, silence, and no eye contact, “if Tisha got something right, they would shout ‘You go, girl!’” and eventually “the kids were celebrating one another’s success without me, and that was huge.” He described the classroom now as “full of life.” He said, “I know it sounds cliché, but you could say ‘the sun rose on a dark day,’ [and] they would just shout out answers and it got to the point where they were almost too willing and it was incredible.” The atmosphere Jeremy and his students created was “almost celebratory” and truly interactive, like a church in which shouts of “Hallelujah!” come from any pew. Or, as Jeremy summed it up: “It was like a party, except with math.” This huge emotional turnaround paid dividends. Ty got an A and told his mom, for the first time ever, that he liked math. The kid with the IQ in the fifties passed the class. Another went from the fourteenth to the forty-fourth percentile. “I remember she told me, ‘Mr. Wills, I am going to pass, I’m going to pass,’ and she did and that was what was incredible.” Indeed, more than 80 percent of Jeremy’s special ed kids passed the state’s standardized math test. When you compare that to the 50 percent pass rate of the regular ed kids in the same high school, you begin to see how remarkable this transformation was. One grandmother called to find out whether her granddaughter passed, and when Jeremy told her she did, “she was like, ‘Hallelujah! Thank the Lord Jesus!!’ ” Understandably, Jeremy was immensely gratified. With poignancy he shared that “when I think about how someone, somewhere down the line, did something horrible to make these kids not like learning and to see their love of learning rekindled was almost like, sort of this . . . I don’t know . . . it is very hard to describe . . . it is almost surreal. When you see the look on their face when they start to believe in themselves again. . . .” He admits that it didn’t work for everyone, but for most it did. “I can safely say that a lot of them walked out of that classroom as far more confident and capable people than they walked in.”

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  We can imagine the inexpressible joy of an obscure woman—who under ordinary circumstances would never have been given the coldest garret in the royal household—when she found herself the mistress of not only the king, but a huge suite of palace rooms. Often the mistress had more—and lovelier—rooms at court than the queen. For instance, in the 1670s Queen Marie-Thérèse was given only eleven rooms at Versailles, whereas Madame de Montespan occupied a suite of twenty. Charles II’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle had a lavish suite with furnishings so ostentatious that the queen’s apartments looked poverty-stricken in comparison. The diarist John Evelyn visited the royal mistress as she sat in a rich dressing gown, having her hair combed. Looking around her apartment in amazement at “the riches and splendor of this world, purchased with vice and dishonor,” he saw “the new fabric of French tapestry, for design, tenderness of work and incomparable imitation of the best paintings, beyond anything I had ever beheld…. Japon cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, huge vases of wrought plate, tables, stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braziers, etc…. all of massive silver, and without number, besides of His Majesty’s best paintings.”6 As highly coveted as court apartments were, they were the first perquisite a disgraced royal mistress would lose. As she left her suite of finely furnished rooms with head hung low, her replacement would be tripping in eagerly with her luggage. So it made sense for the mistress to acquire property away from court. Country estates were highly desirable, providing considerable income from tenants and the sale of crops and wine produced on them. In the 1440s Charles VII of France bestowed several castles and manor houses on Agnes Sorel, the first of which was the Château de Beauté—the Castle of Beauty—from which she acquired her nickname, the Lady of Beauty. Other properties were given to her on the births of her children. Not content with vast suites of rooms in each of the three royal palaces, Athénaïs de Montespan wanted Louis XIV to build her a château of her own. He had already purchased her a fine house near the Louvre in Paris, but she wanted one in the country as well. When Louis had floor plans drawn up for a country house near his Palace of Saint-Germain, she rejected them out of hand as “good only for a chorus girl.”7 So Louis gave her the château of Clagny, which took ten years to build, with up to twelve hundred men working on it at a time, and which cost $11 million in today’s money.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Now I pushed it aside, and rolled upon her. ‘And this,’ I said, moving my hips, ‘is really contributing to the social revolution?’ ‘Oh, yes!’ I wriggled lower. ‘And this, too?’ ‘Oh, certainly!’ I slid beneath the sheet. ‘And how about this?’ ‘Oh!’ ‘Lord,’ I said a little later. ‘To think I have been part of the socialist conspiracy all these years, and never knew it till now ...’ We kept Towards Democracy beside the bed permanently, after that; and just as Florence would sometimes say to me, when the house was quiet, ‘Sing me a song, in your moleskins, Uncle ...’, so I would occasionally lean to whisper to her, over supper or as we walked side by side: ‘Shall we be democratic tonight, Flo ... ?’ Of course, there were certain songs - ‘Sweethearts and Wives’ was one of them - I would never have sung for her. And Leaves of Grass, I noticed, stayed downstairs, on the shelf beneath the photographs of Eleanor Marx and Kitty. I didn’t mind it. How could I mind it? We had struck a kind of bargain. We had fixed to kiss for ever. We had never once said, I love you. ‘Isn’t it marvellous to be in love, in spring-time?’ Annie asked us one evening in April: she and Miss Raymond were sweethearts now, and spent long hours in our parlour, sighing over one another’s charms. ‘I went visiting a factory today, and it was the grimmest, most broken-down old place you ever saw. But I came out into its yard and there was a piece of pussy-willow growing there — just a piece of common old pussy-willow, but with a bit of yellow sun on it, and it looked so exactly like my dear Emma I thought for a moment I would fall down and kiss it, and weep.’ Florence snorted. ‘They should never have let women into the civil service, I said it all along. Weeping over pussy willow? I never heard such rubbish in my life; I really wonder, sometimes, how Emma can bear you. If I heard Nancy likening me to a sprig of catkins, I should be sick.’ ‘Oh, for shame! Nancy, have you never seen Florrie’s face in a chrysanthemum, or a rose?’ ‘Never,’ I said. ‘Though there was a flounder for sale on a fishmonger’s barrow, in Whitechapel yesterday, and the likeness was quite uncanny. I very nearly brought it home ...’ Annie took Miss Raymond’s hand in hers, and gazed at us in wonder. ‘I swear,’ she said, ‘you two are the most unsentimental sweethearts I’ve ever known.’ ‘We are too sensible for sentiment, aren’t we, Nance?’ ‘Too busy, more like,’ I said, with a yawn.

• From Less (2017)

  Less is no athlete. His single moment of greatness came one spring afternoon when he was twelve. In the suburbs of Delaware, spring meant not young love and damp flowers but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to buxom summer. August’s steam-room setting came on automatically in May, cherry and plum blossoms made the slightest wind into a ticker-tape parade, and the air filled with pollen. Schoolteachers heard the boys giggling at the sweat shine of their bosoms; young roller skaters found themselves stuck in softening asphalt. It was the year the cicadas returned; Less had not been alive when they buried themselves in the earth. But now they returned: tens of thousands of them, horrifying but harmless, drunk driving through the air so they bumped into heads and ears, encrusting telephone poles and parked cars with their delicate, amber-hued, almost Egyptian discarded shells. Girls wore them as earrings. Boys (Tom Sawyer descendants) trapped the live ones in paper bags and released them at study hour. At night, the creatures hummed in huge choruses, the sound pulsing around the neighborhood. And school would not end until June. If ever. Then picture young Less: twelve years old, his first year wearing the gold-rimmed glasses that would return to him, thirty years later, when a shopkeeper recommended a pair in Paris and a thrill of sad recognition and shame would course through his body—the short boy in glasses in right field, his hair as gold-white as old ivory, covered now by a black-yellow baseball cap, wandering in the clover with a dreamy look in his eyes. Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada. His father (though Less would not know this for over a decade) had had to attend a meeting of the Public Athletics Board to defend his son’s right to participate in the league despite his clear lack of talent at baseball and obliviousness on the field. His father actually had to remind his son’s coach (who had recommended Less’s removal) that it was a public athletic league and, like a public library, was open to all. Even the fumbling oafs among us. And his mother, a softball champ in her day, has had to pretend none of this matters to her at all and drives Less to games with a speech about sportsmanship that is more a dismantling of her own beliefs than a relief to the boy. Picture Less with his leather glove weighing down his left hand, sweating in the spring heat, his mind lost in the reverie of his childhood lunacies before they give way to adolescent lunacies—when an object appears in the sky. Acting almost on a species memory, he runs forward, the glove before him. The bright sun spangles his vision. And—thwack! The crowd is screaming. He looks into the glove and sees, gloriously grass-bruised and double-stitched in red, the single catch of his life span.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  After a few failed attempts to develop a viable intervention, I found myself in a yearlong interdisciplinary faculty seminar on integrative medicine. Here is where I was first introduced to the ancient mind-training practice called metta in Pali, maître in Sanskrit, often translated as loving-kindness, or simply kindness. In Buddhist teachings, loving-kindness is considered one of the four noblest modes of consciousness—the crown jewel, in some traditions. A lightbulb went off for me: This ancient practice, honed over millennia, could help me test my theory. Perhaps training in loving-kindness was the intervention I’d been seeking. Over the next year, my students and I designed a rigorous and randomized experiment to test the effects of learning to self-generate positive emotions through loving-kindness meditation. My test pilots were reasonably healthy working adults with no particular spiritual orientation. The results were abundantly clear. When people, completely new to meditation, learned to quiet their minds and expand their capacity for love and kindness, they transformed themselves from the inside out. They experienced more love, more engagement, more serenity, more joy, more amusement—more of every positive emotion we measured. And though they typically meditated alone, their biggest boosts in positive emotions came when interacting with others, off the cushion, as it were. Their lives spiraled upward. The kindheartedness they learned to stoke during their meditation practice warmed their connections with others. Later experiments would confirm that it was these connections that most affected their bodies, making them healthier. We also came to discover that other interventions to foster connection—ones that didn’t require learning to meditate—could increase people’s experiences of love and likewise improve their health. I share all of these change strategies with you in part II. These discoveries pushed me to rethink love. Taken as a whole, the numbers tell me that when you learn practical ways to generate warm connections with others—through meditation or other means—you step up to a whole new dynamic. Here is where the soft-focus you encounter in typical discussions about love sharpens into high definition. The mysteries that have long been sources both of wonder and exhilaration, as well as confusion and misunderstanding, now give way to practical, evidence-based prescriptions for how to live life well. We know now that a steady diet of love influences how people grow and change, making them healthier and more resilient day by day. And we’re beginning to understand exactly how this works, by tracking the complex chain of biological reactions that cascade throughout your body and change your behavior in ways that influence those around you. But even as science unveils the mystery of love, it offers you even more reason to pay attention. I’ll show you how love’s capacity to nourish, heal, and do good is deeply wired into your biology, and into your ways of relating to others.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  Expressing feelings (specifically negative ones) or differing points of view may have been impossible. Some family members may have been estranged from one another even before the cult involvement. Others may be angry about their loved one's behavior while in the cult, or resentful about the expense and complications necessary to arrange an exit-counseling intervention or rehabilitation. These troubling conditions from the past (and any difficulties in the present) need to be addressed so that you can construct new and improved ways of relating. Reconciling with family is an important and often difficult task. Just as you will likely need to educate yourself, also it is important to encourage your family to get educated about cults and thought reform so they can gain a better understanding of what happened to you. Your family probably has no idea what you experienced. They may be puzzled, angry, or anxious. Gaining their support and understanding can be extremely helpful, particularly if you had close family ties,, or will be living at home during your postcult adjustment period. If there were communication difficulties before your cult involvement, they will still exist. Many families choose to believe that everything will be okay once their loved one is out of the cult. However, many are surprised and dismayed to discover that there are numerous issues left to address, some cult-related, some not. This may be a time to consider family counseling or professional assistance. Arnold Markowitz, director of the Cult Clinic and Hot Line of the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in New York City, writes: "Family therapy is essential following a cult member's departure from the group to allow the entire family to be `deprogrammed,' or defused, to address long-term patterns of dysfunction, and to help parents give up old expectations in exchange for more realistic expectations that accommodate the overall needs of their son or daughter."' For the most part, families and friends are overjoyed to see their loved one. Despite the stresses and strains, it is often a homecoming unlike any other. Reconnecting with friends is often as important as making the connection with immediate family members, specifically for those who were adults when they joined the cult. It may be vital for former cult members to look up old friends and heal the pain on both sides, as illustrated in the following example: Edith N. joined a political cult when she was thirty. She had many friends in the area, including her longtime friend, Beth S., whom she had known since college. Edith tried hard to recruit Beth, to no avail. Not only was Beth deemed a hopeless recruit but also, because she asked too many questions in her recruitment meetings, she was declared an enemy of the organization, or a nonperson. Edith was ordered to cut Beth out of her life. While carrying out cultrelated work, Edith occasionally ran into Beth; following orders, Edith would turn and walk away, unable to acknowledge her friend.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Father gave me an extra half-crown for every afternoon I worked there. I bought a hat, and a length of lavender ribbon with which to trim it, but the rest of the money I put aside: I would use it, when I had enough, to buy a season ticket for the Canterbury train. For I made my nightly trips all through that week, and sat - as Tony put it - with the Plushes, and gazed at Kitty Butler as she sang; and I never once grew tired of her. It was only, always, marvellous to step again into my little scarlet box; to gaze at the bank of faces, and the golden arch above the stage, and the velvet drapes and tassels, and the stretch of dusty floorboard with its row of lights - like open cockle shells, I always thought them - before which I would soon see Kitty stride and swagger and wave her hat ... Oh! and when she stepped on stage at last, there would be that rush of gladness so swift and sharp I would catch my breath to feel it, and grow faint. That is how it was on my solitary visits; but on Saturday, of course, as we had planned, my family came - and that was rather different. There were nearly twelve of us in all - more by the time we reached the theatre and took our seats, for we met friends and neighbours on the train and at the ticket-booth, and they attached themselves to our gay party, like barnacles. There wasn’t room for us to sit in one long line: we spread ourselves about in groups of threes and fours, so that when one person asked Did we care for a cherry? or Did Mother have her eau-decologne ? or Why had Millicent not brought Jim? the message must be passed, in a shriek or a whisper, all along the gallery, from cousin to cousin, from aunt to sister to uncle to friend, disturbing all the rows along the way. So, anyway, it seemed to me. My seat was between Fred and Alice with Davy and his girl, Rhoda, on Alice’s left, and Mother and Father behind. It was crowded in the hall and still very hot - though cooler than it had been on the previous, sweltering Monday night; but I, who had had a box to myself for a week, with the draught from the stage to chill me, seemed to feel the heat more than anyone. Fred’s hand upon mine, or his lips at my cheek, I found unbearable, like blasts of steam rather than caresses; even the pressure of Alice’s sleeve against my arm, and the warmth of Father’s face against my neck as he leaned to ask us our opinion of the show, made me flinch, and sweat, and squirm in my seat.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  27. y&Ypairrat yhp cc Ev$paj>0??Ti, orctpa 17 ou T/krotwra* prj^oy ical fid'yeov, $ OVK &8tpov<ra- on, TroXXefc rA rek^a TT)S €p*7/ioi> juaXXo*' $ ri}s €%ov<r^s TOP avSpa" "For it is written, Rejoice thou barren woman that bearest not, break forth and shout, thou that travailest not. For more are the children of the desolate than of her that hath the husband." The quota- tion is from Isa. 54*, and follows exactly the text of the Lxx (BKAQ), which neglects to translate the nS\ "rejoicing," "singing," of the Hebrew. In the prophet the words are prob- ably to be joined with $212; they are conceived of as addressed to the ideal Zion, bidding her rejoice in the return of the exiles, Yahweh leading (cf. 52 7-12). The barren woman is Jerusalem in the absence of the exiles, the woman that hath a husband is Jerusalem before the exile; and the comparison signifies that her prosperity after the return from exile was to exceed that which she had enjoyed before the captivity. There may possibly underlie the words of the prophet a reference to Sarah and Hagar as suggesting the symbolism of the passage (cf. 5i2), but there is no clear indication of this. The apostle, also, in quot- ing them may have thought of the barren woman as corre- sponding to Sarah, who till late in life had no child, and the woman that hath a husband to Hagar. But his chief thought is of the O. T. passage as justifying or illustrating his concep- tion of a new redeemed Jerusalem whose glory is to surpass that of the old, the language being all the more appropriate for his purpose because it involved the same figure of Jerusalem as a mother, which he had himself just employed, unless, indeed, v.26 is itself suggested by the passage which was about to be quoted. There is a possible further basis for the apostle's use of the passage in the fact that its context expresses the thought that God is the redeemer not of Israel after the flesh, but of those in whose heart is his law (cf. 5i1-8, esp. v.7). But whether the apostle had this context in mind is not indicated. The Tap is doubtless confirmatory, and connects the whole statement with i?Ti£ €(rrlv ^r^p yp&v. 28. vi*,et$ 5e, aScXc^o/, icarA 1I<ra&K IrraTycX/as T&VO, forfr "And ye, brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise/1 With. rv, 27-29 265

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  On dq -rote %ap8te<; -fyjUov, added to emphasise the transition from the objective sonship to the subjective experience, see Rom. 5* i Cor. 222 Eph. 3n. It is in the heart, as the seat of intellectual and spiritual life in general (r Cor. 2* Rom. g* ic1, etc.) and in particular of the moral and spiritual life (2 Cor. 4* Rom. i12* 24), that the Spirit of God operates. The use of the expression here shows that s&xic&rcecXev refers (not as the same word in v.4 does) to a single historic fact (the day of Pente- cost, e. g.), but to the successive bestowals of the Spirit on individuals (cf* 33)> the aor. being, therefore, a collective historical aor. (BM T 39). On the translation of an aor. in such a case, see EMT 46, 52. On fyxwv, undoubtedly to be preferred to 5{A<Bv, a Western and Syrian reading, see on v.*. *A/3j3a o Trar^p. "crying, Abba, Father.'3 The rec- ognition of God as Father is the distinguishing mark of the filial spirit. The participle Kpd£ov agreeing with irvev^a as- cribes the cry to the Spirit of God's Son; yet it is undoubtedly the apostle's thought that it is the expression of the believer's attitude also. For the Spirit that dwells in us dominates our lives. See chap. 220 525, and cf. Rom. 815: eXa'jSere irvevpa vioOeviaS) ev & /cpafoju€j> *A/3/3a o Trartfp. The use of Kpd£ovy usually employed of a loud or earnest cry (Mt. 927 Acts 14" Rom. 927) or of a public announcement (Jn. 728> 37), in the Lxx often of prayer addressed to God (Ps. 3* io718), emphasises the earnestness and intensity of the utterance of the Spirit within us. Though the word Kpd^ov itself conveys no suggestion of joy, it can hardly be doubted that the intensity which the word reflects is in this case to be conceived of as the intensity of joy. Though to be free from law is to obtain adoption, sonship in its full realisation is more than mere freedom from law. The significance of such freedom lies, indeed, precisely in the fact that it makes it possible that a truly filial relation and attitude of man to God shall displace the legal relation that law creates, that instead of our looking upon God as lawgiver in the spirit of bondage and fear (Rom. 815) he becomes to us Father with whom we live in fellowship as his sons. See detached note on Tlarrjp as applied to God, p. 391. 224 GALATIAJSTS

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I had no other plans. Neither did he. Would it be him? Her? Both? I didn’t know, but I was so willing to find out. And thus fate had her three ways with us. We convened at the redhead’s house at 10:30. Now, this woman knew ambiance like she was born in a harem: red velvet curtains not only on every window but dividing every room; gold fixtures galore; no electric lighting, just candles and incense burning like in a Catholic church; sexy music emanating from unseen speakers; potted palms; naked images of herself in various theatrical guises on the walls; and mirrors, mirrors everywhere—a narcissist’s nirvana. I was learning from this woman already, learning about myself, learning what I liked. After a glass of champagne in crystal flutes at midnight, we ended up on her Persian carpet on some lush pillows watching Fred Astaire in Top Hat. The Young Man had never seen it before. He didn’t see it that night, either. He and I were the first to touch, relinking from earlier that day. As we grasped hand to hand, she watched like a Cheshire cat, and slowly linked herself, too, to me, hands to legs. Before long, they had conspired to remove my clothes, mesmerizing my body with touch. Four hands, two faces, male and female, urgent, loving, sexual, groping, they swept me up in waves of love. Gently, they fought over my pussy; he got there first, but she edged him out. The pleasure was illegal. What’s wrong with girls with girls? Absolutely nothing. But I wanted to come in his mouth, and in my only move, I pulled his face into me. As I gave him all I had and then some, Fred was still twirling in his top hat on the muted black-and-white screen. Then the redhead and I stripped him. He allowed it, willing and erect. She and I gathered like good girlfriends around his cock, which was hard, big, and beautiful. Four hands, two mouths. Every few minutes the Young Man raised his head to look down at the scene of angels praying together over his vertical altar. His eyes rolled back in his head, and with a smile and a groan he fell back into his pleasure. But he never came. She commented on his endurance. He said he’d always been that way. She seemed to know a whole lot about cocks and pussies, and I just sucked it all in. He was one of the blessed, she said, a man who can really take a woman on a ride. I found out later for myself just what kind of ride this could be. Soon after, the redhead announced that she was tired and was going to bed.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  I was new to the University of Michigan faculty and not a sports fan of any sort. Even so, a colleague of mine urged my husband and me to attend the opening game of the football season, because “that’s what we do here.” So we went, not expecting anything in particular. The game—the Pigskin Classic against the University of Virginia and debut for new head coach Lloyd Carr—turned out to be one for the record books. Although Michigan had been favored, well into the fourth quarter, the Virginia Cavaliers had the Wolverines shut out at 0–17. Somehow, though, the Wolverines pulled off two touchdowns that put the score at 12–17. Yet their failure to kick in extra points would leave them needing yet another touchdown to win the game. With fewer than three minutes remaining, they scrambled to make several attempts, each one thwarted by the strong Virginia defense. Then, with just four seconds left on the clock, Michigan quarterback Scott Dreisbach threw a Hail Mary pass to Mercury Hayes. This was clearly the Wolverine’s last hope, and the stadium fell into near-silence with the tension of it all. Running deep into the end zone, Hayes caught the ball with his left foot just brushing the turf before sheer momentum forced him out of bounds. It was an absolutely unbelievable touchdown! Coach Carr’s new team had achieved the biggest Wolverine comeback to date. The stadium exploded into celebratory cheers, high fives, and backslapping hugs. Virtually every body present was part of one massive burst of celebration. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life—before or since. More than one hundred thousand people—all strangers to us at the time—were sharing the same boisterous euphoria (save for a few Cavalier fans). I’d easily call it mass positivity resonance. And what a conversion experience: From that moment on, I was a die-hard Michigan football fan. For the first time in my life, I devoured the sports pages, donned maize and blue, and fretted if I had to miss a game. That single game cemented me within my new community. Even far subtler forms of behavioral synchrony than this can change people. Suppose from where you sit on your front porch, you spot two of your neighbors chatting near their mailboxes. Although you can’t quite make out what they’re saying, their gestures make clear that they’re engaged in a lively exchange. As one raises her brows in disbelief, so does the other. Moments later, each touches her own face, one after the other. My doctoral student Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk has painstakingly coded behavioral synchrony like this as two strangers meet for the first time. What we’ve learned is that when people move together as one orchestrated unit, they later report that they experienced an embodied sense of rapport with each other—they say they felt alive, connected, with a mutual sense of warmth and trust as they conversed.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  He said, “I know it sounds cliché, but you could say ‘the sun rose on a dark day,’ [and] they would just shout out answers and it got to the point where they were almost too willing and it was incredible.” The atmosphere Jeremy and his students created was “almost celebratory” and truly interactive, like a church in which shouts of “Hallelujah!” come from any pew. Or, as Jeremy summed it up: “It was like a party, except with math.” This huge emotional turnaround paid dividends. Ty got an A and told his mom, for the first time ever, that he liked math. The kid with the IQ in the fifties passed the class. Another went from the fourteenth to the forty-fourth percentile. “I remember she told me, ‘Mr. Wills, I am going to pass, I’m going to pass,’ and she did and that was what was incredible.” Indeed, more than 80 percent of Jeremy’s special ed kids passed the state’s standardized math test. When you compare that to the 50 percent pass rate of the regular ed kids in the same high school, you begin to see how remarkable this transformation was. One grandmother called to find out whether her granddaughter passed, and when Jeremy told her she did, “she was like, ‘Hallelujah! Thank the Lord Jesus!!’ ” Understandably, Jeremy was immensely gratified. With poignancy he shared that “when I think about how someone, somewhere down the line, did something horrible to make these kids not like learning and to see their love of learning rekindled was almost like, sort of this . . . I don’t know . . . it is very hard to describe . . . it is almost surreal. When you see the look on their face when they start to believe in themselves again. . . .” He admits that it didn’t work for everyone, but for most it did. “I can safely say that a lot of them walked out of that classroom as far more confident and capable people than they walked in.” As for Jeremy himself, once his classroom climate began to turn around, he began to sleep better. He felt that he had more energy to give. He not only felt better, but his hair stopped falling out. He said to me, “I feel like a far more capable and confident person because of it.”

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Fucked off my feet, my shoes fall to the floor with a thud, one by one. He smiles and says affectionately, “Now we’re having fun.” Now I’m traveling on the fast train to paradise. Unschooled as I am in the process, tears often fall out of my eyes. Like a true gentleman, he will shield my eyes with his broad hand, giving me privacy, while he fucks me harder and harder, faster and faster, squeezing out the tears. When I finally release everything, not one centimeter of my being holding on to anything at all, when my ego is annihilated, then the laughing begins. It can begin while I’m still crying, the energies are the same, though the tears are more familiar. But somewhere, somehow, along the way, my unconscious bursts open and I laugh and laugh and laugh. The harder I laugh the harder he fucks my ass until the whole thing makes no sense at all. Now we are really having fun. He looks at me laughing, and then, content that I’m on the road with him, he fucks me some more, ever vigilant, ever present. My laugh sometimes deepens and I laugh like I never laughed before. I recognized it immediately the first time it happened—the cackle of the crone. It is the sound of a woman who is caught inside the mystery of the universe, in the irony of the angst, in the place that ego abhors. Bliss. At first the pleasure was unbearable and I’d try to pull away, try to know what was happening. But he doesn’t let me, fucking me so relentlessly that any attempt to backtrack to control is useless. It is here that his domination is complete. I am his slave and he forces harmony upon me, against my ferocious fear. With repetition I have come to accept it, and now I don’t only visit but have learned how to stay there. Meanwhile he is looking at me, all tears, giggles, and gut-laughs, and says, “You are CRAZY, girl.” He looks a little dazed himself, but unlike me, he maintains total control, total awareness. I look up as he kneels above me, deep inside me, and I see the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Like Michelangelo’s David, his chest is broad, his skin is smooth, his hands are huge, his face beatific. I see the beauty of this man, the beauty of man. I never saw this before. #220

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Finally, remember the confidence myth. You don’t gain confidence in a vacuum and then go off and conquer the world. Instead, you learn to be confident, to have courage, to get over anxiety, to live your life authentically, by doing challenging things. And an authentic life includes some rejection, some awkwardness, and some embarrassment. But guess what? It also includes deep satisfaction in your accomplishments, even when they don’t turn out exactly as you pictured them. And with ongoing practice, you’ll find it also includes many Moments and even some elation. By practicing, you’ll learn that even if bad stuff happens, you can keep moving forward, keep being brave. You can handle it. But don’t take it from me; take it from Jia, who said to me: “It was surprising how easy it was to get a yes. I realized how many opportunities I missed because I was afraid of people rejecting me, but I was just rejecting myself.” He paused. I’ve learned to recognize that pause in client after client, as well as in myself. It was The Moment. Then with wonder in his voice he said, “The world is a lot nicer than I thought.” PART 4 Busting the Myths of Social Anxiety 11 How (and Why) to Turn Your Attention Inside Out Wah-wah, wah. Wah wah wah wah. Wah wah. To Diego, the medical resident sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher. She was reviewing with him how to perform a testicular exam while their alarmed-looking patient looked on, but Diego was too busy trying to look calm and doctor-like to hear much of what she said. Then she stopped wah-wah-ing and looked at him expectantly. With a start, Diego realized he was supposed to do something, which, given the circumstances, was probably a testicular exam. Diego was a third-year medical student, but so far this year felt more like being on the wrong end of a sniper’s rifle. During the first and second years of med school, he had largely buried himself in a study carrel or worked long hours in the anatomy lab, determined to excel. But this past July, when he and his classmates made the shift from classroom to hospital, he fell headlong into culture shock. He found himself in a whole new world of responsibility, helping to care for real, living patients—not the dead ones of the anatomy lab or the imaginary ones of his textbooks’ case studies. But the biggest change was the scrutiny. Given that the residents and attending physicians didn’t trust the med students to do much besides breathe without supervision, Diego was observed by someone in authority all the time. He was supposed to take vitals, take histories, conduct physical exams, but he always felt as if he were play-acting. His Inner Critic would whisper to him, They can tell you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t belong here. You look stupid.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  ties, strife, jealousy, angers, self-seekings, parties, divisions, ^envy- ings; drunkenness, carousings, and the things like these; respect- ing which I tell you beforehand, as I have (already) told you in ad- vance, that they who do such things will not inherit the kingdom oj God. zzBut the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ^gentleness, self -control. Against such things there is no law. ™And they that belong to the Christ, Jesus, have crucified the flesh with its disposition and its desires. 2S// we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit also let us walk. ^Let us not become vain-minded, provoking one another, envying one another. 13. 'Tjueis jap en e\ev6ep{a e/cX^ri;, d5eX0oi' "For ye were called for freedom, brethren.3' Like v.1 this sentence is transitional. It belongs with what precedes in that it gives a reason (yap is causal) for v.12, but even more significantly in that it is an epitome of the whole preceding argument of the epistle in behalf of the freedom of the Gentile. But it belongs with what follows in that it serves to introduce a wholly new aspect of the matter, the exposition of which begins with IJLOVOV. vfjiels, immediately following vjucis of v.12, is emphatic. "Ye, whom they are disturbing, for freedom were called." On lid, expressing destination, see Th. B. 2 a £; i Thes. 47 Phil. 4". £Xeu0ep(<? manifestly refers to the same freedom that is spoken of in v.1, but being without the article is qualitative. On IxX^OiQTe, cf. on too xaXouvtoi; v.8 and more fully on i8. On dSe"X,«po(, see on iu. IJLOVOV jjirj rfyv €\€v66piav els afopjjirjv rrj <rapK,[} "Only con- vert not your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh." JJLOVOV, used also in i23 210 Phil, i27, to call attention not to an exception to a preceding statement, but to an important addi- tion to it, here introduces a most significant element of the apostle's teaching concerning freedom, which has not been pre- viously mentioned, and which occupies his thought throughout the remainder of this chapter. On this word, as on a hinge, the thought of the epistle turns from freedom to a sharply con- trasted aspect of the matter, the danger of abusing freedom. So far he has strenuously defended the view that the Gentile is 2 92 GALATIANS

• From Less (2017)

  Days, of course, are crowded. There is the sunny town square luncheon alfresco where Less is cautioned not once, not twice, but ten times by various Italians to apply sunscreen to his pinkening face (of course he has applied sunscreen, and what the hell did they know about it, with their luscious mahogany skin?). There is the speech by Fosters Lancett on Ezra Pound, in the middle of which the bitter old man pulls out an electronic cigarette and begins to puff away; its little green light, at this time alien to the Piemontesi, makes some journalists present conjecture he is smoking their local marijuana. There are numerous baffling interviews—“I am sorry, I need the interprete, I cannot understand your American accent”—in which dowdy matrons in lavender linen ask highly intellectual questions about Homer, Joyce, and quantum physics. Less, completely below the journalistic radar in America, and unused to substantive questions, keeps to a fiercely merrymaking persona at all times, refusing to wax philosophical about subjects he chose to write about precisely because he does not understand them. The ladies leave amused but without enough copy for a column. From across the lobby, Less hears journalists laughing at something Alessandro is saying; clearly he knows how to handle these things. And there is the two-hour bus ride up a mountain, when Less turns to Luisa with a question and she explains that the roses at the ends of the vineyard rows are to detect disease. She shakes her finger and says, “The roses will be taken first. Like a bird…what is the bird?” “A canary in a coal mine.” “Sì. Esatto.” “Or like a poet in a Latin American country,” Less offers. “The new regime always kills them first.” The complex triple take of her expression: first astonishment, then wicked complicity, and last shame for either the dead poets, themselves, or both. And then there is the prize ceremony itself. Less was in the apartment when Robert received the call, back in 1992. “Well, holy fuck,” came the cry from the bedroom, and Less rushed in, thinking Robert had injured himself (he carried on a dangerous intrigue with the physical world, and chairs, tables, shoes, all came rushing into his path as to an electromagnet), but found Robert basset faced, the phone in his lap, staring straight ahead at Woodhouse’s painting of Less. In a T-shirt, and with tortoiseshell glasses on his forehead, the newspaper spread around him, a cigarette dangerously close to lighting it, Robert turned to face Less. “It was the Pulitzer committee,” he said evenly. “It turns out I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all these years.” “You won?” “It’s not Pew -lit-sir. It’s Pull -it-sir.” Robert’s eyes took another survey of the room. “Holy fuck, Arthur, I won.”

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Looking to my ass, he spreads my cheeks so deliberately I cannot believe my luck. He rubs the gel gently, firmly onto my asshole, into my asshole, rimming the entryway, smoothing the passage. There is the most wondrous look on his face as he does this, alternately gazing in my eyes and gazing to my ass. He slips a finger inside, then two, watching my face, keeping the gaze as I feel his fingers turning inside me, connecting us internally and externally, full circle. Sliding his fingers out, he squeezes more K-Y onto his fingers and rubs it smoothly along the length of his cock, hard as a rock. It’s Time. Holding his cock, he guides it toward the crack in my ass, like a canoe aiming down a narrow ravine. I feel the smooth tip, both hard and velvety on my skin. The center of my asshole, like a magnet, gravitates toward the pressure. We meet. His key to my door, his positive to my negative, his plug to my socket. And the light goes on. Center to center, he nudges, I breathe, he pushes, I release, he pulses, I open, he pushes, he pushes, I open, he plunges in, our eyes lock, and he sends me home. Sometimes he’ll then pull back, and thrust short at the entry for a while, other times he’ll slide inward, downward, slowly, slowly until he is buried in my ass with no cock to spare, only balls outside. He’ll stay there for a moment, not moving. Then he’ll pulse farther. Sometimes he will move me into a different position—on my hands and knees; or standing up while bending over, hands plastered to the wall; or on my back, feet to the ceiling; or, a favorite, legs over my head and ass to the ceiling. Whichever position I’m in, he remains above me, always looking down upon me, watching me, loving me. And he’ll usually make these shifts without pulling his dick from my ass. Totally fantastic. But whatever the angle I can feel his cock growing inside me, stronger, harder, deeper, pressing into my anxieties, my pettiness, my pride, my vanity. Like a vacuum to dust, he sucks out my lesser selves, removes my sins. One by one they are suctioned away and underneath he finds my goodness, my innocence, my four-year-old before she was hit by The Hand and got mad. This is what he was looking for. This is what he finds. This is what he gives me. Fucked off my feet, my shoes fall to the floor with a thud, one by one. He smiles and says affectionately, “Now we’re having fun.”

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Put simply, you see more as your vision widens; you see the bigger picture. With this momentarily broadened, more encompassing mind-set, you become more flexible, attuned to others, creative, and wise. Over time, you also become more resourceful. This is because, little by little, these mind- expanding moments of positive emotions add up to reshape your life for the better, making you more knowledgeable, more resilient, more socially integrated, and healthier. In fact, science documents that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that lift you up to become a better version of yourself. These two core facts about positive emotions—that they open you up and transform you for the better—form the two anchor points for my broaden- and-build theory of positive emotions, which I wrote about in my first book, Positivity, to show how you can put positive emotions to work as you navigate your days to overcome negativity and thrive. The word positivity is purposefully broad. I chose it to cover the full range of positive emotions and then some. It also spans the psychological conditions that seed your positive emotions as well as their myriad effects—the slowing rhythm of your heart, the opening of your mind, and the relaxed, inviting look on your face. It even encompasses the fruits of positive emotions that ripen for you only a season later—their mounting effects on your relationships, your character, your health and spiritual growth. Here, you could protest and say that I’ve roped too much into this one term. Yet I see real value in using an encompassing word like positivity. It lassos the fuller dynamic system in which love and other positive emotions operate. Positive emotions are the tiny engines that drive this intricate, ever-churning positivity system. They are the active ingredients that set the rest in motion. Yet when I step back from the proverbial microscope to examine the larger system that orbits around your positive emotions, I see how positive emotions knit you into the fabric of life, the social fabric that unites you with others, and how they orchestrate the ways you grow and rebound through changing circumstances. I needed a new word to encompass that broader system, and that’s positivity. Keeping an eye on this fuller positivity system enables a more precise definition of love, which I provide in chapter 2. Love—like all the other positive emotions—follows the ancestral logic of broaden and build: Those pleasant yet fleeting moments of connection that you experience with others expand your awareness in ways that accrue to create lasting and beneficial changes in your life. The love you crave lies within momentary experiences of connection.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  This means that the mere act of reading this book may well have added a new and powerful emotion to your repertoire of interpersonal experiences. How you come to think about love actually stands to reshape the way your body experiences it. A global poll, released on Valentine’s Day, 2012, revealed that most married people, or those similarly coupled, identify their significant other as their most important source of happiness. Likewise, nearly half of all single people say they yearn to find their own happiness by finding their own special person to love. While these numbers certainly varied culture by culture, they strike me as a worldwide collapse of imagination. Thinking of love purely as the romance or commitment that you share with one special person—as it appears most on earth do—surely limits the health and happiness you derive from micro-moments of positivity resonance. Put differently, your beliefs about what love is become self-fulfilling prophecies. If, for instance, you think love can in fact also bloom between you and the utter stranger with whom you connect for only a few minutes at the airport, then it more readily can. If, by contrast, you think love can bloom only between you and a special, predesignated one, then you’ve severely limited the prospects for yourself and that kindly person at the airport. Think of the old-school view of love as pouring a thick layer of cement over a garden that has been planted with a thousand flower bulbs. Although any single flower might still push its way through cracks in the cement and bloom nevertheless, the odds are severely stacked against it. Yet by upgrading your view of love to recognize its full scope, you break up and remove this cement to let a thousand flowers bloom. Positivity resonance exists, whether you adopt a new view of love or not. It remains the ancient life-giving, soul-stretching state that your body craves. The difference you get with an upgrade is whether you are awake to the thousands of opportunities that surround you for fulfilling this craving. When you awaken to this new understanding of your heart’s potential, a new and life-changing emotion is born within you. Do-It-Yourself Gene Expression? Also in the span of time that I’ve written this book, my research team and I have been making new discoveries about how your experiences of love may be either amplified or muffled by the expression of certain genes within your cells. As sketched back in chapter 3, we’ve already discovered that people with higher cardiac vagal tone somehow extract a larger and more immediate positive jolt out of their efforts to practice the style of mediation, LKM, that I’ve featured prominently in part II. Even more inspiring, we found that practicing LKM actually raises people’s vagal tone such that positive feelings and higher vagal tone feed each other over time.