You Are Allowed to Feel Joy While the World Is Hurting

By Luz María Campuzano

Many people are carrying a quiet belief right now. They believe that joy feels inappropriate while suffering exists. They believe that working on themselves feels selfish when others are in pain. They believe that allowing anything other than sadness, anger, or despair means turning away from reality.

These feelings deserve to be honored. They also deserve to be understood more deeply.

Honoring your emotional response to the world does not require abandoning joy. Healing yourself does not mean ignoring suffering. It means developing the capacity to respond to it with clarity, compassion, and integrity rather than collapse or reactivity.

Honoring Your Emotions Without Becoming Trapped in Them

Every emotion carries information. Anger, grief, despair, and fear are signals moving through the body, not personal failures. When an emotion arises, it is important to acknowledge it fully. Notice where it lives in your body. Observe where it begins, how it moves, and where it settles.

This somatic awareness matters. It is how the body communicates truth before the mind can organize it into meaning. This information is invaluable, yet awareness alone is not the destination.

Remaining immersed in heavy emotional states does not honor the suffering of the world. It amplifies it.

When Emotion Becomes Either Medicine or Division

Human beings are emotional by design. Emotion drives motivation, behavior, and action. The question is not whether you feel. The question is which emotions you allow to lead.

Anger can signal injustice. It alerts us that something is out of alignment. When anger remains unprocessed, it turns outward as division or inward as harm. Left unchecked, it fragments connection and multiplies separation rather than creating change.

Despair often arises from profound compassion. It appears when the suffering of others is deeply felt but not yet integrated. When compassion loses sight of divine strength, it collapses into despair and drains the capacity to act with clarity and purpose. At that point, compassion no longer serves healing. It becomes immobilizing.

Emotion that is not metabolized through the body becomes distortion rather than guidance.

The Forgotten Power Within Compassion

There is another side of compassion that is rarely named. Compassion is not only the ability to feel with another in their pain. Compassion is the capacity to hold the knowing of their true divine nature, even when they cannot access it themselves.

True compassion does not collapse into suffering. It does not meet someone only at the level of their wound. It holds them in the remembrance of who they are beneath the pain. It recognizes their inherent strength, intelligence, and capacity to transform.

Suffering with another offers no inherent power. Holding them in the truth of their divine nature restores dignity and awakens coherence. This form of compassion does not deny pain. It refuses to define a person by it.

Love as the Force That Restores Coherence

My spiritual teacher Barbara Y. Martin offered a truth worth contemplating. “Love is the bond that holds creation together.” If love binds, then fear separates. Hatred fragments. Unprocessed anger isolates.

Many systems in this world are built on fear. Fear dysregulates the nervous system. Fear disconnects people from inner authority. When individuals move through the world led by unprocessed anger or despair, they unintentionally reinforce the very systems that thrive on separation.

Love restores coherence. Love regulates the nervous system. Love allows people to remain present without collapsing into overwhelm.

Vibrational Ethics and Inner Responsibility

Your emotional state matters. The energy you carry matters. The way you meet the world matters. This is vibrational ethics, the understanding that what you embody shapes what you contribute.

Leading with love does not mean ignoring injustice. It means responding from a regulated nervous system rather than from emotional fusion or reactivity. Feeling joy when it becomes available does not betray those who are suffering. It restores your capacity to show up with discernment, compassion, and strength.

Working on yourself is not indulgent. It is preparation.

Transmutation as a Necessary Skill

Many people want to help and feel overwhelmed. Nervous systems are overstimulated. Triggers arrive faster than they can be processed. The body holds what the mind cannot yet organize.

Transmutation is not suppression. It is transformation. It is the ability to move anger into clarity, despair into grounded compassion, sadness into wisdom, and fear into presence.

This work happens through the body. It happens through somatic awareness, breath, nervous system regulation, and intentional energetic practices. Without these tools, people remain caught in cycles of reaction rather than conscious response.

Healing Yourself Is an Act of Service

When you understand the language of your body, you stop reacting unconsciously. When your nervous system is regulated, your actions become intentional. When you transmute heavy emotional states, you become a stabilizing presence rather than another source of fragmentation.

This is how togetherness is restored. It is not restored through rage or collapse. It is restored through embodied presence and ethical leadership.

You are not here to spread more separation. You are here to become part of the bond that holds creation together. Joy strengthens that bond. Love strengthens that bond. Healing strengthens that bond.

The world does not need more people drowning in despair. It needs grounded humans who can hold grief without becoming it.

Ask yourself honestly whether you are feeding the systems that keep us divided or becoming the frequency that reconnects us. Your inner work is not optional. It is service.

With so much love and gratitude, Luz María