Slogan #21
Always maintain only a joyful mind.
What is joy but simply a moment of presence, a moment of feeling abundantly and gloriously alive? Experience joy as the opening of the heart. Notice and lean into the small moments of joy that you feel in your meditation practice. Perhaps joy is bringing mindful attention to places in your body that feel connected to the earth, the feeling of being open to grace as you breathe, the inner knowing that you’re enough, the moments of rest, stillness, and silence that you experience, or the feeling of interconnectedness with community as you sit. Joy is experienced in authentic moments of presence when our stories fall away and we celebrate the feeling of being alive in our bodies. Where does joy live in your body? Experience the domain of joy by feeling heat and energy in your body. Do you feel differences in temperature as you scan your body? Enjoy your body just as it is. Joy is the internal sun that warms your heart, reflects vitality and radiance, and creates an environment for your passions to grow. Be receptive to the quiet voice of your heart; enjoy your life. With an open heart, allow poetry, song, dance, yoga, or whatever inspires you to creatively express joy. Reflect on the things that have come to you in your life: friendships, experiences, intimacies, and feeling cared about. Ask yourself the following questions: What’s different about me? What do I do most naturally? What calls to my heart, brings me to life? What’s the best advice that I’ve ever given myself? What delights me? What is the role of struggle in my life and how do I feel when I surmount obstacles, when I solve problems?
Here is one of the most luminous, raw, beautifully crafted meditations of the word joy written by poet and author David Whyte:
Joy can be made by practiced, hard-won achievement as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace arrived out of nowhere; joy is a measure of our relationship to death and our living with death, joy is the act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are asked to, joy is practiced generosity. If joy is a deep form of love, it is also the raw engagement with the passing seasonality of existence, the fleeting presence of those we love understood as gift, going in and out of our lives, faces, voices, memory, aromas of the first spring day or a wood fire in winter, the last breath of a dying parent as they create a rare, raw, beautiful frontier between loving presence and a new and blossoming absence.
To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar face—I was here and you were here and together we made a world.