The Joy of… Joy

When we think of joy, it generates feelings of delight, bliss, ecstasy, rapture and radiance. It is something that we all long for but that also seems very elusive, especially in this wild and crazy Coronavirus time.

To experience joy again, it is helpful to notice that the word joy has no opposite. There is happiness and unhappiness; there is pleasure and displeasure; but there is no disjoy or unjoy. That is because joy is the ground of our being and thus has no opposite.

What would it be like if you were able to not only know joy, but live from it? After many years of seeing, loving the struggles in my mind, I have cleared up my inner space enough to see that joy is our true nature. The field of joy that you really are has always been with you and always will, but you are conditioned to pay attention to the struggles in your head rather than the field of joy (Eckhart Tolle calls it the light body).

Take a moment, close your eyes and vigorously shake your hand. Now stop suddenly and feel your hand. It is alive with energy. That is a glimpse into the radiance and aliveness that is joy, for joy is a free-flowing river of energy that is experienced through every nook and cranny of your being.  All you need do is learn how to see and love the struggles inside of yourself, which fill up the spaciousness that you truly are – the space that is joy!

In order to let go of the struggles that keep us separate from joy, we need to understand we were all destined to take on a variety of struggles that eventually filled the space of joy.  Do you remember the boy in the bubble?  He was born without an immune system, so all the germs and viruses of life could invade him at will.  In order to stay alive, he was placed in a sterile bubble made of plastic, separated from life.

In many ways we are like that boy in the bubble.  Our ‘psychological immune system’ was not highly developed when we were young and so we were easily invaded by the unskillfulness of others.  In order to survive, we crawled into a bubble of thought.  For much of our lives this brought us a sense of safety, but it also cut us off from life.  As we became lost in our bubble of thought, we forgot how to be available for life exactly as it is – not our ideas of it but the real thing.

We all long to truly experience life again.  We long to feel it deeply enough so that we live from the joy of being alive!  The wonderful thing to know is that you have never been separated from the field of joy. You just thought you were! When you are sad, it is still with you.  When you are in fear, it is there.  And even when you are mad. All the struggles of life are clouds that are passing through the vast field of joy that you are.

So, my invitation to you is not to try to find joy. First, get to know how your mind struggles with life.  What is its story of fear, shame, loneliness, envy, judgment, irritation, and/or sadness?  These are some of the story lines that move through your mind all day long, separating you from your joy. You are not these stories! You are the awareness that can see them.  When I moved from “I am afraid’ to ‘Fear is here,” I discovered a freedom that I had never known.

Second, be alert; be available; and allow joy to reveal itself to you. As the wind rustles your hair, or the song of the bird cascades through you or the depth of a child’s eyes touch your heart, know that the field of joy is speaking to you.  As you lift your attention out of your bubble of thought and recognize the radiant field of joy that is life, this field will be amplified in your awareness, eventually becoming the ground of being from which you live.

I leave you with the quote that Joseph Campbell put on the first page of the first chapter of his book The Power of Myth.  I also put it on the first page of the first chapter of my first book, Belonging to Life:

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”