Ram Dass once said- if you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family. Just in time for the holidays we’re talking about families and emotional contagion. How can you find sanity amidst the people most likely to push your buttons? What are the best ways to navigate your friends, family and loved ones? How can your own expectations and belief systems be creating havoc when all you want is peace and love? Get your hot cocoa and get ready for some holiday cheer.

Today’s episode is the first of what we hope will be many where we answer a listener's question. As you may recall, we did a couple of episodes on self love, and afterwards we got a very thoughtful question asking, essentially, “well what about selfless love?” Vanessa and I, as usual, have a lot to say about what we often define as selfless love, and what true self love and selfless love really are. As Vanessa says in the episode, “All love technically is selfless.” Boom.

After 3 episodes sitting with fear, today we’re talking about joy. And yet Joy is such a profoundly vulnerable state that we can be a bit, or a lot, phobic of it actually. First, what do we mean by this word joy? And how is what we’re talking about different than the pursuit of happiness? And why is it that even in the helpful places- like in meditation or mindfulness circles or in therapy- that we focus so heavily on the contents of the muck in the basement? If we want to welcome more joy into our lives, what are we up against really? I mean, what is up with the suppression of the sublime going on?!