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

  With a referral from a trusted friend, I started therapy with a Jungian psychotherapist. After four months of intense work, my therapist suggested that I might want to go and get Ganga someday. My reply was total surprise, "You mean I can?" From that moment on, Harry and I worked to get our daughter back. We assembled a team of lawyers, cult specialists, therapists, and private investigators. Four months later, I went to Kashi Ranch with my father, a private investigator, and the local SWAT team, and demanded my daughter back. With the cooperation of the local criminal justice system, I had secured the necessary court order. Our daughter was reluctantly released to the police, and had to wait in a foster home until the judge awarded us custody. Two weeks later, Ganga was on the airplane with her true family, flying to her new home in Colorado. This is what she wrote at the age of nine: A cult is a person that uses mind control and can make you gullible and you don't even know it. But you start to love her because she makes you feel special. A cult can hurt you very bad. She can even make you think she's god! A cult is bad. Even though it is easier to express what is wrong with Kashi Ranch, we do our best to keep it in perspective and let Ganga express what was good about her cult experience. There were some positive things, and these helped mold her to become the wonderful person she is today. I feel quite lucky. I got a second chance, a chance to be whole and live a full life with all of my children. Having my daughter back is a dream come true. Yet I struggle not only with the loss of those precious six years but also with the pain of the wound I inflicted on my daughter. Every day I search for forgiveness; the healthier Ganga gets, the easier it becomes. (In Chapter 15, Rosanne describes the challenges faced by Ganga and her family as she learned to adjust to life away from the cult.) Troubles Overcome Are Good to Tellby Alexandra Stein Alexandra Stein spent ten years in a political cult in the Midwest. She documented her experiences in her book, Inside Out: A Memoir of Entering and Breaking Out of a Minneapolis Political Cult (North Star Press of St. Cloud). Currently, she is completing a Ph.D. in sociology, specializing in the social psychology of political extremism. She also writes creative nonfiction on a variety of less heady topics. I was in a left-wing political cult called the "0" for about ten years, from the age of twenty-six to thirty-six. I wrote this eight years after I left the group, and another six years have passed since then. Even though I have come along even further in my recovery, these earlier insights will, I hope, be beneficial to others.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At Quilter Street we all rose early, and bathed and washed our hair and dressed - it was like getting ready for a wedding. I very gallantly decided not to risk my trousers on the crowd - socialists having such a poor name already; instead, I wore a suit of navy-blue, with scarlet frogging on the coat, and a matching necktie, and a billycock hat. As ladies’ outfits went, it was a smart one; even so, I found myself twitching irritably at my skirts as I paced the parlour waiting for Flo - and was soon joined by Ralph, who was dressed up stiff as a clerk, and kept pulling at his collar where it chafed against his throat.Florence herself wore the damson-coloured suit I so admired: I bought a flower for her, on the walk from Bethnal Green, and pinned it to her jacket. It was a daisy, big as a fist, and shone when the sun struck it, like a lamp. ‘You shall certainly,’ she said to me, ‘not lose me in that.’Victoria Park itself we found transformed. Workmen had been busy raising tents and platforms and stalls all through the weekend, and there were strings of flags and banners at every tree, and stall-holders already setting up their tables and displays. Florence had about a dozen lists of duties upon her, and now produced them, then went off to find Mrs Macey of the Guild. Ralph and I picked our way through all the drooping bunting, to find the tent he was to speak in. It turned out to be the biggest of the lot: ‘There’ll be room for seven hundred people in here, at the least!’ the workmen told us cheerfully, as they filled it with chairs. That made it greater than some of the halls I had used to play at; and when Ralph heard it, he turned very pale, and retired to a bench for another reading of his speech.After that, I took Cyril and wandered about, gazing at whatever caught my eye and stopping to chat with girls I recognised, lending a hand with fluttering tablecloths, splitting boxes, awkward rosettes. There were speakers and exhibitions there, it seemed to me, for every queer or philanthropic society and cause you could imagine - trade unionists and suffragists, Christian Scientists, Christian Socialists, Jewish Socialists, Irish Socialists, anarchists, vegetarians ... ‘Ain’t this marvellous?’ I heard as I walked, from friends and strangers alike. ‘Did you ever see a sight like this?’ One woman gave me a sash of satin to pin about my hat; I fastened it to Cyril’s frock instead, and when people saw him in the colours of the SDF, they smiled and shook his hand: ‘Hallo, comrade!’‘Won’t he remember this day, when he’s grown!’ said a man, as he touched Cyril’s head and gave him a penny.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At the last moment, as I leaned from the carriage to embrace him, he drew a little chamois bag from his pocket and placed it in my hand, and closed my fingers over it. It held coins - sovereigns - six of them, and more, I knew, than he could afford to part with; but by the time I had drawn open the neck of the bag and seen the gleam of the gold inside it, the train had begun to move, and it was too late to thrust them back. Instead, I could only shout my thanks, and kiss my fingers to him, and watch as he raised his hat and waved it; then place my cheek against the window-glass when he was gone from sight, and wonder when I should see him next.I did not wonder for long, I am afraid to say, for the thrill of being with Kitty - of hearing her talk again of the rooms we were to share, and the kind of life we were to have together in the city, where she was to make her fortune - soon overcame my grief. My family would have thought me cruel, I know, to see me laugh while they were sad at home without me; but oh! I could no more not have smiled, that afternoon, than not drawn breath, or sweated.And soon, too, I had London to gaze at and marvel over; for in an hour we had arrived at Charing Cross. Here Kitty found a porter to help us with our bags and boxes, and while he loaded them on to a trolley we looked round anxiously for Mr Bliss. At last, ‘There he is!’ cried Kitty, and her pointing finger showed him striding up the platform, his whiskers and his coat-tails flying and his face very red.‘Miss Butler!’ he cried when he reached us. ‘What a pleasure! What a pleasure! I feared I would be late; but here you are exactly as we planned, and even more charming than before.’ He turned to me, then removed his hat - the silk, again - and made me a low, theatrical bow. ‘“Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wrench!’” he said, rather loudly. ‘Miss Astley - late of Whitstable, I believe?’ He took my hand and gripped it briefly. Then he snapped his fingers at the porter, and offered us each an arm.He had left a carriage waiting for us on the Strand; the driver touched his whip to his cap when we approached, and jumped from his seat to place our luggage on the roof.

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

  In the current era, a typical scientific answer to this question describes a momentary emotional state—like anger, fear, or joy—as an organized set of responses to some new circumstance you face—like an insult, a clear danger, or sudden good fortune. These coordinated responses show up as discrete and identifiable changes in your facial movements and cardiovascular activity, in your subjective experience and action urges, and so on, all presumably orchestrated by discrete and identifiable changes in your brain. A hidden assumption is that the unique states of anger, fear, and joy are given to you by the basic design of your body and brain, as sculpted over millennia by Darwinian natural selection. Barrett’s answer to the question, what is an emotion?, equally compatible with the premise that you inherited your basic emotional architecture from a long line of human ancestors, is that your experiences of anger, fear, and joy are not, in fact, biological givens, handed to you, preformed, by specific hardwired locations or circuits in your brain. Instead, she argues for considerably more flexibility in what makes for an emotion. Posing an assumption-shaking challenge to the field we share, Barrett contends that your brain comes preset only with the capacity to represent what she calls core affect , the more amorphous pleasure or displeasure of your bodily states, along with some degree of arousal. What makes for a specific experience of anger, fear, or joy, then, is your ability to weave together your appreciation of your body’s current state of pleasure or displeasure with your conceptual understanding of what’s happening to you in that very moment. In other words, higher-order mental processes—like memory, learning, knowledge, and language—are the more basic “ingredients of mind” that combine together with “core affect” to create the various recipes for states like anger, fear, or joy. Although aspects of Barrett and colleagues’ “constructionist” view of emotions can be traced back to earlier scientists, theirs is the first to be backed by modern neuroscientific evidence. What does this mean for love? What does it mean for you? Plenty. For millennia, your ancestors felt energized by markedly good feelings when they interacted and connected with others. Those were the moments that made them feel part of something much larger than themselves, more energized, alert, and alive than they felt in other, more ordinary moments. Piecing together the commonalities across the many and varied situations that gave rise to such powerfully energizing good feelings led your ancestors to come up with words, rituals—and indeed whole religions—fashioned to represent and cultivate those longed-for feelings, in themselves and in others. Having such words and rituals makes a big difference.

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

  My students and I first included a brief nightly reflection task like this in one of our many longitudinal studies a few years back. We’d originally included it to track group differences in our participants’ experiences of social connection. We expected that, compared to the people in our wait list control group, those who were randomly assigned to learn loving-kindness meditation (LKM) would report more day-to-day social connections alongside more day-to-day positive emotions. They did. What we didn’t expect was that our control group—those who simply completed the daily surveys yet did not learn LKM—would also show increases over time in both social connections and positive emotions. We’d never seen this before. Across several past longitudinal studies in which we’d asked people to provide daily reports of their emotions, we’d never seen improvements simply due to the act of regularly reflecting on feelings. But in this study, we did. The only difference was that we’d added the social connection questions. With these two questions added to the very end of the daily report form, upward spirals emerged for our control participants as well. Even more remarkable, increased feelings of social connection forecast changes in the functioning of people’s physical hearts, as registered by increases in their vagal tone. If it weren’t for this pronounced effect, we might have dismissed the result as mere wishful thinking or the possibility that our study participants simply got wind of our interests (in social connection and positive emotions) and told us (through their daily reports) what they thought we wanted to hear. Yet the fact that reflecting on social connection appeared to penetrate the body to affect enduring heart rhythms made us take a closer look. This surprise finding inspired a key part of my student Bethany Kok’s dissertation. To gather definitive data on whether the one-minute thought exercise of considering how “close” and “in tune” people feel when interacting with others in fact generates important emotional and biological changes, Bethany randomly assigned working adults to reflect daily either on their social connections in this manner or on the three tasks on which they spent the most time that day and to evaluate how “useful” and “important” those tasks had felt to them. Remarkably, here again, we observed increases in day-to-day positive emotions and end-of-study vagal tone, but only in the group assigned to reflect on social connections. Clearly something powerful was embedded within this simple thought exercise.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  In the beginning, I bought the tiny little travel tubes, good for one or two sessions, small, discreet, deniable. Once I knew, initially, the ecstasy of the act, I also knew it could only be a very rare occurrence, sort of like a birthday special. I reasoned that it would not be healthy for my little asshole to be so invaded too frequently. I reasoned that bliss was not free, not plannable, and definitely not something that might come my way very often. Such reasoning led me to buy those little travel tubes. But those tiny tubes kept running out and denial became an effort. Ass-fucking was part of the regular repertoire. The next time he opened the drawer, he pulled out a giant, phallic-sized white-and-blue tube, looked at it, and fell off the bed howling with laughter. It was a risky move for me. Presumptuous. Practical. After several months of using one large tube after another, I put two large tubes in the drawer at the same time. That is how he developed the ritual of dispersing the tubes while I sucked his cock. The beautiful man with a fierce erection tossing large white-and-blue plastic tubes around the room (wherever we land he can fuck my ass, right there, right then, no reaching): it is an image of promise as close to a guarantee as I’ve ever known with a man. The gold band on my left ring finger guaranteed far less. Soon there are as many as five tubes in the drawer at one time, each in a different stage of emptiness, the emptier the better. I still haven’t figured out how many ass-fucks per four-ounce tube. Probably about eleven. At $4.19 a tube, that is about 38 cents a fuck . . . add that to the price of a condom (thirty-six for $14.99) at 42 cents, and the best thing in the world costs less than a buck. Then I found the tubes discounted at Costco, two for $4.00, and bought six. That brings the whole affair down to 60 cents per cum shot. (Ass-fuckers: use dark glasses for K-Y shopping and don’t turn around in the checkout line: they’re all staring at your butt in disbelief.) I’m going to buy stock in K-Y. The Lexus of lubricants. Grateful for the smooth ride. I heard a television talk-show shrink quizzing a cross-dressing man to test if he was gay or straight. Playing quick word association, she says “football,” he says “beer”; she says . . . he says . . . she says “KY,” he says “Kentucky.” She announces triumphantly that he is heterosexual. And, I would add, clearly not a heterosexual sodomite. Of the liquid lubricants, Astroglide is king. But be forewarned: if you pour Astroglide onto K-Y during a single vigorous ass-fucking, then expect a large amount of froth. Froth everywhere.

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

  Coming up on the back side of the store, I turned left into what I figured was the back entrance, planning to make my way around the parking lot to the storefront. Only it wasn’t really an entrance. It was just a short gravel road that led nowhere. I stopped the car and stared at the distant storefront. I’m sure I was only frozen like that for a matter of seconds, but my husband found it amusing. “Stuck on a gravel road?” he chided. We shared a laugh at my stunned response. I can’t tell you how many times in the years since Jeff has resurrected this phrase to gently tease me for being a bit slow to figure out an unexpected situation. Knowing me so well, he gets that surprises can make me deer-in-the-headlights stuck for a moment (or six). Yet instead of taking this recurrence as a character flaw to overlook, or as cause for annoyance or criticism, he has made it our running inside joke. Ever an alchemist, he transforms predicaments like these into micro-moments of love. Love that not only brings me swiftly back into action but also reinforces the safety of our bond. This silly example points to yet another thing that your intimates uniquely offer you: shared history. Earlier this year I took a late-night cab ride at a conference with my former office mate from graduate school, whom I’d just run into for the first time in nearly a decade. Although we’d lost touch for so long, within a matter of minutes, we were laughing uproariously in the back of that cab about old times, conjuring up our old goofy sayings and antics. In the short commute to our respective hotels we were transported back to the late 1980s as well, and to the fun times we’d had together. Wiping the tears of laughter away as we said our good-byes, we dreamed up ways we might reconnect again in the future. Your intimates offer you history, safety, trust, and openness in addition to the frequent opportunity to connect. The more trusting and open you are with someone else—and the more trusting and open that person is with you—the more points of connection each of you may find over which to share a laugh, or a common source of intrigue, serenity, or delight. What About Babies? Appreciating the deeply shared understanding and care that supports the micro-moments of love you feel with intimates can make you wonder whether newborns have the wherewithal to truly engage in love. While (most) parents love (most of) their newborns, are their newborns truly capable of loving them back? With their limited capacities, how can newborns muster up the selfless focus on others seemingly required by love? The trick is, they don’t need to muster at all. Under the right prenatal conditions, newborns arrive thirsty for connection with caring adults, trusting and open.

• 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.

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

  Now, gently call forth the visual image of someone for whom you know something good has happened. This good event may be big or small. Perhaps this person’s family has been expanded to include a healthy newborn child. Or maybe he or she got a raise or had an important project at work meet with success. Or maybe this person is simply feeling healthy and strong, and enjoying a sense of ease in daily life. No matter the circumstances, let your mind slowly absorb the scope of this person’s good fortune, knowing that, like all events—good and bad—this, too, shall fade with time. Then, lightly remind yourself of how people worldwide yearn to be happy, and that—at this particular moment, for this particular person—this universal wish is coming true. Into this context, say the following classic phrase, or your own version of it, speaking from your heart: May your happiness and good fortune continue. Repeat this ancient wish over and again, with each new breath you take. Let the phrase infuse and soften your heart and your face. Visualize yourself supporting this person, celebrating his or her unexpected good fortune, coaxing whatever goodness he or she experiences to linger just a bit longer. As your practice deepens, try out new ways to soften and expand your heart’s capacity. Take in new people, ranging from those you know well to those you don’t know at all. Remember that your aim is not to make this or any other person’s good fortune last forever. That’s hardly possible. All things pass, and it does no good to expect otherwise. Instead, your aim is simply to condition your own heart to appreciate others’ blessings when you become aware of them, to open to them, so that you may lovingly celebrate with them. Try This Micro-moment Practice: Create Celebratory Love in Daily Life