Why Is Joy Hard for Me?

Part Three

Understanding why joy can feel difficult, and learning how capacity gently expands, lays important groundwork. But healing doesn’t happen through understanding alone.

The body needs experience.

This is where yoga and somatic practices become so powerful — not just for processing trauma, but for increasing our capacity to hold both stress and joy.

Trauma research has shown us that trauma lives in the body, not just the story we tell about it. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk speaks extensively about how talk therapy alone often isn’t enough, and how practices like yoga help people reconnect with their bodies in ways that feel safer and more regulated.

Yoga works because it doesn’t ask the nervous system to explain or relive what happened. It works directly with sensation, breath, rhythm, and awareness — the same pathways through which trauma and regulation live.

This matters because both stress and joy create activation in the nervous system.

Most people understand that we need capacity to hold stress. What’s less understood is that we also need capacity to hold joy.

Excitement, pleasure, connection, and contentment all bring energy into the body. For nervous systems shaped by trauma, that energy can feel just as overwhelming as stress. Without enough capacity, the system may shut down joy the same way it shuts down threat.

Yoga helps build capacity for both.

Through slow, intentional movement, the nervous system practices tolerating sensation without becoming overwhelmed. Through breath, the body experiences regulation from the inside out. Through repetition, the system learns that activation can rise and fall without danger.

This is how the body learns resilience.

Somatic practices also help restore something trauma often disrupts: choice.

In yoga, you choose how much sensation to feel, when to pause, when to rest, and when to continue. That sense of agency teaches the nervous system that it doesn’t have to brace, comply, or push through. It can listen and respond.

Choice creates safety.

Safety creates openness.

Over time, this changes how the body relates not only to stress, but to pleasure and joy.

Research has shown that yoga supports nervous system regulation, reduces stress hormones, and improves emotional regulation. When the body learns that it can experience sensation and return to balance, it becomes easier to stay present — whether the sensation is challenging or pleasant.

This is why yoga can feel grounding one day and unexpectedly emotional another. The body is learning to stay connected instead of shutting down.

Joy, in this context, doesn’t have to look like happiness or excitement. Sometimes joy shows up as steadiness. Sometimes it’s ease. Sometimes it’s simply feeling at home in your body for a moment.

Learning to recognize these experiences is part of building capacity.

Yoga doesn’t force joy.

It creates the conditions for it.

Each time you stay with a stretch that feels nourishing, allow your breath to settle, or notice a sense of calm without rushing past it, you’re teaching your nervous system something new: this is safe enough.

And as the body learns it can hold sensation, regulate, and return to safety, joy becomes less threatening. It becomes something the body knows how to receive.

Not because life is perfect.

Not because pain disappears.

But because safety is being practiced.

In this way, yoga isn’t just a tool for healing trauma.

It’s a practice for expanding your capacity — for stress, for presence, and for joy.

With Love

Carrie Payne