How to Feel Joy Instantly: 2 Healing Practices I Use Every Day

When I dived into my healing in 2020 and stopped denying the childhood trauma and mental wiring that was affecting everything in my life, I began to understand how important it is to feel joy, compassion, and love as often as possible if I want to heal. 

In 2015, I launched the blog Courage Within You. Although I intended to make people aware that our pain can become our greatest strength, I didn’t grasp the concept of love and self-compassion the process, and honestly, I didn’t spend too much on this topic. 

When I found the courage to face the sexual assault and the mental, physical and emotional abuse I went through, I began to understand the importance of the universal power that survivors of trauma often don’t think about: the power of love and joy we carry in our heart. 

Love doesn’t hurt – unhealed triggers do

At first, I thought that love was difficult. Considering the quality of relationships I have created, full of drama, fights, vindictive behavior, substance abuse, jealousy, and hurting others because of my pain – none of them seemed loving and safe. 

Later on, I learned that true love doesn’t hurt, but unhealed trauma and deeply rooted emotional triggers do. I wasn’t creating relationships that were healing and comforting. I was creating trauma bonds with people who proved to me that I was unworthy, unlovable, and not enough. Since I believed these statements at my core, I couldn’t attract anything loving. Red flags and poor behavior were, considering my mental wiring, totally normal and acceptable. 

I fed off of fights and drama. Extreme lows and highs were all I knew, and although I was suffering, in some twisted way, I enjoyed it since it brought the excitement and adrenaline my survival brain craved. 

I couldn’t help but wonder: “How do other people find their love and happiness, feel joyful, build dream businesses, and have routines they rarely break? In the meantime, here I was, at 3 am, trying not to have an anxiety attack while feeling totally abandoned?” 

Reflecting on it today, this was my normal way of life. It isn’t a secret that human beings are very flexible in adaptation to whatever environment they are in. Survival mode isn’t any different. 

Pain and the unhealed past make us often act like lunatics. They bring us to the edge of crazy. We begin to doubt whether we will ever feel different since everything good and pleasure seem so out of reach. 

Although these feelings and thoughts are valid and common for trauma survivors, they shouldn’t stay unchecked and unacknowledged, let alone unhealed. 

Joyful feelings bring hope

Here is a question I want you to consider: If you grow up in an environment with a lack of support, nurturing, and love, what do you need to heal it and become whole? 

Yes, you guessed it. You need support, nurturing, and love. The great way to create it for yourself is by building meaningful and trusting relationships with others. However, there are other ways you can use to begin your healing process. 

Whether you were sexually assaulted, bullied, physically and mentally abused, experienced poverty, lived in a household with a chemically dependent person, or witnessed domestic violence – you need love and compassion to heal and recover. 

And you deserve it as often as you possibly can have it, feel it and experience it. You are worthy and that, my dear reader, is non-negotiable. Therefore, I want to offer you some simple exercises that will allow you to feel joy and love instantly.

If you are anything like me, the concept of self-compassion and self-love may feel weird to you, almost uncomfortable at times. I certainly couldn’t grasp it at first. I wasn’t open to the idea that I actually deserved to feel joy or any other pleasurable emotions.

Although awareness of our triggers, the impact of negative experiences on our mental health, and understanding of our self-sabotaging behaviors are imperative for successful healing, we also need more of what we crave, like love and care. I learned about the self-care toolkit during my therapy, and I love it. 

In the recent blog post – “4 Self-Loving techniques I learned in Therapy” – I shared with you things I do to incorporate self-soothing techniques into my life. 

Today, I want you to expand your self-care toolkit with two simple, yet effective healing practices to feel more joy and love in your life. Remember that healing doesn’t have to be this dark and overbearing journey. It’s also about loving and freeing experiences that bring hope and safety into your heart. 

Healing practice #1 Gratitude and Visualization 

I remember when I started practicing meditations from Dr. Dispenza, where I learned one of the best tools to raise my vibration. He explains that if we want to connect to higher emotional states but can’t feel that emotion, the best way to get as close to this feeling as possible is gratitude. 

It’s easy to get caught up in our triggers and survival behaviors and feel defeated. Therefore, we want to work with our perspective by finding the good within the bad. The best way to find and feel joy is through gratitude and visualization. The reason is that feelings of joy, love, and compassion give us hope and override hopelessness. 

I love to combine visualization and gratitude since it allows me to feel joy much faster. Whether you are visualizing and giving thanks for things that have already happened or focusing on things and experiences you want to have in the future, this is a sure way to accomplish it. 

Here is how to use both of them for the past and the future. If I feel defeated, sad, or even unworthy, I grab a moment or an experience from the past to feel utterly grateful. If I feel unmotivated or stuck, I use a future experience that I want to manifest for myself. 

The exercise I started to practice in the past couple of months is called priming, and I learned it from Tony Robbins. You can find one on YouTube HERE. The video is short, empowering, and very effective in raising your emotional state and feeling more joy within minutes. 

Healing practice #2 Loving prayer 

What defines lasting recovery and healing is love. Love is the best ingredient to heal our wounds and start treating ourselves with compassion and empathy. 

If you are anything like me, you know how to pull through difficult situations, be tough, be strong, maybe independent, or even ultra independent (which is a trauma response, BTW). You have all kinds of tricks on how to survive. 

These skills brought you to this stage of your life and helped you to survive. They have been useful – no doubts about it. However, in order to rise and thrive in life, what you need is love – huge, enormous, crazy amounts of love to heal your heart and keep it open. Love is what pulls walls down and allows us to open up. It allows us to pour our emotions out and process what we have been stuffing inside of us for all those years. 

When practicing this loving prayer, close your eyes, and find a comfortable and quiet place where you can relax. Place the right hand over your heart and take three deep breaths while focusing on your heartbeat. Keep your hand on your heart during the entire exercise. 

When you inhale, imagine white or ice blue loving light coming down to your heart through your head. Feel it surrounding your heart and heal it. When you exhale, imagine this loving energy spreading all over you. Remember that there is not a lack of love. Love is all around you and within you -it is your perception of the absence of love that’s creating the state of lack. 

The important part of saying this prayer is to feel its words. Therefore, choose the ones that most speak to you, and bring you peace and comfort. Here is an example of my simple loving prayer: 

“Infinite Universe and my loving Intelligence. Please bring me wisdom to see the lessons I am overlooking. Give me the strength to endure what I am going through. Bring me peace to let go of what I can’t control. Thank you for loving me unconditionally. I feel loved, I am love, I give love.”

Now take another three deep breaths, and use the same method as at the beginning of this exercise. To help you tune in even deeper, use any favorite meditation music on YouTube. It brings more comfort and peace, and it gets you centered. 

Conclusion 

Although we must work through emotions of our traumatic experiences, we don’t want to only focus on our pain. We need to turn to healing emotions like love, compassion, and empathy. These nurturing emotions allow us to heal our childhood wounds. 

What keeps us stuck in survival mode are often the same emotions that wired us to live in it in the first place. Learning to approach ourselves with more love and understanding brings out more moments to feel joy and gratitude – gratitude for our strength, resilience, and power. Therefore we build confidence in ourselves that no matter what we face, we can recover and thrive in life.