Joy is My Justice Reclaim What Is Yours
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-0-306-83003-7 (hardcover); 978-0-306-83005-1 (ebook)
LCCN: 2022051038
E3-20230328-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
That Monday
A Road Map
Part I: Reclaim Your Space
Chapter 1: Does Joy Matter?
Why F—ing Bother?
What Is Your Deeper Why?
Chapter 2: You’re Not Broken
The System Is
Positivity Is Dangerous
Don’t Believe Their Lies
Chapter 3: The Present Moment Is Not Enough
The Past and Future Matter Too
Cookie Is His Name
We Are All Able
Chapter 4: Your Body Knows
And It Remembers
Pain Is Wise
Pain Moves
Pain Teaches
Chapter 5: Rewrite the System
What Is Your Joy?
Chardi Kala
Not All or None
Your Own Ground Rules
Part II: Reclaim Your Tools
Chapter 6: Ask, Don’t Tell
Why Not Me?
Why Are You So Sad?
What’s Your Truth?
Chapter 7: Don’t Just Accept Everything
Turn Toward It
S=P×R
Stop the Fixing
The Secret
Chapter 8: Your Love Matters
Who You Love Matters
Your Brain Knows the Difference
You Will Have Tripster Days
Superhuman
Safety at Your Fingertips
Love Matters. Period.
Chapter 9: Your Body Is Your Home; Settle In
The Whole Envelope
One Breath at a Time
Untangling the Threads
Hope Molecules
Your Rhythms
Your Body Makes Sense
Chapter 10: Hope for Yourself
Is There Hope?
Hope Sees the Unseen
False Hope Is the Lie
Remove the Conditions
The Kindling
Chapter 11: Gratitude Doesn’t Solve Everything
Not Gratitude, Again
Face the Right Direction
Swim in It
When It Feels Hard
When It Feels Impossible
Widen Your Circle
Chapter 12: It’s Not Forgiveness, It’s Grace
Forget Forgiveness
Forget the Hook
Write Your Own Story
Part III: Reclaim Your Joy
Chapter 13: In Your Body
Chapter 14: In Awe
Chapter 15: In Beauty
Chapter 16: In Faith
Chapter 17: In Fear
Chapter 18: In Your Purpose
Chapter 19: In Your Resilience
Chapter 20: In the Unknown
Chapter 21: Your Joy Is Also Our Justice
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Notes
Praise for Joy Is My Justice
For my deepest river of love—Neha, Zubin, Sahaj, and
Steve
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Author’s Note
Before we begin, I’d like to acknowledge two things:
Some names have been changed for privacy; some patient stories are
composites.
The practices you’ll find throughout these pages are not fully of my or any
contemporary teacher’s creation; they are fundamentally rooted in global
traditions and lineages (inclusive of Indigenous Americas, Africa, Asia,
and the South Pacific) and amplified here with loving reciprocity.
Prologue
I was nine months pregnant with my third child, on top of the world, when
my dreams suddenly shattered. My barely three-year-old son, Zubin, was
handed a death sentence: Duchenne muscular dystrophy… like an ALS in
children. In a moment that can never be undone, my life was time-stamped
into a before and an after.
Everyone alive will endure great pain—multiple times and usually
beyond our control. What we choose to do with that pain is critical. Escape
was my first impulse. Running away is our most primal survival tactic. But
I learned that, if instead I choose to walk back toward my pain, something
radical, even revolutionary, could emerge: Joy.
That work of finding and keeping Joy, no matter what, has become my
most potent medicine. A medicine that is accessible to all, independent of
race, gender expression, or bank account. Joy is your birthright… even
when your child is dying, right before your eyes.
As a Sikh American physician and activist, I have spent the last two and
a half decades working in the most underserved communities, fighting for
health equity through racial, gender, and food justice. I seek Justice through
the medical, legal, or social outcome of my efforts. But in this book, the
battleground for Justice is our own lives, our own bodies, where we can find
Joy no matter what our external circumstances are.
Your pain is not fair or just. You are not broken because you feel it
deeply. Yet every footstep you take toward Joy, even while still living with
fear or rage, is a radical act of Justice that defies the oppressive weight of
your pain and creates a powerful change in your biochemistry. You and only
you choose which neurochemical will take strongest hold in your brain and
heart; you choose what story your cells will hear.
I do not mean that you should accept inequity or injustice as
unchangeable truths. Just the opposite. When you find your own Joy and
create a personal path for Justice—which only you can forge—you are
better able to right unfairness in the world because you have risen into your
own power first. You move from contraction to openness, from someone
who was held back to one who moves forward. My determination to find
Joy has healed other deep wounds in my life—despite my grief and cultural
guilt that a mother should not be Joyful if her child is dying. Joy is that
powerful a medicine. Joy is my Justice.
When your personal Justice begins in your body, you are in liberation
work daily. You see clearly a broken world of wellness and self-
empowerment that is predicated on an oppressive ideology: if you do not
feel good, it is because you are not good enough at getting better. This
world is unjust. Systems are often built against you. And bad things happen,
to all of us.
And yes, this Justice work is hard. I won’t lie. When you repave old
patterns, your body can be confused and uncomfortable; like laying down
new roads, it’s tiring and sweaty work. But receive this: This kind of feeling
bad is a signal you want, it signifies a new beginning, a new path you are
paving. Get familiar with this feeling, be it a signal of discomfort, anxiety,
or fear. It is a message from your body that it hears your call for a new way.
It’s time to let your pain be the alchemy for the life you were meant to live.
You can learn to linger in Joy so that your body and entire intricate
nervous system bathe in its magic and remember it more easily in times of
struggle. Not because your struggle isn’t real (It always is), not because you
ever need to dampen any difficult emotions (Those are also real and vital),
but instead because having Joy as your steady companion expands your
capacity to hold it all.
This is the book I wish I’d had to read as a young Brown girl who
internalized hate from the world around me. And later in life on a mother’s
nightmarish day, to give me hope and faith that my family’s life was not
over. And this is the story the world desperately needs right now: Joy is here
if you want a relationship with her. But she’s not going to just knock on
your door. You have to find a way to open to her. And when you do, you
reclaim Joy in your own body, where Justice has always lived.
Joy is here for you.
Joy is your birthright.
It’s my mission to make sure you find yours.
And this book will lead you there.
That Monday
It started out like any Monday. Monday, September 24, 2007, to be exact.
That afternoon, I walked into my colleague’s office with a frozen look and
told him in a monotone voice to cancel my patients that afternoon.
I have to leave… now.
Those were the only words I could find. Steve, my husband, had just
called, with only three words for me.
Come home… now.
His voice quivered slightly, and it was the quiver that left me frozen.
Steve holds an unwavering faith in life. It’s sometimes quite annoying to
my anxiety and doom-prone self, but it serves him, and our family, well. As
an anesthesiologist, he’s the calm in the storm. Every time my children and
I are at a work gathering, someone will tell us that Steve is the guy we want
in the operating room when things are going wrong. We make bets on how
many times we’ll be asked, Does he ever get mad? He’s that guy whose
heart may be racing on the inside, but on the outside, he looks placid,
unshakable.
So, when Steve trembles, you know things have already gone very
wrong.
Just a week earlier, Zubin’s physical therapist had confronted me at his
developmental preschool. Something more is going on is what she said. I
felt her five words suffocating me. As if she had reached straight into my
heart and painfully nudged my deepest fear.
Something is going on, I had said so many times to Steve over those last
two and a half years of Zubin’s life. And of course, he would pacify me
with his reassurances and faith in the good.
I think he’s fine. (Okay, if Steve isn’t worried, I feel reassured.)
All children develop at their own pace. You take care of young children,
you know that. (Yes, using my medical expertise as a distraction worked
many times.)
We can’t compare him to Sahaj. (And of course, the most effective one,
calling the comparison card.)
Our precocious older son, Sahaj, not only reached every milestone early,
but he was already saying things wise beyond his years. His brother, Zubin,
had yet to run, had taken a long time to even walk, and was still speaking
only a few words. Yet I would sigh with relief when Steve would allay my
worries. It was as if his ease gave me permission to discard any scary
premonitions I had. If Steve is calm, all must be okay.
And so it came to pass that my husband called on that Monday with a
wavering in his voice that I had never heard before.
Come home now.
Steve waited for me on our front porch on that warm fall day. It was as if
he didn’t want to utter the words inside our home. We didn’t make it past
the wooden glider bench, given to us by close friends when we finally
became parents. When you were born, our hearts rejoiced, the engraving
proclaimed, implying Joy was surely to follow.
In one prick of a needle, one blood test had shattered everything that
bench had promised, every milestone, every anticipated marvel of this
journey of parenting. No, this would not be how we had imagined it.
Muscular dystrophy.
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD).
Those were the three words we were now left with. Of all the eighty-
plus types, it was the most severe, the fatal one, the kind that would
deteriorate and ravage Zubin’s body.
DMD is a mutation in the longest gene in the human body, dystrophin,
the main building block for all muscle. Leg, arm, lung, heart. All of it. Boys
with DMD lose their ability to walk until eventually their lungs and heart
fail. It is a disease that no mother, including a doctor mother, wants to read
about or comprehend.
On an otherwise sunny September Monday, one month before the birth
of our third child no less, my life got way less perfect. Permanently less
perfect.
And nobody’s clichéd sympathies, homemade casseroles, or positive
thinking would bring me any closer to jumping over this kind of hurdle.
A Road Map
I recently had a vision, I mean the this-can’t-be-real-someone-must-be-
messing-with-me kind. No, I don’t usually have visions. I’ve led at least a
thousand people in a practice to meet their inner, wise guides and I swear,
even people who have never meditated in their life come out of that with
images of sacred owls and all kinds of amazing messages, grandmothers in
light form, the whole bit. And me? Nothing. How I came to this particular
vision is a longer story for another time, but I was cradled in a lush golden
sling, at least that’s the best I can describe it, my head held by my masi
(Mom’s sister) who is no longer on this earth, and my feet by my son,
Zubin, who lives, but tenuously. They were lovingly rocking me over an
abyss that symbolized the unknown (you just know that kind of shit in a
vision) and saying, almost chanting, to trust and then trust some more. To
trust the rattling uncertainty in my life, to know that a path would unfold,
and that I could be bold enough to follow it.
This book is a threshold over your own abyss, over that liminal space
between what is no longer for you and what is yet to be. Helluva scary place
to dangle, but you can knit your own wide, golden sling. The truth is, you
walk through these transitions all the time—between jobs, after scary
diagnoses, relationships shattered or discovered, unspeakable events,
through all the befores and afters—into the unfolding of your life. This
time, walk with me into the unknown and trust that Joy is not only yours to
have but that a Joy discovered through the lens of Justice may be the most
enduring you can find.
Yes, we will lay out the practice of Joy. But not the usual whitewashed,
oversimplified one of a wellness patriarchy that ignores the oppressive
world and deems that Joy is for the most resilient, for the human beings
who are able to rewire their brain and shift their thoughts. First of all, that
requires privilege—nothing wrong with that, but let’s call it out. You can’t
positively think your way out of poverty, dangerous situations, or
oppression. Second, Joy already lives and flows in your body where rational
cognition does not govern. Just as your body does not need your willful
thought to exert its most primal functions, so does Joy not need to be given
to you by someone else. Third and possibly most important, none of us has
asked for suffering. Suffering isn’t a personal or moral failing or the result
of a faulty nervous system. We are merely humans who have experienced
tragedy brought on by other humans, natural disasters, failed systems, or
sheer fate, and it is these tragedies that have oppressed and dysregulated
our nervous system. We’ve experienced a lack of safety; our mind, heart,
and body have done—and continue to do—what they lovingly needed to get
us through it.
Time-out for a medical disclaimer: I’m a physician who has
tended to countless humans in deep suffering and has seen the
depths of challenge it can take to even care about trying to
survive. I’m also a human who has suffered from clinical
depression, more than once. I know what it’s like to lie in bed
and wonder why the hell even bother to get up. One of my bouts
almost ruined two other lives in the process.
This book is not a comprehensive treatment for depression,
complex trauma, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is
not a substitute for medications or supplements, trauma-
informed counseling, or work with a somatic therapist. If you’re
using those, use them well and lovingly. They can be lifesavers.
Honor and have gratitude for them, but even with the grace of
those offerings, know that there are still more tools available to
you.
This is about you taking Justice into your own hands, into your own
body. This is about finding your path to Joy, not through platitudes or
contrived positivity, but instead through settling more peacefully in your
skin. That is revolutionary Justice: finding your own sense of safety when
