A Meditation From Making Enthusiasm Cool Again

The trouble with letting my enthusiasm show is that most of the time I’m afraid I won’t look cool. I’ll be outed for being joyful in a world that’s scary and getting worse. Enthusiasm almost feels inappropriate.

But what if enthusiasm is just effort infused by love? And what if we didn’t feel inhibited to bring love – not romantic love but the natural luminosity of our minds – into our days? What if, even amid the chaos that is 2024, we still, nonetheless, brought a kind of enthusiasm floated by love, into our courtrooms, conference rooms, classrooms, and living rooms? That would be cool enough, wouldn’t it?

Transcript

So finding your posture for right now,

Whatever posture would,

Yeah,

Maybe enable some of that recollection of the luminosity of your own mind and heart to to come through.

Maybe it's sitting up straighter,

Taking a few deeper breaths.

Maybe it's allowing the awareness to flow down through the body from the top of the head all the way down to the toes and just noticing where there's clenching and letting go,

Part by part,

Place by place.

When the mind wanders away from this exploration of what might be clenched,

You can just notice,

Is it wandering towards planning,

Thinking,

Recollecting something other than its own luminosity?

And coming back to the present moment,

What's available right here and right now?

What peace,

What joy,

What,

Yeah,

Love,

What love is available right here?

And can you point the attention or invite the attention to reside in that luminosity,

In that love and let it,

Let it radiate throughout the body?

For me,

It's always the more I can relax,

The more opportunity there is for this love,

Loving-kindness meta to show up and to kind of infuse the body-mind.

It's already there,

But it tends to retreat.

Yeah,

Making space for it to expand.

And then just this invitation to inquire,

How can I bring this with me into my day?

This joyful effort,

This enthusiasm,

Born out of luminosity of my own heart and mind.