Your Joyous Heart

You and I live in a world where at times, it can be very challenging. We’ve all had our hearts broken, our hopes disappointed, and our trust betrayed. And yet we also live in an astoundingly magnificent world full of unexpected moments where the beauty and magic at the heart of life reveals itself.

The extraordinary is everywhere!! You, yourself are extraordinary. You started as one cell, which developed into 60 trillion cells that all work together without much input from you. Also, there are more stars than there are grains of sand on every beach of the earth.  And you can recognize how life is one living being by seeing plants won’t do very well without carbon dioxide (which we breathe out) and we thrive because they breathe in oxygen! If you slow down and look, life is constantly asking you to slow down and be awed by how astonishing and miraculous life is! And yet most of us miss these invitations from life to pause, to unhook from our endless becoming, and simply let in the miracle of life.

Whether you know it or not, in all your doing, doing, doing, you long to step out of the tight and small world of your mind and reconnect with the thrilling recognition that you are part of something that is so creative, so full of beauty and so much smarter than you. And the more you do this, it becomes easier to feel and rest in your joyous heart.

Life is constantly saying “Pssst! Wake up!” Joy is right here, right now! It is easy to miss the invitations from life because to our minds they look so ordinary. But stopping and being touched by an amazing cloud formation, or the sound of a person’s laugh, or the opening of your heart when a piece of music moves you, or the scintillating smell of coffee, or the taste of a really fine piece of chocolate, or the loving eyes of a pet, or a star-filled sky are doorways out of the closed-off world of the mind.

Because the addiction to struggling with life permeates most people’s minds and hearts, I am inviting you to be alert when life is saying, “Please stop and let me in.” The more you let life in, for even just a moment or two, the more you will see it has taken all the creativity that has ever happened in this universe to make these moments possible. Please, please don’t take them for granted. As you allow these so-called ordinary moments to open you to the vibrant joy of being alive, you begin to radiate the joy that is our birthright!

I have a favorite park I walk in almost every day. It’s on a bluff above Lake Washington and you can see forever – across the lake, to the city of Seattle, and onto the snowcapped Olympic Mountains. This park is also a favorite haunt of eagles, squirrels, and dogs playing with abandon. This place reminds me over and over again to pause, let in the miracle of life, and then send that joy out into the world for most people are starving for this kind of connection with life. Sometimes, as I look across the park, I imagine my joy is a cascade of light, showering all the beings there – people, dogs, birds –  with the joy of being alive.

Because whatever you do affects the whole world, I invite you, for all the children that are coming after you, to hold the intention for today to be alert to the moments when life says ‘just be with me’ so you can recognize that always living in doing/struggle is not your home. Your true home is this vibrantly alive living moment that is always changing and always saying, “Be with me. Please be with me.”