Joy is the fruit you get when you are more you! Don't miss out!
For the longest time, when people would talk about joy, the best I could think was that: if I was in joy, I was just really, really happy. In joy meant that I was having the best day ever. I was in bliss. Nothing could bring me down.
But then something would and I would say, I lost my joy.
And though happiness is how joy manifests sometimes, that is not always the case.
Have you ever felt something so deeply, something so beautiful, so heart felt, you couldn't help but cry? Have you ever cried "tears of joy"?
Sometimes, these are the moments that bring us to our knees.
The loss of a loved one, and as a result, the bird that comes to sit outside the window and chirps us a love song. The depth of the experience felt, the connection made, as a result of the pain from losing that which we love.
Joy can be like this too, not just surface happiness because things are going our way.
No, rather we feel the magnitude of our heart and its overflow. We feel the wellspring that is full of love, and that we are connected to it. Joy is connection to the Divine that we cultivate through our interaction with It. It hovers in the worst days and longs to lift us up or pull us in and hold us tight. And if we reach back consistently through devotion, we are reminded because we have cultivated this joyful space inside that we are OK; we are not alone.
This is a practice, a returning to the Spirit that wants a relationship with us, who enlivens our joy muscle so that even when things are not as we would want, we know that there is something sweet, a beautiful light through the dark hole in the wound. That light, that joy, is something like the bird's chirp to be extracted when we are ready to feel the depth of our connection to the Allness that is.
What I did not understand when I was calling joy happiness was that joy is a state of being, a fruit (a sweet result) of being connected to the Infinite, God.
How do we know when we are connected? Here are a couple ways to check your joy meter.
1. We smile more, and let all feeling come up and out. A joyous state creeps (or surges) up from the heart to our face, hands and/or feet.
2. When people say things that are designed to hurt us, we take a step back and realize their pain. Our joy is like a boomerang.
3. When we lose or fail or feel doubt, we go inside to see that we are still loved. And though things are tough, we sit in awe in the joy at the heart.
4. We are more positive. and when we are not, we know that we need to realign so joy may again flow up from Spirit to our spirit once again.
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And there are so many more ways to check ourselves, and to fill up our joy meter. There are so many tools made available to us all the time. There is joy right inside your precious heart, so close and yet in our misunderstanding that it is somewhere outside of us waiting in a happy day or with some person, so often it is missed.
Don't miss out on feeling the joy inside of you. You can practice cultivating joy. Join me this Wednesday, August 4th for the last live class of the Align at the Heart series, 6:45-7:45am.
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