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JOY
Nurturing seeds of joy, kindness, and compassion is not a nice-to-have- they are a necessity. A dear fellow meditation teacher, Lori Baker, shared with me that joy is a state of mind—I love that understanding. Joy is a deeper emotion than happiness. Joy appears in the simplest moments. Like when my daughter squeezes my hand. When we think about it, are we in pursuit of happiness or are we searching for clear awareness of joy? The invitation this week is to cultivate a deeper understanding of joy through meditation, intention, and inward reflection.
I had the chance to interview Karla Mclaren author of Language of Emotions in 2019 (listen to the full interview here) and I come back to her work often. I call her the Beyonce of Emotions--she is the queen bee. Her book taught me a lot about joy, and I wanted to share it with you too. Continue reading about joy in the“Bonus: Inward Reflection” section below.
Meditation Practice:
7-minute joy meditation. This is a short, sweet, and happy little meditation to help cultivate joy in your life. :) Remember you are training in this practice. Some days it comes easier than others but over time it strengthens. Easy does it and begin again. :) Listen here.
Daily Intention: “Thank you for this radiant moment.”
The next time you feel joy may you notice with gratitude. Use this intention practice as anchor.
Question of the week: What brings me deep connection and a sense of expansion?
Tip: Take a few deep breaths and consider what activities, conversations, or environments feel expansive to you. Let that be an indicator of becoming aware of joy in your life.
Bonus: Inward Reflection
JOY: Affinity & Communion
Joy's GIFTS: Expansion ~ Communion ~ Inspiration ~ Splendor ~ Radiance ~ Bliss
ACTION REQUIRED: Joy arises to help you feel a blissful sense of expansiveness and connection to others, to ideas, or experiences.
By: Karla McLaren
The natural pathway to joy
“When joy arises naturally, it often does so after you’ve come to the end of a long and arduous path; for instance, you often have to travel a long way to get to your favorite natural setting, just as you often have to struggle through painful relationships before you find your heart’s true companion. For this reason, joy and contentment are more connected to each other than to happiness – because both joy and contentment arise in response to honest work and real triumphs, whereas happiness usually arises to give you a quick and rejuvenating intermission from all the work you need to do before you can truly feel contentment or joy.
This special relationship between joy and hard work is not universally understood, because most people are surprised by joy and see it as a magical gift from the cosmos rather than a natural human emotion.
But joy isn’t magical – it’s an emotion, and it has a specific purpose.
Joy ebbs and flows reliably not only in response to hard work and contentment but also to an emotion that may surprise you: Joy often follows or travels alongside grief – which may seem puzzling if you don’t understand the opportunity for communion that lives inside both joy and grief.
These two emotions are deeply interconnected because if you enter into the beautiful work that awaits you in the deep river of grief, you’ll become one with the continuum of life – one with the births and deaths of all souls. That’s communion, which places you immediately into the territory of joy – both while you’re in the river performing your sacred grief work, and after you come up and out of the water to rejoin everyday life again.
Whole people understand that joy is not a goal in and of itself, but that joy arises of its own accord in a life that’s resourced with honest hardships, triumphs, ordeals, loss, hard work, love, laughter, grief, and wholeness.”
-Karla McLaren—> Books. Free Resources.
KEEP THE CONVO GOING
Did the newsletter leave you wondering or do you want to add your own thoughts on the topic of joy? Comment below.
CONNECT:
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Weekly Practice: Expansion//Joy