How to Turn Joy Into Justice with Tanmeet Sethi

Transcript

Jessica Fein: Welcome. I'm Jessica Fein and this is the I Don't know how you do it podcast, where we talk to people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside and dive into how they're able to do things that look un undoable.

I'm so glad you're joining me on this journey, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Welcome back. My guest today calls herself a joy activist. How cool is that? Dr. Tanmeet Sethi is an integrative and psychedelic board certified family medicine physician who has devoted her career to caring for the most vulnerable people and teaching physicians how to care for these communities in the most humane and skillful way possible.

She has spent the last 25 years on the front lines practicing primary care and community activism with the most marginalized communities as well as globally with victims of school shootings, survivors of hurricanes, citizens impacted by police violence, and psychologists in Ukraine under attack.

As a mother, she's also received the impossible news that her youngest son has a fatal degenerative disease.

She weaves together the expertise of both acquired knowledge with real life experience and explores the ways these experiences can be translated accessibly through the blend of ancient spiritual traditions and modern neuroscience. She's spoken on two TEDx stages about using gratitude as medicine.

Today her book, Joy Is My Justice is being released. So it's a very exciting day for Tanmeet and I know that after hearing her, you're gonna want a copy of her book. You are in luck because I have two copies to offer to people who share this episode. So just copy the link, share it, send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook, and you'll be entered to win a copy of Joy is My Justice.

And now without further ado, here is Tanmeet. Welcome, Tanmeet. I am so, so looking forward to this conversation. First of all, congratulations. This is a huge day for [00:02:00] you. Your book, joy is My Justice is out in the World. It is your book's birthday. So happy birthday to you and your book baby.

Tanmeet Sethi: Oh, thank you so much.

And I am so honored to be here. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.  

Jessica Fein: Well thank you. And I have to share that I have had the lucky opportunity to read this book already. We're gonna talk about it, but I'm so in love with this book. It's one of those books that even as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, okay, I'm gonna need to go back to that.

I wanna, you know, tell somebody else about this part. It's so rich and it resonated with me so deeply. So I'm so excited for you and I'm so excited for all the people out there who are gonna be able to read it.

Tanmeet Sethi: Uh, you're just singing to my heart. Thank you so much. That means the world to me. 

Jessica Fein: This book that we're talking about is called Joy is My Justice, and let's just start right there because wow, what a powerful title.

What does it mean?

Tanmeet Sethi:  I feel like I need to explain a little and then tell you what it [00:03:00] means. So my personal and professional lives have converged in this book in a big way. And what that means is that I've spent my entire career in activism, health, equity, social justice, intimate partner violence, gender justice, on and on reproductive rights.

And I've always fought for the underdog because that underdog was me. I always tell people I know now it's not cuz I'm so good. It's because I wanted to make the world safer for me because I never felt safe. Fighting for justice is just what I do and it feels like, you know, one of my purposes in life.

And then my second child, right before he was three while I was pregnant with my third, was diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which for your listeners is like an ALS in children. So a degenerative disease that is a hundred percent fatal, and it was this moment of reckoning. There was nothing to fight against.

There was no cure. Even as people say, [00:04:00] fight for when people talk about their cures, there was nothing, and I didn't know how I could ever be joyful. I knew I could get through it, but that's not a way to live for me, it didn't feel like the way I wanted to live. It wasn't until I understood how to look for joy that I then realized what I couldn't have predicted, which was that everyone wants joy.

Of course, I wanted joy, but what I deserved was personal liberation in my body, justice of the truest kind, a settling and comfort in my body that would allow me to finally feel that deep well of joy that I honestly don't think I had felt before. 

Jessica Fein: First of all, I connect with you as you know personally, as you share this story and this idea of, can I find joy?

How can I find joy knowing that my child has this illness? But you're a doctor, and so when you talk about the settling in your body and how it [00:05:00] changes you physiologically, can you share some of that with those of us who are laypeople, who are most us? 

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes. Yes. You know, you hear a lot of people say in my body, how do I feel in my body?

What's going on in my body? And what they're really referring to is this intricate nervous system that we have and that people are familiar with the stress in system, the sympathetic nervous system, and then the relaxation system, the parasympathetic nervous system of which the main nerve is the vagus nerve.

It travels all the way from the base of our brainstem down through our chest, through the deepest organs of our gut. And it sends more information to our brain than our brain sends to it. So the highway goes one way more than the other, and what that really means is empowering. What that means is what you do and feel and find in your body.

Can translate how you see your life. So I don't think it's about changing thoughts and getting in the right mindset. I think it's about getting in your [00:06:00] body and really feeling what you feel and giving yourself safety and comfort as you feel it. Now, that might sound vague, but I explain that with tools in the book.

And they're tools that everyone's heard of. But what I'm really trying to tell people is that some of the, what I would call whitewashed wellness world offers up platitudes for us. Often. Just, you know, see the bright side. I don't know if you have ever Jessica heard this, but at least you. This at least.

Jessica Fein: Absolutely. I wrote an article recently that says, never ever start with at least the only people who get to say at least are the people who are going through it. 

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes, yes. Thank you for writing that. And so what we go through all day is having our experience diminished because nobody wants, neither are I nor others who hear me want to sit in the pain of my story.

Right. Of course. I didn't wanna sit in it. Nobody wants to sit in it. Our nervous system's reaction is to run away. It's [00:07:00] danger, but that's our nervous system caring for us in the best way it can, but that doesn't serve us all the time and longer in life. At some point we have to res sooth our nervous system to tell ourselves that we're safe and okay in this moment.

Jessica Fein: It's so interesting because you write that when you got the diagnosis, Your immediate feeling was to escape. First of all, there is no escape in that situation. Of course, you wanted to escape. Who wouldn't want to escape, but in fact, when you moved toward what was happening, that's where you found your joy, and that seems so counterintuitive.

How did you find the joy when you moved toward the situation? 

Tanmeet Sethi: People say that all the time because it does sound counterintuitive, but what I want people to understand is what I didn't understand then, which I understand now. Is that joy lives in the same deep well as your pain because it's really deeply embedded in your capacity [00:08:00] for love and meaning.

And so joy is in the same place. And the more we can sit with love, tend to, and accept our pain, the more we can feel the deepest joy we'll ever feel. And so, yes, of course I wanted to run away. I didn't want this life that was. Wasn't the motherhood I had imagined, but in the end it was what it was and there was no way, as you said, to escape it.

And part of our suffering is wanting to escape it and saying, we wish it were different now. I did that all the time. I still, let's face it. I wish traffic weren't happening. When I'm in it, I wish, you know, I mean, it goes from little things to big things. We do it all the time. That's our natural inclination.

But all I'm asking people is to say, this is an invitation. Because after I give talks, you may have read in the book, people will say, I just can't do that. And I just say, well, it's an [00:09:00] invitation. And honestly, most people who say that to me tell me that what they're doing isn't working for them. So I invite them to a different way.

Jessica Fein: I love what you're saying so much because you're putting words and science around something that I felt really deeply as I was by my daughter, Dalia's side. I didn't know how to explain it, and so it's validating for me to hear what you're saying. One of the things that you talk about is this cultural guilt that a mother shouldn't feel joy when she has a sick child.

And I totally understand that. So how do we reconcile? Why do we feel the cultural guilt and how do we reconcile that with how we know we do feel or want to feel? 

Tanmeet Sethi: Well, this could be a few hours on its own this question. Right. That's a such a big topic

Jessica Fein: I feel like every question could be because there's so much here in this book.

Tanmeet Sethi: Yeah, I'm with you. So [00:10:00] I think everyone's cultural guilt is different. It's conditioning of the highest kind from our family's society for women in general. We are conditioned. In my personal situation, in my culture, you grieve and toil over suffering, and if you look like you're happy, then it's like you're not actually a good mother.

You're not really a mother who cares enough or loves enough. Some of this is given to us explicitly and most of it implicitly, right? It's what we see modeled. It's what we're told in our culture, in our movies, and our rituals and our prayers, all of it. And at the same time, what I'm trying to do with this book is really tell people that it's time to reclaim space because people have made you too small.

This story is too small, right? And every time we're in suffering. We're in a narrow sliver of suffering. We can't see anything else, and all joy practice is, [00:11:00] is expanding that sliver ever so slightly as often as we can. I had to unpack my cultural guilt around being a mother with a dying child, and I had to say, how can I expand that story?

How can I, as I say, others say, rewrite that story. Right, because that story's too small. I'm not just a mother who is suffering because I am. That is a truth that will not change. I do suffer. I grieve, I toil, I cry. I get angry every day, even in a joy practice. That's what people need to understand. But my joy practice holds all of that because then I touch joy.

Over and over through these ways that I talk about in the book and really allow myself to understand that joy is not a solution, but it's a way to hold all that I feel, and we all deserve that, right, Jessica? I mean, I would say if you're a mother who's suffer, if you're anyone who's suffering and you have some [00:12:00] cultural guilt or story that joy is not yours to have.

Or as someone told me recently, their patients say, I just can't find joy anymore. That's what they say. I would say, you haven't deserved your pain. You don't deserve to suffer. Even you're not faulty, that your nervous system took care of you and you feel activated or numb either way, but you sure as hell deserve to find joy now and allow yourself that kind of justice in your body because we're all human, right, and we deserve that.

Jessica Fein: Wow. Part of what you do in your book and their storytelling, and you talk about patience and you talk about your own experience, and you also give really practical ways for people to begin this practice of joy. You know, hopefully everybody listening will read the whole book, but for now, can you share some of the ways people can invite joy in particularly when it feels counterintuitive to them?

Tanmeet Sethi: Gosh, there's so many ways I'll give practical examples. I'll just pull out [00:13:00] some examples from my own life so people can understand how this looks day-to-day. I actually, very recently, about a month ago, we had a very traumatic instant where my son Zubin fractured his spine in an accident and. It was quite traumatic and I've never heard him in that much pain or that scared even with all that he goes through, and I was very activated that night in the ER for 10 hours.

I mean, I was very activated, grief stricken, crying, constantly. Very, very anxious and hard to hear him squeal like that. First of all. My joy practice allows me to feel all of that because what a joy practice does is say this, what you're feeling is valid and necessary. These emotions are what you need to feel to actually face the pain.

There's no sort of, why can't I buck up and not cry here in the er? Oh God, I'm a doctor and I should [00:14:00] be stronger, and I'm thinking of what things could go through my head. Right. And 

Jessica Fein: you know what's so interesting is that I think a lot of people feel like, well, those two things have to be mutually exclusive.

If I'm crying and grieving and scared, I can't possibly find joy. And what I'm understanding from what you're saying is not only are they not mutually exclusive, But they're dependent on each other. 

Tanmeet Sethi: They are. And so in those moments, often in that er, uh, I think it was 12 hours, I don't remember. I often put my hand on my heart as I describe in the book, how to do self-compassion practice.

Not because I was berating myself, but because I was needing tending to. And my husband was there, and he is a gift. I mean, like we could do a whole podcast about my husband, but you know, he also needed to take care of my son and himself. And so in that moment, I just needed to give myself what I needed because self-compassion turns off the threat [00:15:00] center and it allows us to feel safe because in any moment of trauma we feel that we are not okay.

We are not safe. So that's one simple thing. Two, I did gratitude practice in that emergency room. Now people will say gratitude is looking on the bright side. It's it's toxic positivity, which I'm totally against. I don't like toxic positivity either, and I talk about that in the book. But gratitude is not like that when practice at its depth and its core.

What gratitude is is allowing myself to cry, feel scared. Sit and waiting for imaging tests and other tests to be done and to sit and say, I am grateful that I can feel all of these emotions, because that means that this suffering has not stripped me of my humanity. I am grateful that I have a partner, a loving, beautiful partner who can cry with me.

I am grateful that there are light workers in this emergency room who are here to take care of my son. I don't wanna be [00:16:00] here. No, but thank God they're here. Those are just small examples of how these practices through the book can be brought into daily life. Not to solve, nothing changed. It was a traumatic evening in that way, but what changed was how I held it.

And what changed was my faith that I knew we would be okay. What does okay mean? It depends what you think it means, but I knew I would be okay. We would get through this, not cuz we would buck up and get through it, but because we would get through it with love, grace, and compassion. 

Jessica Fein: What is the difference between joy and happiness?

Tanmeet Sethi: Hmm. It's so big. So big. So happiness is welcome. I, I'll take it any day. Okay. I'll take any happiness I can get. So it's not to say the happiness is not worthwhile, but it is a cognitive evaluation. It is attached to outcome. It is based on what we get or how things work out or what we do, and it's so [00:17:00] fun and pleasurable.

But it's not like joy, which like I said, draws on that deep. Well, the same well as pain. Joy is not binary. Joy can live right next to all the hard emotions. I understand why people say, how can you be joyful? Because I think they're getting confused with happiness. I think so too. I think that 

Jessica Fein: people absolutely use them interchangeably.

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes. And happiness is binary. You're happy one moment and you're sad the next. It's an emotion. I think it's beautiful. But it's an emotion. Whereas joy is actually a deep embodied experience. It's very different on how it draws and what it gives, and it's not, like I said, it never negates anger, fear, sadness, or grief, joy holds all of it, you know?

It's the reason you can be at a funeral and feel so deeply sad and laugh so hard, remembering something about that person. And 

Jessica Fein: I feel like sometimes others see you [00:18:00] laughing and think, how can you be doing that? You know, back to that idea of cultural guilt. Yes. We feel judged like I have to be absolutely visibly in the depths of despair every single minute, or there's something wrong with me.

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes. And if you ask someone who's laughing like that, I've been that person. If we're happy, no, I wasn't happy, but I sure as hell touched a moment of joy right there because I touched the love that has caused the pain I'm sitting in. 

Jessica Fein: Are people predisposed to a certain level of joy? And what I mean by that is, you know, a lot of us have heard about this happiness scale, right?

Like you're born with a certain happiness set level, and the best things can happen to you. But if you don't have a high level of happiness, then you're not gonna feel great. And likewise, you can be born with a high level of happiness and have really tough time, and you'll still come out smiling, whatever.

 I don't know how much scientific validity there is in that, but I'm wondering how much, because you talk a lot about cultivating this practice, how much of it is we either have it or we don't?

Tanmeet Sethi:  [00:19:00] I haven't been asked this question yet, and I love it. I will say that I think you've just really touched on another big difference, which is that there is this sort of whole happiness set point and all of that.

We've all heard about. I do not think that there is a set point for joy. So you're really bringing out one of the biggest differences because joy lives in the body already. I talk about in the book, I think of joy as a human right. I think of it as our innate human right to find our joy. We are born with it.

It is stripped away many times, and for some of us, many times too many. I do not understand why some people I care for have the amount of suffering they do. It breaks my heart in shattered pieces at the same time. They still have the right to joy and maybe happiness is hard for them in general. I mean, I know people who seem to just be happy every day no matter what.

I will tell you that's [00:20:00] not me. I mean, I think I bring light and good energy into a room, but I am not your happy go-lucky camper that is not me. But I don't know if you'll meet more joyful person than I am. They're very different. You know, and so I always tell people I was so much happier before Zen was diagnosed in my whole life, even with two bouts of very serious depression.

I think I was happier in my life, but I was never as joyful, never. 

Jessica Fein: Is it because you weren't as tied in to things that matter? I ask that because I feel like having gone through the most insidious, punishing illness with my own child, yes. I saw so much more variation in both the darkest of the dark, but also a different level of beauty.

Than I ever was privy to. And I wonder if when you say you didn't [00:21:00] have as much joy, if there's a little bit of resonance with what I'm saying.

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes, I think so. You know, this is despite a whole childhood of not belonging and racism and all kinds of harassment and danger, but I don't think I felt this kind of heart pain before.

So people will say, do I need to feel that to have joy then? To find joy. I don't think that's true. I do think people who touch the deepest depths of pain do seem to feel the greatest heights of joy. I cannot discount that. And at the same time, what I try to tell people is the more you can sit in and imagine the world's pain, The more you can find your joy, because I'm sure people have told you this too, I can't imagine what you went through.

I can't imagine what that was like or how you do it. Well tell everyone out there, I know all these statements come from a place of love. I actually really do. And I think there is part of the [00:22:00] conditioning of our system that none of us wanna sit in pain, so we try not to make other people sit in it.

We're already suffering. I get where it comes from, but what I tell people is, please try to imagine my pain. 

Jessica Fein: I feel that exact same way. It's something else that I've written about because I actually think people can imagine, I just think they don't want to. Yes, yes. Right. And I think that when people say it, they're trying to say, I respect what you're going through.

I can't even imagine. Yes. They feel it would be presumptuous for them to say, I, I, I get it. And yet, It shuts everything down. It's, it's like an end to the conversation. No, you can't imagine it. Okay. Well, I'm not gonna explain it to you then. I guess we're done. Rather than to use your word, having an invitation to let's try and be in it together.

Tanmeet Sethi: What you're saying is, what I resonate with deeply is then I feel excluded. I feel invisible, right? Like now I'm some alien person and so we can't have a conversation and I've had people say like, I don't wanna tell you about this cuz you deal with so much more. Or, and what I would say to people is that, I get it.

Don't get me wrong, [00:23:00] I mean, I'm not living in a refugee camp with, you know, my children being taken away from, I mean, we can all do this, right? But what we're doing then is creating a hierarchy of suffering, which only gives it more power, and what I'm talking about is taking our power back.

Jessica Fein: I love that. Which gets back to the very first question I asked, which is, can you explain this idea that joy is justice? Joy is your justice. 

Tanmeet Sethi: Exactly, because joy is your power. It is your way to stand boldly in the world and say, no matter what is happening or has happened to me, I deserve to feel joy. I deserve to find my joy and live with everything else right alongside all of that.

Because if we cannot find our deep joy, we have lost our humanity because yes, we all will suffer. Humans will suffer. But we all should also say, all humans have the right to experience joy. Why don't we say that [00:24:00] too? It seems so simple now to me that I could not have told you 15 years ago when I thought there was no way I was gonna feel joyful.

You know, I thought that was done. Like I'll just fake it now, right? I'll just get through and fake this, but we'll just make it work. I could have never understood that even though trauma lives in the body, we all know that that is where it heals. There is a place to heal trauma. We don't have to think that we were given something, and that is the end of the story.

There is never an end to your story. 

Jessica Fein: Well, it's so interesting that you say it that way about the body because you have said finding and keeping your joy is your most potent medicine. Yes. And that struck me because you're a doctor saying that. Yes. And I love thinking about joy as medicine, but again, it's that idea of the challenge of not only finding it, but keeping it.

Especially when you're in a situation where you're continuing to have the tough stuff.

Tanmeet Sethi: Yeah, but here's the secret for your listeners is that it sounds hard. It's not easy. It's simple, but it's not easy. But actually, it gets really easy because once you work for joy, to find joy, be in your body, to really realize what it means to feel safety in your body, and to soothe and to comfort yourself and use these tools.

It starts to work on you and it starts to work on you in a way that it shows up without you trying.  

Jessica Fein: Well, that's so interesting because you do say joy isn't gonna just come knocking on your door. Right. And I loved that because that is a very passive way that we might be like, well Joy, you know, joy is not showing up for me.

And you're saying, no, you have got to open the door. You have to invite that joy in.

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes. But when you do, she takes up residence.  

Jessica Fein: I love that. Once she's invited in, she's like, I am staying.

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes. I don't even know anymore what my practice is because it's part of every day, moment to [00:26:00] moment. So I'm having a hard day.

I take a walk in nature, 10 minute walk, maybe down to the park with my dog. I see a beautiful tree or a leaf, and I stop and marvel in awe at the majesty of nature that yet as much as I can suffer, as much as I can feel sadness, this tree yet perseveres and sits here for me to be with. I can turn on hot water and start getting teary.

You know? So I'm just saying that this practice really, it starts to take a life of its own. So yes, it's hard at first. But then it is the easiest thing you will ever do because you will never want to not be doing it. 

Jessica Fein: One of the things that you talk about is the power of changing the way we question ourselves and giving ourselves permission.

One of the specific examples you gave that struck me was the power in changing the question from why me to why not me.

Tanmeet Sethi:  Yeah, this is a big one. I think all of us say, why me at [00:27:00] very naturally, many times, like I said, about traffic or about your luggage getting lost or, and then also about really, really hard diagnoses or hard experiences because it's natural to not want the pain.

So then we question it. But that question actually, I realize, reveals sort of the arrogance of humanity. Why me? Well, why not me? I'm human. There are other people suffering around me. Now I'm not saying, oh yeah, bring it on. This is so great. I'm so excited. What I'm saying is though, is that as you read, it's a very powerful question.

It's not just a changing of the word. It changes all about your body posture and your expression. So if you think about it, if I say, why me? I think of being hunched over, maybe bent over sort of in a victim role. When I say, why not me, it feels like my body has expanded, that I've opened myself up to the world, opened my heart, and I am here standing boldly.

And I [00:28:00] reference Amy Cutty's work and her work on power poses and so forth, and I really love her work. But I actually, when I first experienced her work, I thought, well, is this just whitewashed woo kind of stuff more, you know? Cause I'm always kind of looking for that. Gosh, no. What she's really saying is that the way you change your body can change your chemistry and can change how you see this world.

Jessica Fein: Right, and it's so validating to hear you as a physician saying that.

Tanmeet Sethi: I really mean it. That question and that sense of expansion is a part of joy practice because what that is, is saying, no, here I am and I'm going to open up to this world despite what this world is doing to me. 

Jessica Fein: The other thing is I feel like, why not me can be used in the exact opposite way as well. And what I mean by that is this horrible thing happens. We say, why me? Why me? And what we're talking about is shifting that and saying, why not me? But I also think that when we [00:29:00] are achieving great success.

Tanmeet Sethi:  Yes 

Jessica Fein: Or you know, something fabulous happens.

Sometimes we feel like, oh I, I don't deserve that. Why me? And I feel like that's also a time to say, why not me.

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes. I, I so agree with you. That's sort of creating that expansiveness. Yes. And stop contracting your story. I really, I could not agree more. 

Jessica Fein: So when you wake up in the morning and you're like, I am not feeling the joy today. I, I can't access it. Like there's just too much. How do you shift? You mentioned you might go in a walk, you might do gratitude practice. Do you have like your go-to for this is how I'm gonna start the day in a way that feels more open and joyful? 

Tanmeet Sethi: Yes, I like to get up earlier than everyone else so I can have some time alone actually in the dark.

And I do breath practice as well as gratitude and some type of movement in the morning just to get me going. Now I explain why all three of those things help with the joy practice in the book, but what I'm [00:30:00] really doing is. Very lightly using those tools in the morning to set the tone for my body as I get up out of bed and my feet touch the earth, meaning my ground of my room, I actually think almost every day, another day that I get to touch this earth.

It might be a day that I'm dreading. I. But it's another day that I'm touching the earth. I do breath practice, which people call meditation, breath practice, but it's, it's kind of a meditation. And then I do some gratitude as well, kind of reflecting on what I'm grateful for today, especially if I think it the day is going to suck, then I kind of look ahead at what I'm grateful for.

Now I wanna be really clear because you may have gotten to this place in the book or read it, but I talk about ritual and I really think that the way people talk about mourning rituals in the wellness world are sort of handed down in this military tough type of kind of way, like. You win the day. If you set up your, you know, green [00:31:00] smoothie on the counter right.

And you, you know, and hey, don't get me wrong, I do a lot of green juices and, you know, I'm an integrative doc. I do all this stuff, but I would say that, you know, there's science to show that rituals are helpful. So there's, there's science to back why the wellness world is so adamant about it. And at the same time, I don't think it's presented in a way that's very healing.

And so the way I think about it is, is that my morning ritual is a soft place to land. It's a place to say to myself, I'm okay in this moment, even if life is not okay and believe me, in those days, just recently after my son's accident, there were a lot of days after that where I woke up and did a lot of that, sort of reminding myself that this is my soft way to land and that I'm okay right now.

I may not be okay. Overall, I may feel very scared. But right now I'm okay and this is giving me a piece of certainty in this moment. And rituals do that I [00:32:00] explain in the book, but the science is really clear that rituals offer us that. And so I do like to start my day in that way. Oh my God. When I had little kids, you know, I started my day with kids next to me on me, right?

And, um, I did do gratitude practice then too, but I didn't, you know, have like a alone time in the dark. That just didn't happen. But I found a time through the day sometime to come back to a ritual even then. So I would encourage people, when in your day can you just come back to a soft place to land? Is it before you come home from work, you know, is it on your way home from work?

Is it before you check your email? What are your regular rhythms? Is it after you take your kids to school, whatever it is, find a soft place where you can say, I'm going to bring one of these tools in in just a minute or two. I'm not talking about sitting under a bunion tree for 30 minutes here, right?

Like, And so bringing them in what I call meditative [00:33:00] moments, because I think longer meditation that I do in the morning and some people do is beautiful, but it's actually the moment to moment meditations that allow that to actually be more potent. And so I would never just sort of say, oh, I've meditated and I'm done.

Jessica Fein: Oh I love that. Because I also think saying, well, I've gotta find 20 minutes to meditate. Right? Whatever. It's, that can feel scary and intimidating and like, that's just not gonna happen. We can all find a meditative moment. 

Tanmeet Sethi: Exactly. Someone recently asked me how on a day where it's very busy or stressful, because I am a caregiver, right?

I have a disabled child who cannot do anything for himself. And so how is it that you can actually do what they said, self-care. That's a whole nother podcast, self-care. But what I would say is that I care for myself in moments all through the day. So even if I'm sitting with my son and I have to transfer him, lift him, and you know, obey them or whatever, I can give myself a breath.

Now that my son's [00:34:00] older, I try to do things with him, so he loves it. So we breathe or we do a little guided meditation that we listen to, or I just think breath. Breath. And I give myself some belly breaths, giving my vagus nerve some soothing moments because otherwise I'm on stress. And I'm human, so my mind can go to, why do I have to be a caregiver?

All my friends are going out without a babysitter cuz their kids are older. I can go into that mode really in a second. So I have to sort of nurture that, that sadness. All that is is grief.

Jessica Fein: There's so much here, and like you said, I feel like we could do six different podcasts. Every one of these topics is deserving of its own hour.

Tanmeet Sethi: I think what I really want everyone to hear or think about is that joy is their right. Joy is their revolution. I mean, I honestly, this is my mission now. It's my activism. I call myself a joy activist now because I have fought [00:35:00] for so many things, but I have never fought. So hard for something that I know everyone can have.

There is just nothing that can keep anyone from it. And I mean that through trauma, oppression and suffering. And I wish I could change all of that, but I know that everybody has the right to feel joy alongside all the crap they are given in this world. And I would say the more pain you have in this world, the more you need to access joy.

And the more you have the right to moments of love, peace, and hope. 

Jessica Fein: I think your work is amazing. I think your book is amazing. Joy is my justice and I recommend it to everybody who's listening. And I'm just so grateful that you wrote it and I am in that mission with you. Oh, absolutely. I am advocating for joy.

What better thing to be advocating for. So thank you so much for sharing yourself and your work with us.

Tanmeet Sethi:  Ah, such an honor to be with you.

Jessica Fein: There's so [00:36:00] much to take from this conversation and from Fait's book. So again, if you'd like to enter to win a copy of Joy as My Justice, all you need to do is share this episode with a friend and send me a dm.

My takeaways are number one, joy is a human right, accessible to all of us. 

Number two, you have not deserved your pain. You do not deserve to suffer, but you definitely deserve to find joy now and allow yourself that kind of justice in your body. 

Number three, what you do in your body rewrites how your brain interprets and translates your life.

Number four, happiness and joy are different. Happiness is a cognitive evaluation. It's attached to outcome. It's based on what we get or how things work out or what we do. It's fun and it's pleasurable. But it's not like joy, which draws on a deep well, the same well, that holds pain. Joy is not binary. It can live right next to all the hard emotions.

Number five, changing the question from why me? To why not me can change your body [00:37:00] chemistry and how you see the world. 

And number six, which I think is my favorite, caring for yourself, does not need to mean sitting under a banyan tree for an hour. It can happen in small moments throughout the day. 

I'd love to know what you think of the show and if there are guests you'd like to hear from, you can send me an email through my website, Jessicafeinstories.com and don't forget to follow rate and review the show.

Have a great day. Talk to you next time.