Ep 171 Goodbyes and Hellos

Today is a special episode where we hear from Dr. Kristina Kaiser about her doctoral work with the topic of Joy.   It also marks the final episode with Kristina as our co-host, as she plans to focus more time and energy towards this work.  Tune in as we learn more about the academic, emotional and spiritual aspects of joy.

To follow Kristina:

• kristinamkaiser@gmail.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-kaiser-73a00337/

Sign up for our newsletter here: https://foundrysc.com/about/newsletter

Some of our show notes contain affiliate links.    We want to save you the effort of looking up resources + we get a small commission at no extra cost to you.  Thanks for your support.

Transcript

171 Goodbyes and Hellos

[00:00:00] Christina: Hello, it's great to be with you. Today is a special episode on our podcast that comes with a mixture of emotions. If you've been a listener for a while, you know that Christina Kaiser has been working on her doctor of ministry and recently completed that milestone. And so we wanted to take an opportunity for Christina to share more about the next chapter of her work.

[00:00:23] And with that, this will also be Christina's last time co hosting the podcast with us. And we know that goodbyes and hellos are a mixture of both the happy and the sad emotions. And we think it's important to take time on the podcast to talk about this process, maybe give a little bit of the behind the scenes so that we can all move forward into these next chapters well.

[00:00:43] And we also recognize that people experience goodbyes and hellos all the time. And so the hope is that hearing our journey can inspire yours as well. So with that, Christina, we would love to hear more about the work that you've been doing behind the scenes to make it upfront for our listeners. 

[00:00:59] Kristina: Yes, thank you.

[00:01:01] And hopefully, even as it changes, it's not exactly goodbye, but for our listeners, there's definitely this kind of switch in how we experience life together. And for us, too. But yeah, thanks. As you mentioned, I've been working on this Doctorate that came along when I started my whole journey towards becoming a spiritual director.

[00:01:22] And when you do these doctorate of ministries, you get to do a project, which is similar to a dissertation, but tends to be something that you can take with you out into the rest of your life, something very tangible. And I ended up choosing to work on joy for mine. So prior to going into my doctoral project, I had led classes on.

[00:01:44] having a life filled with joy and living through life in this kind of a way. And so it was already an interest in something that I wanted to maybe dive a little deeper into. And so when I spoke with the head of the place where I finished my doctorate, which is Graduate Theological Foundation, I brought it up thinking they would tell me no somehow that maybe joy wasn't the kind of academic thing that one studies, but.

[00:02:10] They were wildly affirmative about it. They're like, yes, go for it, do your thing. And so you go through a little process to help you put parameters around what that's going to look like. And in my case, the question that I ended up asking was, can even 10 minutes a day in a spiritual practice improve one's quality of life, specifically where joy is concerned?

[00:02:35] And there's a way in which you might say yes, of course, any spiritual practice will be good for you, but the question then expands to like, how much is that going to impact your life? How much is that possible? There were a few academic things that you have to do along the way.

[00:02:52] You have to define what joy is going to be for the purposes of your project, and in my case I looked at the kind of scientific definitions of joy, which can be like that effervescent emotion that people tend to associate with joy. Like I did a Facebook kind of poll one time, just like, how do you think of joy?

[00:03:13] And people would say things like rolling down a hill with like complete delight and just this feeling of so much that even maybe the body can't contain it. But then there are this people who weigh in about joy, and they look at it a little bit differently than the scientific way. So the spiritual realm, one of the definitions I had found was along the lines of this unlimited essence of one's being.

[00:03:39] And depending on what tradition you come from, you might use different words. Like in Christianity, we often talk about the fruits of the spirit. And so sometimes we might think of joy as this gift that comes from the Holy Spirit. But I really liked this notion that joy is this thing that lives within and we can draw from it, like a wellspring, and it's maybe one of those names for gods, as we talk about the many names of God.

[00:04:04] Christina: Well, Christina, I am so thankful that they received this idea with enthusiasm because I do think it's important and I love the ways that you're describing the academic approach to joy, some of the spiritual aspects of joy, etc. And so I'm curious, practically speaking, what did this look like?

[00:04:22] How did this project come to fruition? 

[00:04:25] Kristina: Yeah. So then you have to put something together. And the great thing about these professional doctorates is you can do something tangible. You could do a retreat, you could develop a class. So in this case, I developed a 90 day journey, a reflection type guide that also brought in time one on one with a spiritual guide throughout that experience once a month and then a lot of surveying so that I would have actual data for my ending paper So yeah, I launched into a 90 day experience writing and writing and creating these and each week had a theme Within each week, there were different focuses from day to day that repeated throughout, the 90 days.

[00:05:10] So sometimes the focus was on nature, sometimes the focus was on movement, sometimes on senses, sometimes journaling. Every seventh day was a celebration day. So there were rhythms built in and then from there, giving people the opportunity to try many things. And it was just fascinating to watch what happened over the course of that experience.

[00:05:35] Some things I think there's like just super good news, like. When you start reading the surveys, shifts in perspective, like within 14 days, like how quickly that this takes root in our, we don't always have numbers. We have this sense that maybe something good happens when we sit in spiritual practice, but how much good, and is it all just in our heads?

[00:05:57] How do we really know? So people were taking daily surveys and they were taking monthly surveys and we were meeting in one on one settings where they could say more verbally. And yeah, you start to see within two weeks time, this shifting, and then as I would talk with people, they would say various things like, I, I never even thought about joy before, for example, but yeah, like some people I think don't even have hope for it, right?

[00:06:25] They don't even have hope that life, Maybe could have a higher tone or a higher vibration than what they're currently experiencing. Whereas other people, like one of my favorite comments that came out of it was like, when I started this, I felt smothered by my life and I don't feel that way anymore.

[00:06:44] And so that's just this huge. When we're sitting and we're saying, I don't know what to do, I don't know what's wrong with me, but there's this general malaise over my life. And I think that this comes from the stresses that we experience, and the disappointments that we experience, and the things that we don't know what to do about.

[00:07:02] And so I think there's this little like tamping down of one's life that starts to happen so that even when things feel good in our lives, we don't even have enough celebration energy. We just that was good, what's going to happen next. And so a lot of people reported feeling like they had a sense of tools, even.

[00:07:21] Chris: I love some of the things that you're talking about, Christina, and I've had Experiences of relaying your work to other people talking about joy and even getting a doctorate in joy. And I think some of the things that I've come up against with people is oh, that's interesting.

[00:07:39] But what is the practicality to that? Like where some of the things that I hear you saying is just an intentionality on awareness. We're becoming more aware of our life our presence in the world. And so what are some of the practicalities of where joy meets the road?

[00:07:59] Kristina: That's such a good question. Yeah, and there's such a gamut of how to even think about it. As people looked over their whole 90 days, some of them started to say things like, I feel like I have tools now to deal with my life, or I can really tell if I missed a couple of days, I can feel like Oh, that anxiety is really stronger today than it normally is.

[00:08:23] And so that those little things make a really big difference, I think. And when I look over what's happening for people, I there's multiple layers to it, I think one is that we tend to be in a little bit of dysregulation. So I do a little bit more thinking about this in terms of my kids and parenting sometimes, but.

[00:08:45] Like this book we mentioned not so long ago on the podcast. It was raising kids with big baffling behaviors is what it was. And so she talks about the owl brain, like when we are in our wise brain and in the contemplative world, we might think of this as that space where we can see, where we can breathe, where we can let things go.

[00:09:05] And then she talks about the watchdog brain, where people are on attack or on guard and so essentially what they've done is dropped down into the lower brainstem and it's more about survival and then there's possum brain where people are like I don't know what to do so I go limp. I think sometimes in And this is true even when I'm working with people in spiritual guidance maybe we come in and there's a little bit of flustering, like I got lost on the highway and now I'm in a parking lot.

[00:09:34] It's not the ideal way to come into your session, right? And so sometimes you can't just dive in and say, Oh, what a horrible experience you had. So tell me, where do you see God in your life these days? It's not going to work that way, right? We need a minute. to just breathe, establish that we are relatively safe, that we are relatively okay, which then allows us to open to what is wisdom saying to me?

[00:09:59] What is spirit saying to me? Where do I sense good things in my life? And so I think just even 10 minutes a day gives people that like, okay, and now I've done it once. So maybe later on in my day, when I become a little bit dysregulated again. I can get calm again and find that space where I can hear.

[00:10:20] all over again. I think that's what tends to happen for people. Yeah, so I think that's the big one. 

[00:10:26] Christina: Yeah. And I appreciate you naming to, early on recognizing that in the Christian tradition, we talk about fruits of the spirit. One of them is joy, but it's clumped in with eight others.

[00:10:35] And so to really pay attention to that particular piece of it, and even you naming, Some people don't have hope for joy. And so what's the point or is this even relevant, et cetera. And I appreciate Christina, it sounds like there was a variety of ways that one could enter into the joy with the nature, with, different aspects of what that might look like.

[00:10:53] And so I'm curious as you explored kind of a variety of joy pieces and again, honing in on this one particular piece, how does joy fit in with some of the other gamuts of the emotions and what we experience, I was actually just recently listening to an interview with an Lamont and she's an author that I really appreciate.

[00:11:12] And she said, I think in our younger years, joy is more of that. emotive celebratory type things where when we get older, joy looks more like peace. She's like, when I'm experiencing a peacefulness, that's when joy comes. And I think, oh, that's interesting, right? The fruits of the spirit clumped in the peace and joy or whatever.

[00:11:29] So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. 

[00:11:31] Kristina: Yeah I agree. And it was funny to, as I would sit with people through this joy journey, I They would say things like, I'm gonna add peace to my own definition of joy. That when I am feeling peaceful, that is joy too. And I found this fascinating because in one way I had offered them a very specific definition of joy, right?

[00:11:54] This unlimited essence of our being and it didn't matter that they had read that There's something in us that through our experiences, we develop our own way of thinking about it and talking about it. So I do tend to think that these are all like spokes in a wheel, as far as I'm concerned, like they all play together.

[00:12:14] And even in the context of the joy journey, one day every week was specifically designated to be a day of joy. where you worked through the more difficult things that you were experiencing in life. And I think probably oftentimes that came up on more than one day. But sometimes people would comment in their surveys like, Am I supposed to feel joyful at the end?

[00:12:34] I don't know. Because it's a little bit of a shock. But the theory for me was, based off of things that I was reading which was if we are suppressing anything We are suppressing everything And so if we're trying to hold all of our difficult emotions at bay When the opportunity for joy comes we're going to have trouble experiencing that too So I do think that they all work together and in part that's why each week had a different focus So yeah, like week one is awareness.

[00:13:05] And, I actually waited until week eight to do play as an aspect of joy, but there's like transcendence and acceptance and forgiveness and kindness and generosity. There's many aspects of entering in. But it was funny. I thought that play would be this big gift to offer to people after doing all this inner work.

[00:13:26] And I think that people really enjoyed the inner work. More than we sometimes give inner work credit for, like we maybe think. Oh, we're not gonna, we're not gonna like that, but actually it gets at something and allows us to deal with it. I do think that there's this big interplay, that if we're working on our joy, quote unquote, we're really working on many other things as well, because they are all connected.

[00:13:50] It's not really you can't really just be a joy expert, it's all gonna come in. 

[00:13:54] Chris: Yeah, I think one of the things that comes to mind for me, and I'll give a very practical example me and Christina Roberts, we talk a lot about parenting and I, I've interacted with a lot of grandparents and grandparents have A completely different narrative of being a grandparent than parents have.

[00:14:14] And so grandparents talk about how their grandchildren are bringing in them joy. And it's it's the thing that they bring up in their life. And then I'm also around parents and it's no, I don't hear that. I don't hear joy as the thing. And so my question is it responsibility?

[00:14:31] Like grandparents say, you get to be with the grandkids and then you give them back. That's the thing they love about grandparenting is they don't have the responsibility. But Christine and I have been asking the question, what does it look like to have that grandparent energy in parenting your kids?

[00:14:46] And where does joy come in? But yeah it depends. Meets this you do have to restrict, you're restricting your kids. We restrict with phone time with screen time, like we're restricting because this lack of freedom now is going to produce more freedom in the future.

[00:15:06] And where does joy fit in with all of that? And so I would love to hear some practical comments on my parenting conundrum. 

[00:15:16] Kristina: Yes, I am so in the trenches with you. Is this that reality of life and I do think about this a lot and maybe I'll take it away from parenting and then come back for a moment.

[00:15:27] But one of the people that I worked with had a really high demanding job. And so when you have a demanding job like that, time for yourself, your hours are weird. Like it's just all very difficult. We often had to reschedule our meetings to make it work. And in one of our sessions, he was saying that he turned a corner and he could suddenly hear the birds chirping.

[00:15:51] Outside, and that it just opened his perspective and he had this kind of moment of feeling, sometimes we call it happiness, we don't use the word joy very much in our culture, but he had this feeling of feeling happy or content or good again. And I think that has, that's a really good story about how this works in general.

[00:16:10] Not every moment of anybody's day is absolutely free of stress. It doesn't work that way. It's not if we invest in joy, we don't experience stress and struggle because we do. I think this is the theory that I'm on anyways, is that it's about experiencing for, As much as you possibly can, those moments that are so good.

[00:16:33] And so if we're all at the dinner table and we're all laughing together and we feel connected, I know that I'm still going to have to go parents later on. I'm going to have to tell someone to pick something up or whatever. And that's not going to be fun for me. That is reality. So can I really be here in this moment now where things are easy and we're connected So that those other moments don't feel like that's all that there is it's There was this really great, quote that I found in a book called Joyful, where they talked about joy is not ignoring what is negative, it's being able to hold that both are true, right?

[00:17:12] There is both negative and positive going on in our lives all the time. And do we weight one more than the other? A lot of times because of how we're wired, we just pay more attention to what's hard. And if we don't really focus on the good, it'll just get lost and it won't feel like it exists. And so a lot of it, I think my theory is really savoring, noticing, paying attention to what actually feels good in our lives.

[00:17:41] And then from there, I think perspective starts to shift. So I, one person I worked with struggles a lot with their sleep. Patterns and they would sometimes report like on a scale of one to five, I feel like a two because I just didn't get good sleep. And then somewhere in the middle of the journey, they said, I'm going to give it a three because I didn't get good sleep last night.

[00:18:03] But their perspective was shifting. What did it mean to have a bad day? And how did I perceive that bad experience started to change? And so it wasn't as burdensome as it had been in the past, which I think is really interesting. 

[00:18:17] Christina: Christina, clearly you have so much energy and life around this topic of joy, and it's just so fun to hear the work that you're doing this project and what's next.

[00:18:26] And so maybe we can just take a minute to acknowledge that, like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, this is going to be Christina's last podcast with us, and we are leaving on wonderful terms. All of us are still friends, we love each other, and we want to be supportive of this next chapter. So Chris and I are going to continue the Contemplative Life podcast Another one will be. airing next week. So be sure to tune in and Christina, I'm wondering if people want to follow what you're doing and learn more about the joy journey and the next iteration of that, how can they be in touch? Yeah. 

[00:18:55] Kristina: I have set up my LinkedIn page, which will be in the show notes. So if you go to LinkedIn sometimes I'm searchable as Christina Kaiser, sometimes Christina stone Kaiser, which is my maiden name, but I think on LinkedIn it's Christina Kaiser.

[00:19:09] People can also certainly email me. It's Christina M, as in monkey, Christina M. Kaiser at gmail. com. So both of those are possible. And then, yeah, with the Joy Journey, I do hope to run it again in May. I've been working with my husband, who's a technology guy, to see can we get this up on the website? A website.

[00:19:31] There is no the. There's no website exists, but could we get it on a website so that people could run the journey like as they discover it, this kind of a thing because as I talk to people, I'll just be anywhere. I'll be at my kids events of some kind and people will just share it. I'm having trouble sleeping at night.

[00:19:49] I think I might have some seasonal affect disorder stuff going on. I don't know what's wrong with me. I had to take a half day off of work and just sit in front of the TV and knit. And I don't know, we moved and I'm just unhappy. And I think, yeah, this is life. And are there little ways that we can improve our experience, right?

[00:20:07] That, that question I asked, improve our quality of life in any way. Yeah. 

[00:20:12] Christina: Awesome. Thank you so much, Christina, for being with us today. And of course, for being with us the past couple of years in this role, we are excited to see what's next for you. 

[00:20:20] Kristina: Yes. And thank you for journeying with me because as we talk about many times offline, I am who I am because we have been together as long as we have.

[00:20:30] So thank you guys. 

[00:20:32] Christina: And that was the part of the podcast where we take a moment to talk about what we are into. So what are we into my friends? 

[00:20:44] Chris: I am into bobbleheads and my this isn't something that I've normally been into but very specific bobbleheads. My children know my musical taste and I love the band.

[00:20:59] You too. And so they had this debate on which bobblehead would I want the most out of the YouTube band and the one that was willing to put up the money for the bobblehead thought that I would like Bono as the number one pick for bobbleheads. And was very disappointed to find out that it was actually the edge that would have been my number one choice for a bobblehead.

[00:21:23] So I love looking up at my bobblehead and I love that my children think of me and know my musical preference. So that's what I've been into lately. 

[00:21:33] Kristina: Love it. We have been into making tempeh and tofu from scratch. So when we lived in the Boston area, we could easily get tempeh. In central Wisconsin, we have not been able to.

[00:21:48] And so a friend of ours, there's this meeting we go to a couple times a month and they were like, Oh, we make our own tofu. We could loan you our stuff so you could just try it. And of course that led us down this path. And now we are buying the ingredients necessary and trying these things and we've had some success.

[00:22:05] It doesn't always look as pretty as it does in the package because, we're still learning, but it has been fun to try and it's been fun to eat. 

[00:22:13] Christina: Wow, that's incredible. You're always into such creative culinary things. I am into Bluey. And for those of you who may not know what Bluey is, it's this delightful Australian, Cartoon, and it's actually something that the entire family likes to watch.

[00:22:28] Actually I think my teenagers maybe first heard about it and then of course my eight year old. And so if you haven't watched Bluey, I highly recommend it. Just the episodes are so down to earth and it's to your point, Christina, how do we experience the joy in the day to day life of just living together?

[00:22:41] So I am very much into Bluey. Thank you so much for being with us and hope to see you again next week. Have a great week.