Living With Joy

We are inspired by those rare individuals who live fully, maximizing their potential and radiating joy. Yet for the rest of us, life encourages a certain frenetic state of mind in large part due to constant, uncontrolled distractions. During our commute, driving ’round looking for parking, it’s easy to live from a place of irritation as a way of protecting ourselves. It seems to simplify our world and the demands placed upon us. However, it has a significant cost.

Multi-tasking is part of the problem; we’re so often busily trying to do more than one thing at a time that we get caught in a particular mindset. We’re largely unaware of this because we feel like there’s no choice. After all, in order to get everything done, we have to multi-task. But this comes with a feeling of being drained, overwhelmed and as the day goes on, cranky.

The thing is, all of us actually have choices — it’s just that we often find it easier to quietly take our lumps and collect grievances (only to righteously explode when things have gotten badly out of balance).

So, how do we change this soul-crushing way of life? Well, your life can’t change if your mind doesn’t change first!

Deciding to include joy in your life will give you the energy and uplift necessary to motivate other changes about how you live. If you decide that you can introduce joy, you’re beginning to take emotional responsibility for your life. This will have a positive, trickle-down effect, even on negative emotions.

Here are seven ways to create a life with joy:

1. Learn to live in the moment
Take a deep breath. Feel the weight of your body pressing into your chair. Listen to the sounds around you. Allow yourself to be absorbed in the moment; it is one of the reasons people love to travel, or to become infatuated, those heightened moments feel like really living. A similar feeling of being alive is available to you, if you live (as often as possible) in the current moment, even at home or at work. This takes effort, because our habitual state of mind takes us out of the moment. Nonetheless, this is where the seat of joy lives – you can cultivate it.

2. Cultivate aesthetic appreciation
Another way to appreciate the moment is to choose to experience things that please you aesthetically. If you love art, schedule in a trip to the museum. If you love music, go to a performance. If you love color, go to a high-end paint store. If you love the colors of cosmetics, linger in the department store. Or even choose to rearrange a closet; creating something pleasing to you does wonders to lift your spirits.

3. Expand the powers of your mind, through your body
Choose to learn forced concentration through something that involves balance: yoga, sport climbing, martial arts, even dance. This type of work with your body will give you a different experience of your mind, being present while being active. From this place, it’s not unusual to experience the joyful, physical fulfillment of being a child. Elect to have that in your life again!

4. Choose contemplation or meditation
Develop your ability to concentrate, to resist stress and to appreciate the present moment through a mediation practice. Nearly every community has affordable classes offered by practitioners of varying techniques. There are also mediation tapes and CDs that can help you develop this powerful practice. Best of all, any form of mediation brings a growing lightness and joy with its daily practice.

5. Practice sensual concentration
Take a moment to call to mind bathing happily as a child, or of bathing your own child. Remember that childish absorption in the pleasure of the warm water, the bubbles, the splashing? Often as adults we don’t give ourselves the simpler joys of the body – even though it’s so easy to take a bath or an unhurried shower, or even get a massage. This is an easily achievable way to give yourself a bit of joy without too much trouble or effort, especially if you really allow yourself to drink in the experience.

6. Let yourself play
Learn to allow yourself to play! When you were little you didn’t worry about whose drawing was the best, you just threw yourself into gripping those fat crayons and drawing the cat onto a piece of paper. You can re-experience that kind of absorption – if you will let yourself get out of your head, out of your ego. In fact, you can do anything that used to give you pleasure – draw, finger paint, dance, play the piano… Whatever it is, do it with the openness of a child. Don’t show what you’ve made or done to anyone, do it purely and solely for the pleasure in it.

If you choose to let joy back into your life, you’ll live more fully, more resiliently and you’ll have the emotional resources to choose what kind of mind-state you want to carry with you throughout your days. This is the only life you’ll have; let your joy be a gift to yourself, to those you love and to those you come across on your journey.