BRING ON THE JOY!
Weekly sessions RESUME
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2023
The Joy Gym is a (virtual) place where we come together as a community to practice cultivating and strengthening the muscle of joy, to learn to build awareness, and to gain tools and techniques for shifting our energetic patterns.
Our 30-minute training sessions will be spent working on different brain and heart “muscles” that support joy and emotional well-being in our life. Our gym equipment and tools include mindfulness, meditation, reflections, writing, discussions, and working out some of the knots in our lives.
what past participants have to say...
THE JOY MUSCLE?
At The Joy Gym, we’ll focus on strengthening the “muscles” (awareness around mindstates, vibration, and frequency) that cultivate and nourish joy, ease, and contentment in our lives. We’ll explore and cultivate our capacity to notice feeling tones (satisfaction and dissatisfaction, pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant) and bring awareness to thought patterns that are unwholesome and unbeneficial for maintaining movement towards happiness.
Similarly to how one muscle doesn’t do all the work to help us move our body, our happiness is supported by many “muscles” and nourished by awareness. Muscles we’ll explore include joy, play, imagination, peace, ease, simplicity, hope, equanimity, compassion, connection, gladdening the heart and mind, contentment, lovingkindness, flow, bliss, happiness, generosity, gratitude, and appreciation in our lives. We’ll explore how to build these muscles, their near enemies, and the challenges or blocks we encounter along the way.
why THE JOY GYM?
Joy is our jam.
Simply put, we can cultivate suffering or we can cultivate joy. We choose joy. We want to live in a world that values joy, connection, ease, peace, and balance. And that’s a world that values healing, awareness, and self-reflection. It’s also a world that is soaked in play, imagination, and openness to new perspectives.
The Joy Gym allows us to be mindful of and release lower vibrating energies, such as shame, guilt, fear, and isolation, while actively cultivating the higher vibrating energies, such as joy, gratitude, acceptance, love, and contentment.
Monica and Sherwood both want more joy in their worlds and believe that modeling joy and the skills that have brought them so much joy already can have a valuable impact on others. Joy is infectious. We don’t just want to be more joyful--we want to surround ourselves with people who are cultivating this energy in their lives. Waves that come together in the same frequency grow exponentially.
Negative conditioning can make the world hard to navigate, where it’s easy to get swept up in an eddy of lower vibrations. There is tremendous value to being in a community of like-minded individuals who are practicing the tools to navigate life’s hurdles and to allow ourselves to marinate in joy.
Joy is our jaM
BENEFITS
-
Trainings, tools, exercises, and techniques that support the cultivation of joy, wisdom, and emotional well-being
-
Community workouts and support
-
Experience more joy, lightheartedness, laughter, ease, spaciousness, and mental and emotional flexibility and stability
-
Develop deeper levels of awareness that ripple out much farther than simply supporting joy in your life
TYPICAL SESSION
-
Short guided meditation to arrive and ground into our time together
-
Warm-up: often a quick check-in focused around of topic of the week
-
Intro to workout: A brief lesson on this week’s particular muscle
-
Workout: An exercise, practice, or activity
-
Community Reflections
-
Home workout instructions and check-out
COST
Joy is our Jam and we think it’s important to propagate the wisdom that cultivates joy in the world.
The Joy Gym is freely offered. To support this work on a recurring basis, you can donate monthly via Patron.
You can also offer a one-time donation via Venmo or PayPal. Please place “The Joy Gym” in the memo.
Another generous way to support this work is share the joy you receive from The Joy Gym with others.
TIME
The Joy Gym is a 30-minute “workout” on Wednesdays at 6pm (ET). We will offer suggestions for at-home workouts to take the practices into the real world each week.
We'll offer 15 minutes of community connection after each session (6:30-6:45p). This is optional for those who want something a little more than just the workout.
MEET THE JOY GYM TRAINERS
Sherwood and Monica consider themselves spiritual mutts, practicing and incorporating wisdom and tools from many spiritual lineages including Buddhism, law of attraction, Toltec and Lakota wisdom, paganism, law of one, (positive) psychology, astrology, and good ‘ole energy work.
While both lived for years in Philadelphia (at the same time, unbeknownst to each other), Monica and Sherwood met after moving to Barre, MA, just months apart, to work at the Insight Meditation Society, a retreat center that focuses on silent meditation in the vipassana, or insight, tradition.
Sherwood Soley
For the past twenty years, my mission in life has been to be a radiant light of love and fabulosity, but if I search through memories of my childhood, that was my mission from day one.
I was introduced to meditation through a yoga class in 2006 and later through Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). I began to explore Buddhist values and study how and why mindfulness and meditation are such powerful tools. I continue to explore and deepen my path.
In 2014, I began teaching and developing a mindfulness-based curriculum with Sheltered Yoga in Philadelphia, leading to my teacher certification in 2016. I facilitated Pause. Breathe. Smile, a weekly mindfulness class and practice group and have hosted various iterations of Queer Sangha, a community of spiritual friendship with folks who identify as LGBTQAI+.
But who is Sherwood?
As a teacher, I am a lifelong learner and believe that everyone is my teacher, that everyone has a gift to offer, whether it’s wisdom, experience, or simply kindness. When I started teaching mindfulness to children, I often reflected that in reality, they were teaching me where I had space to practice a little more deeply.
Before I ever “officially” began teaching mindfulness, I was teaching high school marching band and colorguard students the valuable tools of awareness, focus, attention, intention, impact, perspective, and equanimity. Years later I was given the terminology of what I was teaching: mindfulness and self-empowerment.
As a healer, I walk the talk, practicing self-care daily to help me show up in the world as my best self; keeping my light radiant (in its highest vibration); and continuing to train my mind’s eye to observe with curiosity and wonder, to enjoy and be excited by life.
As a human, I continue to uncover old wounds to heal, and encounter new ones as I navigate the world. The process of healing is never complete.
As your coach, my job is to inspire curiosity within yourself to explore and embody the wisdom already in your being while relying on the tools and practices that best suit your unique orientation in this world. We cannot change anyone but ourselves, so my mission is to shine my radiant light of unconditional love, for myself and others, through my unique, fabulous being and hope that my light illuminates a path for you toward your light.
Monica Williams
I believe everyone has a purpose suited to their deepest desires, gifts, and talents. My purpose in this lifetime is to inspire and guide others on their journey of self-discovery and transformation.
The saying that has always resonated most with me is: "Life is a journey, not a destination!" I used to strive for perfection, to reach an ultimate goal, to finally arrive at that place where I could rest because then I would finally be complete, whole, and worthy of the love, peace, and freedom I sought. But, through my own personal journey of healing and transformation, I realized that there is nowhere that I have to get to, no final place of perfection at which point I am "done" evolving, and there was never anything broken that I needed to fix.
I learned to accept myself for exactly who I am because I realized it is exactly who I am meant to be in this lifetime. My perception of myself was clouded by external conditioning and others' expectations. By shifting my focus inward and connecting with a Higher truth, I found the courage to let all that go and honor my own personal journey.
My purpose is to guide people on their unique journey to discover and accept who they truly are, identify personal strengths and challenges, align with Higher Purpose, become empowered and fulfilled in all types of relationships, release limiting conditioned beliefs, and develop the awareness and authenticity to transform their lives.
I earned a B.A. in Psychology from George Mason University and a M.A. in Counseling from Arcadia University. I spent many years Counseling in many areas: sexual abuse, family dysfunction, co-dependency, trauma, depression/anxiety, and substance abuse/addiction. Feeling limited by the traditional paradigm of Counseling and Psychotherapy, I began to expand my knowledge and skill set to match my interests in spirituality, philosophy, metaphysics, and the occult, and what I believe to be my Higher Purpose. I have been studying Buddhism since 2012 and have attended several silent meditation retreats, including a 3-month long retreat in 2015. Learning to focus my energy inward has transformed my understanding of life itself and how I participate in my own life on a daily basis. I also received my Yoga Teaching Certification in 2014.
More recently my path led me to Astrology, which is both a perspective and a tool that allows me to seamlessly connect my spiritual beliefs with my earthly pursuits. I draw on everything (formal education, informal learning and studying, professional counseling experience, and personal spiritual practice) to inform my work today. I try to bridge the gap between a higher plane and the earthly expression of it because we are spiritual beings living a human life.
