David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.
For many of us, August is traditionally the month of summer vacations, a time of recreation and happy activities. This makes this an ideal month to explore what I call “joy mining.”
In the realms of spirit, joy is more than just a feeling of happiness. When we hold joy in our hearts and minds, letting it permeate us, it heightens our spiritual energy, opening the door to a wider flow of spirit from us into the world around us. But can we summon joy when we want to? For many people, joy is a result of something good happening. Absent that good event, where does the joy come from?
There is a simple practice that I call "joy mining." Think of yourself as deliberately looking for "nuggets" of joy in your daily affairs and drawing their energy into yourself, depositing them in an inner "bank account." To do this, you need to realize that joy doesn't have to be a dramatic experience of ecstasy and pleasure. It can be very simple, a moment of wonder, a moment of feeling whole. What you are looking for are moments that hold the potential of heightening your felt sense of life. The trick is to make a habit of noticing and acknowledging them so that they become part of your psychological and spiritual “muscle memory.”
What might constitute of "nugget" of joy? It could be anything that in the moment gives you an uplifting feeling or attunes you to the spaciousness and wonder of life. It could be the pleasure of a good cup of coffee on a cold morning. It could be a smile from a friend. It could be seeing the blue of a clear sky or hearing the soothing sound of rain on the roof. It could be a song you hear, a funny remark, a bite of something delicious. Our senses are designed to connect us with pleasure in the world around us; when we acknowledge a moment of pleasure, we discover a nugget of joy. It may not be the joy of winning a lottery of thousands of dollars or the joy of getting married, but it's a nugget of joy nonetheless. The more we acknowledge and collect them, the more they shape and fill our life’s energy, becoming like a warmth we can send out into the world around us.
There are challenges. One is that we mentally establish a threshold of delight that has to be crossed before we will recognize the presence of joy. This is like saying that bits of gold dust are beneath our notice and that all we'll mine are fist-size hunks of gold. Yet as many a wealthy miner has discovered, those little bits of gold dust can add up to a fortune.
Another challenge is that we feel guilty. How can we justify being joyful when so many in the world are suffering? Denying joy, though, or refusing to acknowledge its presence in our lives, doesn’t alleviate suffering. It may only add to it. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the uplifting and empowering effect being with a truly joyous person can have on us, giving us renewed energy and strength to meet our challenges. The issue is not one of denying joy to ourselves but one of not hoarding it, feeling that it’s our right, that it’s our joy not to be shared. That attitude turns joy into lead, like a reverse Philosopher’s Stone
The heart of Joy Mining is paying attention to moments of happiness, lightness, pleasure, and all-around ok-ness when they happen to you, even if they seem like small pleasures indeed. By paying attention, you are sensitizing yourself to this heightening, expansive energy. Further, it helps you realize that for you to pass on joy into the world, you don't have to be in a crazy state of ecstatic happiness yourself, though I can say from my own experience that as you practice this, the sense of being in the midst of joy gets progressively stronger until it can truly lead to moments of bliss and ecstasy in the midst of ordinary life.
The exercise is very simple. The moment you feel pleased by something or have a sense of happiness about something you experience, pause for a moment and "collect" it. You do this by acknowledging the moment and honoring its felt sense. Feel this joy in your body, in your heart, in your mind. Feel yourself filled with it and surrounded by it. Feel it opening you to the grace and wonder of the universe. Say to yourself something like, "This is a nugget of joy. In this moment, I am touching joy. Let it become part of me that it becomes a power within me shaping my life. May this joy empower me to radiate it onward and outward to my world." Then give a silent appreciation for the moment. Gratitude and joy go hand in hand.
May your summertime this month bring you many mining opportunities, and may your accumulation of joy grow in blessing to you and to your world.