Okay. Hello. How's it going? This is Jay Brown Yoga Talks podcast. My name is Jay Brown. Welcome and thank you for listening.

This is posting on the first day of the new year.

And there's a deeply ingrained impulse in me to want to say,

Happy New Year to you.

But as I believe I've discussed on this podcast before, I sometimes feel like happiness as a goal

puts an undue pressure on us.

Happiness is very fleeting to me.

And I don't know if I say, have a happy new year,

and you don't, what does that mean? So what I prefer is to wish for you joy, because to me, joy is not

the least bit contingent on happiness happiness i can be very sad and still

joyful at the same time it's like a thread that runs through it all and helps me feel human

so that i most certainly feel good to wish for you that you would have a joyful new year.

And I am still in Virginia.

I'm recording this just a couple days before it's going to post. I'm still hanging out

with my in-laws. In fact, I am under quite a bit of a constraint to make this happen with you today

because my wife did not stick to our plan. And so my time that we had set aside for me to do this recording,

it got smaller and smaller and smaller and just only a few moments before hitting the button

to record this, my little three-year-old daughter was in here, and I was trying to record this

with her in here because she wanted to be in here. And she was doing a wonderful job. She was being

so quiet and so sweet, but I just, I could do it. I felt a little too self-conscious, and I just,

I couldn't see you to make it happen. And then when I started to make it

happen, she coughed because she has like a little bit of a cold. I'm like, oh, this isn't going to work,

...