Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: And I'm Aimee Prasek. Here at Joy Lab, we infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. And today, we are doing an episode completely on a quote that I am just feeling in my bones. And I want to share it. I want to affirm it. I don't want to talk about it for just a bit, but really just to like, share it with everybody and hope that it maybe it resonates with you as much as it [00:01:00] does me.
Okay, here it is. It's from Virginia Woolf. "No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but one's self." I love this quote. And I think I love it so much because how we just, I think we just put so much pressure on ourselves to be big, to be bigger, to do bigger things. I hear this a lot in, in work life too, you know, I want to, I want to do something bigger as if what you're doing isn't meaningful at whatever way of working or serving you're doing.
There's just seems to be all this pressure on, because perhaps the internet can connect us to the world that we have to make a global impact in everything we do. And I think it's, it sucks. That's too much pressure. And I think it's wrong and it makes me just want [00:02:00] to throw the world away and just live alone on my you know, plot of land or something. So, like, what is in between that, I guess? How can we engage with the world and not feel this pressure to sparkle, to hurry, to rush, to do these big things that we think will, feed something that feels, insufficient in us. And I think this pressure starts, especially when we're little too.
I see some of these shows that my daughter has caught. We try to, you know, curate certainly what she watches, but some of the, some of these shows are so focused on maybe, uh, you know, just even a cartoon character that is a pop star, that is a princess, you know, these roles where they're focused in fame and fortune and power.
And so I think, you know, this is not a, this is a narrative that we're given when we're little. And so [00:03:00] I just want to sink into this quote. I just want y'all to hear it. Henry, is there something you want to share with us as well? When you hear that quote?
Henry: Well, first, I love the quote. I've never heard it before. Virginia Woolf, you know, she lived a while ago in a different world. And I'm just a little curious, Aimee, if you recall, how did you come across this quote?
Aimee: Okay. So this comes from a show. This is going to be
Henry: Of course it does.
Aimee: There's a show called "I'm Sorry" with a comedian and it's pretty vulgar, but it is an amazing show. I think it digs into these types of dramas that we have in our own inner workings. And so her, I don't know what the context was, but, the mom was feeling ill or something.
And she had said about her five or six year old daughter, she said, just tell the world, tell the world that my daughter [00:04:00] was average. And I was like, Oh. Yeah, what a great thing. To be average. She said it with such this pride, like she had raised an average human. I was like, yeah, I want to be average. I love that.
Like, what a great place to be. So then I started looking around for more research and quotes on the mental health benefits of releasing these pressures and these judgments on us. Yeah.
Henry: I love it. Wow. No, that's great. That's, that's, uh, that's very creative, I think. It's a creative way of seeking out a really super cool quote. So, the first part of that, she says, I think she said, there's no need to hurry. Is that right? Yeah, so I am reminded of my kind of early childhood years where I was well I'm old enough to have [00:05:00] known boredom first hand as a child, when I didn't have anything really to distract myself.
And there were simply times where there was nothing much to do. And now we've talked about this, I think, that people would, will do almost anything to avoid letting their mind be idle. You know, this study that showed that people, if left in a room, quiet room by themselves and they're given the option of giving themselves a little electric shock versus just sitting there doing nothing, people will choose to give themselves a little shock. We simply don't want our minds to be idle and there is a lot of virtue in having an idle mind from time to time. Of letting your mind [00:06:00] wander, you know, without filling it with stuff. So that's one thing that jumped out at me. The second piece, "You Don't Have to Sparkle," is, I think, really beautiful.
Aimee: Yes.
Henry: And I love it. I love the concept of being okay with being average with not standing out in some way. And it reminded me of a conversation I had not long ago, very recently with a client of mine who listens to our podcast. And, you know, we're often talking about thriving, living in such a way that you're, if you're thriving, there's less room for something like depression.
Well, her, her question was, how do I know if I'm thriving and I could just hear that, you know, there's a fine line here between, wanting to thrive and seeing it as just one more thing that I'm [00:07:00] not doing well enough, and which is clearly not what we want or what we're going for here.
So, I would say thriving could be something as simple as not doing anything special and being good with that. Being okay with that. That might be one way of thriving. Because it sort of ties in with that third part of the quote, which is, I can't remember how she phrased it, but something about really just being yourself.
Aimee: "no need to be anybody but oneself."
Henry: Yes. Which to me speaks to authenticity. Something that, it's a concept we haven't talked a lot about in Joy Lab and I'd like to do more of it because I just love it and I think it's so important and this, and it ties in so well with self compassion and self acceptance... this idea that I am this. [00:08:00] This is who I am, I know myself so well, and I accept that this is who and how I am.
There's just so much power in that, and I think that becoming really authentic in one's life is no small task. And it doesn't just happen automatically. So it's really worth exploring. I love that she included that in the quote, and it seems to just tie everything else together.
Aimee: Yes. I love this quote to in the context of thinking about, this piece of wisdom, you know, that when the student is ready, the teacher will come. This idea that, this rushing, rushing, rushing is not going to accelerate our speed of healing or our speed of growth necessarily. That there is, there is a time. And it will blossom, and that doesn't dismiss motivation or hard work or anything like that. [00:09:00] But, it does sort of soften the grasping around what's at the end of that tunnel that we're trying to race to the end of. And then this idea of no needing, no need to sparkle. We already sparkle, we are made of stardust. I mean, that is a proven fact. So at, you know, authentically, we are sparkly. That is who we are. So that striving can soften. I think we have a lot of episodes coming up as well that get into what you just said, Henry, authenticity. Self compassion, self acceptance, we can lighten up on ourselves, we can, soften our clench, our grasping, our hurrying, our busyness, our rushing. And still grow and flourish and thrive.
That's what's so beautiful. And we'll get into that a lot over the next couple months. So look for those episodes. So to close us today, I am going to read that same quote and let's just, [00:10:00] if you need to close your eyes, if you are in a safe spot to close your eyes, close your eyes and let it sink in.
Here it is.
"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but yourself."
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