Returning to Joy

A couple years ago I attended a meditation where the point was to learn how to access a moment of joy, and use it to generate feelings of bliss in the body. We were instructed to remember a time in the past where we felt the most joy, and we were walked through a process of experiencing the smells, the sounds and all of the senses of that moment. Then we were to try to reconnect with the feeling of that moment and feel it again in our bodies in the present. 

I was taken back to a moment so long ago when I was a teenager. I remembered this day when some friends and I were walking home from school on the afternoon of one of our late winter thaws. We were barefoot, the sun was shining, and it just felt so good to be alive. I felt so free in this moment, like all of my senses were on fire. There was so much laughter, and we were so carefree and so very much in the moment. 

Going through this mediation and re-experiencing this moment brought me to wonder; “Why is this feeling so foreign to me now?” What is missing, and has been missing from my life that I have not felt this state of bliss and freedom in so long. Part of me longed for those days when I had such a sense of freedom and possibility, but the realist in me says “why can I not have that now?” 

I think this is a feeling so many of us feel later in life. What happened? Why have we all grown so far from joy? Life is supposed to be fun, exciting. If we are not living to be happier and more fulfilled in life, then what are we even doing here? 

A good friend and colleague of mine Dr. Dawn Stranges once said to me, “the act of living is supposed to be fun.” So where had it all gone? At what point had the focus gone to something other than joy, and if I wasn’t living for joy, then what was it exactly I was working for. Success? Growth? Learning? Helping? Where is the meaning in any of that if I wasn’t able to find joy in it?

In a recent conversation I was having with another friend and colleague, Aaron Twiss, we were discussing how taking hallucinogens had a euphoric effect on the body because of how they enable you to live in the present moment. This reminded me how in Gestalt psychology the purpose is to get the client into the present moment, and to keep them from escaping into the past or the future. Then I brought up the practice of mindfulness and how again the point is bring you into the present moment. Why are so many therapies designed for the simple task of trying to get us into the present moment? Why is it so hard for people to live in the present moment without adhering to some sort of practice? And more importantly, what is so offensive about the present moment that so many of us have a hard time sitting in it?

Coming back to the subject of joy, I think it’s important to say that we cannot experience true joy in any moment but the present. Rather than trying to create a present moment that can facilitate joy for us we fill our lives with distractions in an effort to keep from acknowledging how very far away it is. Pain is created by the distance between your current circumstance and the life that you want. This bottomless chasm that exists between many of us and our happiness in life is so insurmountable that we cannot even bare the idea of trying to cross it. 

In another conversation I had with astrologer Sarah Nephtali, on the subjects of joy and what is keeping us from our present moment happiness, we hit on the idea that maybe it was a sense of callousness that comes with the experience of life. The disappointment generated by being hurt or let down so many times perhaps had caused a resistance to present experience for fear of future blunder. Sarah responded with the idea that maybe what keeps us from living more in our present experience, is the idea that we are all living with the frustration of wanting connection so badly, but rejecting it because we have experienced hurt. Through years of attempting to find a place in our relationships where we can feel fully accepted and appreciated for who we are, and being hurt or rejected by the same people has put us further from our goal of connection and further from the desire to seek it in others. 

Disappointment may indeed be the enemy of joy and fear, it’s willing companion, helps to keep us further from living a life that we can truly be happy. The Dalai Lama in his book, The Art of Happiness, says that the key to a joyful life is compassion. With the understanding that life is suffering it is our duty to extend compassion in an effort to detract from that suffering. To be focused on acts of compassion, kindness and hope we not only ease the lives of others, but we ourselves benefit from the act of giving. I myself use this as inspiration to help me to live a more fulfilling life, but it can be difficult when there are those who are so eager to take from us unfairly. When considering the importance of compassion it is important not to become bewildered by those who would take unfair advantage of us, but to understand that those same people may in fact need more compassion than others. This by no means am I asking anyone to give at their own detriment, self love must come first. You cannot feed anyone from an empty plate. 

As a personal goal for this new year, I am seeking to get back into joy. I hope that along the way I can discover the obstacles in myself that keep me from attaining it so that I can share it with all of you who also would like to have more joy in their lives. We must remember not to be disheartened by the poor choices of those who would do wrong against us. We must realize that those people are also suffering, and they may not have the same strength as you or I to continue to do good in spite of it. 

This is not intended to fall in line with the common voice that people are intrinsically bad and will only hurt you, but to inspire you to continue to do your best to seek joy. We are all in this journey together. Some of us may have forgotten that we are here to try to live our best lives, and that our goal to have more joy should take into account the joy of others. 

So what is your most blissful memory? How can you hold it dear and use it as a barometer to make the choices in your life that will bring you closer to that which you seek. We are here to have fun. We are here to enjoy this life. What can be done today to ensure that you are moving closer to joy, and bringing those you love with you on your journey? Let us all reconnect with hope, and let us take up faith that we can have happiness in our lives. Let us all move forward into an era of joy, and show the world that the journey is worth it.