Joy: Cultivating An Awakened Heart

Cultivating joy is essential to walking a spiritual path. We can begin by opening to the joy of others, experienced when we pause to allow our hearts to be touched by happiness and good fortune around us. We can then open to the gratitude that naturally arises as we recall the goodness found in our own lives.

Transcript

Warm welcome to all.

We'll begin with our meditation and for that you can begin by checking in with your body,

Adjusting the posture so that you're seated in a way that you feel upright,

Checking in with the alignment of the spine,

Shoulder back,

Chest open,

All in a way that balances alertness and relaxation,

Not straining or pressing in any way,

Just being comfortable in the body and closing the eyes if you feel comfortable doing so,

Taking a few full deep breaths,

Inhaling deeply on the in-breath,

Filling the lungs and relaxing,

Releasing on the out-breath,

Again a full deep in-breath,

Feeling the chest rise,

Exhaling,

Releasing on the out-breath,

One more full deep in-breath,

Holding the breath at the top of the in-breath,

Feeling the contraction in the body and releasing,

Allowing the breath to be natural and easy,

Smoothing out the breath and as you do so feel that you're smoothing out the mind.

To awaken joy within us we can bring to mind different situations in life and simply sense what the heart feels and how the heart opens and after which we'll silently repeat a phrase of encouragement.

So first you can call to mind someone who struggles with addiction,

Who's been clean and sober for another day.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase.

Next someone who just returned from the doctor with the news that they're cancer-free.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase.

Someone trying to support their family who has been out of work and just got a job.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase.

A dog realizing it's time for a walk,

Who grabs the leash in her mouth and runs to the door wagging her tail,

Looking back at you,

Waiting for you to join her.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase.

A friend who has had trouble meeting a partner who has now found someone and both of them are in love.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase.

A friend who has been trying for years to get pregnant and just found out that she is going to have a child.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase.

And now you imagine visiting this friend soon after she has had the baby and holding the baby in your arms,

Looking down at the baby's face and then up at the beaming face of your friend.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase.

Now turning to yourself,

Can you identify something good that has happened to you in the last day?

Something you're grateful for?

Can be quite small,

Some small thing a co-worker,

A friend or a partner did to help you?

An encouraging positive word they offered you or just the brightness of the sky today or the taste of your coffee in the morning or someone who smiled at you?

Repeat the same phrase silently to yourself.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase.

May you recognize joy in your life.

May your happiness and good fortune continue and increase more and more and more.

For a moment you can rest in these feelings of joy,

Of contentment,

Happiness.

Sense how they feel in the body,

Allow them to grow,

Expand.

Sense how good they feel.

Now let these feelings rest and come gently back and in your own time can open your eyes.

A few weeks back we started this inquiry about the remarkable connection between beings.

We started with compassion which not so much as a sentimental feeling but this mysterious phenomena of the mirror neurons in the brain that somehow make us feel to a smaller degree the same thing that's being felt by the other person.

Same areas of the brain lighting up for us as they do for that person.

The derivation of the word compassion is simply passion with with passion.

You're participating somehow in this feeling that the other person has.

I recently watched the documentary Free Solo which I highly recommend.

It's the story of the first free solo meaning without any ropes,

Any security harness,

Anything ascending El Capitan 3,

300 feet,

Sheer rock face and the filming in the documentary is spectacular.

You know he's gonna make it because otherwise they wouldn't put the movie out but you are jumping out of your skin as he's holding on by three fingers through a small crack in the rock a thousand feet above the ground and one slip and it's all over.

You're on the edge of your seat and it occurred to me these are the mirror neurons kicking in somehow you're feeling what it is a small degree what he's feeling this amazing connection between people what's happening to the other happens in some way also to us.

This is just half of the equation because we don't just share in the despair the suffering of others we also share in the joy.

I watched another documentary recently that's called The Rescue and this is the story of the 2018 Thai soccer team,

Boys soccer team that was playing in this cave and monsoon came and they could not get out of the cave because of the rain so they started to walk into the cave the rains increased and so did the water.

Nine days divers searched for them and on the ninth day two and a half miles inside the cave a diver comes up and sees the boys in this opening in which there's air to breathe and he shouts out to them and they're all there they're all safe and he takes video on his phone and tells them he's gonna be back and then he goes back through the cave and surfaces and probably many of you remember this video shot across the world and in the documentary they have seen if the World Cup came being played and everyone stops as they put this video up on this huge screen and people stand up and cheer and you feel like the entire world for that moment was somehow sharing the joy of these parents that suddenly seeing all their children alive.

This amazing connection between people and I think we have a duty and an obligation to share this joy as much as we share the suffering of others to share the joy.

Thich Nhat Hanh says I've seen so much suffering I must teach joy or Dorothy Day said that we all have a duty of delight in this world.

Or this from the Dalai Lama if I can share in the joy of others then I increase my odds of joy from one to six billion meaning from himself to all people on the earth.

Or this this is a Christian hymn called the servant song and it goes we are pilgrims on a journey we are travelers on the road we are here to help each other walk the mile and bear the load.

I will weep when you are weeping when you laugh I'll laugh with you I will share your joy and sorrow till we've seen this journey through.

I recall once I was visiting a family member in the emergency room and they were okay but as I was leaving the hospital after you walk through and you see you know person after person lying there I was thinking you know tonight there'll probably be a few people who die in this hospital and I started thinking about them and then I thought but you know a few floors away there'll be a bunch of people being born at the same time in this hospital and that there you have it it's all happening at the same time.

The Taoists talk about the thousand joys and the thousand sorrows of life but we also know that they're not created equal as I've mentioned before there is this phenomena within the brain that they say the mind is like velcro for bad experiences and teflon for good experiences and as I've mentioned before you know the neuro scientists say this is our evolutionary heritage we over learn from the dangerous experiences were hyper vigilant always looking for whatever danger is around the corner which is why we got here as a species you know we have to thank those they have to thank those impulses for having brought us here but they're not well adapted to modern life at all and it's certainly compounded by our news cycle I have a friend who calls NPR the suffering channel because if you listen to it it's like mostly suffering last five minutes usually they have like a little human interest story.

So joy practice sometimes it's called sympathetic joy practice to rebalance her life.

I'm gonna offer a few suggestions on how to do this.

First dwell in the joy of others you can take a moment just like in the meditation to recognize not let slip away these moments of joy which we all have seeing for other people the good that occurs there are these traditional phrases like one I offer the may your happiness and good fortune continue and increase but you also just might use a simple soft mental note of joy something happens right just say to yourself like joy you know and that has a way of helping it to sink in to stick a little bit to savor it next feel your own joy it's usually harder than feeling the joy of others one teacher has this humorous prayer which is Lord help me to accept the truth about myself regardless of how good it is so that same pause to accept those small things sometimes that that will warm our hearts if we're just open to them or James Barris has this little prayer before he goes to sleep I open my heart to the universe and accept love and peace the last thing he does before he goes to sleep as a way of setting that intention then for the advanced practice okay you can look to the person or persons with whom you compare yourself sometimes perhaps unfavorably or you feel perhaps it's some sort of competition with I know this is really sort of disfavored now but still we have a few friends who will send a Christmas card with a Christmas letter at the end of the year that tells you how they've been and I don't know if this is true for you but I there's at least one friend who sends a letter with things unbelievable things that happened in the last year their youngest just got the Rhodes Scholarship and their oldest is about to qualify for the Olympics and you know the spouse is nominated for the third time for the Nobel Peace Prize and you know and the writer is gonna have a new book come out this year and you're reading all this stuff and on a human level one can feel either a little bit of envy shall we say or perhaps thinking to starting to compose in your own mind your next letter for next year where you're gonna try to top whatever this is they said because they can't go unanswered so so you know you could respond in that way in a very human sense or just feel quite depressed like my life is really nothing compared to all of this or you can open yourself to the joy the joy that's there and and can you offer this person that same wish of may your happiness and good fortune continue and increase and doing that not out of a sense of scarcity like somehow joy is a scarce commodity and if if you've got some then I'm gonna have less it's gonna be less left over for me but the sense like there's plenty there's plenty to go around for you and for me it's not a competition to win the Buddha talks about the comparing mind the comparing mind can say that I'm better than you or I'm worse than you or I'm equal to you and he says none of them work none of them work as a path to happiness what does work is sharing joy increasing joy can we increase joy and last I would say joy an antidote to sorrow and necessary for combating oppression I as some of you know I worked in a refugee camp for a few years the only people in the camp were people who had survived the massacres and Guatemala in the late 90s might late like 1980 excuse me in the late 1980 the beginning of the 1980s excuse me and so every well every one of them had a history of deep trauma from being able to escape through the rainforest into Mexico I had read this history before I got there the thing that surprised me when I first got to the camp was the first thing you saw was children piles of children children young children everywhere this is a place where there were no psychotherapists there was no treatment for trauma but it occurred to me that their therapy was to start over and to hear the laughter of these children day in and day out was the therapy we did a lot of things in the refugee camp but we had one woman who would teach songs and games to the children and she would arrive at the camp with her guitar and children would swarm from every corner to to sing with her and to play with her if you haven't seen it I can also recommend a book by Desmond Tutu the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama which is called the book of joy which is a book long interview the two of them you get the impression most of the time they spent laughing laughing together laughing at each other cracking jokes it's an uproarious book from two people who both suffered enormous oppression so let's take a final moment to go back inside if you like you can close your eyes and get back in touch for a moment with joy wherever you might feel it you can take any of the stories that you've heard or anything you feel inside and just allow joy to arise you might feel hesitation I feel too focused on other things that you need to guard against or protect yourself against you can leave you with this quote that happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower but is always there in relaxation and letting go simply allowing the joy to arise just let it do its thing and as you're ready you can come gently back open your eyes I thank all of you for your kind attention