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Recipe for a Joyful Life

Recipe for a Joyful Life

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 Recipe Card (can be a visual of an actual recipe card for blog or content on website) Preparation: Take stock of your current situation to know where you began. 1 Full cup of gratitude 2 hours of meditation 6 spoonfuls of daily practices (x2) A hearty handful of boundaries A sprinkling of laughter Stir Clockwise while smiling and holding a vision of living a life you enjoy. Repeat for no less than 10 weeks, then revisit your current state, your vision, and account for progress. Celebrate your accomplishments and continue until you allow purpose to set in. ********** Making a recipe card like this might sound kind of funny for something as ephemeral as Joy or living a Joyful Life. But what if Joy wasn’t something elusive? Most of us chasing Joy think of it like the wings of a butterfly. Something beautiful that you cannot touch. And like those wings, if you do touch them, they are destroyed. What if it was something you could actually touch and not only feel its tangibility- but build beneath you like the firm foundation of a house? I’m here to tell you that you can, and the recipe is quite available to you with a little bit of commitment to the discipline of the practice of know thyself. First to my butterfly wing analogy, the reason many people think Joy and enjoyment are elusive, and that experiencing joy (like touching butterfly wings) destroys it, is because most people are chasing Happiness. Happiness is an external fleeting thing that depends on factors outside ourselves. And the other side of the Happiness coin is sadness. Take, for example, you place all your expectations for happiness on a relationship with a significant other. And you are in that relationship and everything is all perfect in your life because someone loves you and accepts you and wants to do things with you. This is Happiness you say. Then one day that person says I’m leaving, or that person dies, or that person changes because of some factor outside of your control and the relationship ends. Now you are sad. You are sadder than you ever were before the relationship because for awhile you had The Thing you thought made you happy. And in a way you are right. You touched the butterfly's wings and it couldn’t fly anymore, and it died. Now you have no more feeling of Happy - you have the memory of it, the longing for it. But you no longer have it so that attachment to this past state of Happy you lost now makes you Sad because it is draining your today (like a leak in a boat). I watch this play out with my partner every time he speaks of his past fiance who left him because he stopped fulfilling her narcissist needs. He has this attachment to that belief in that with her, when he was in the peak of his health, in the peak of this happiness having all these activities with this other built purely on external circumstances that He was Happy. And maybe he was Happy. For a moment, because he bought her the right ring, he took her to dance in the right place, he provided everything she needed so that she could get on her feet, save for a house, make a down payment and leave him when she didn’t need him anymore. And then his Happy came crashing down, when the lie was revealed and she left him because his usefulness to her ended - putting him in a pit of depression that caused him to harm himself with alcohol and other choices due to the severe sadness felt after the high of Happy. Now today, he isn’t in that depression anymore, we are in a healthy relationship of exchange co-creating together, but I can still see that attachment to a past version of himself when he believes he was Happy. Because in that past he had health (and no liver disease) and he had for this brief moment some combination of external factors (fleeting as they were) that made everything “Perfect.” So now, this attachment to a past version of himself when he was quote/unquote Happy inhibits his ability to fully experience his present moment and the amazing life he and I are creating. He is working on it, and acknowledges his attachment challenges, and having physical limitations is a real obstacle,- which is why finding our inner source of Joy (and thus resilience) is so essential. Ok, let’s talk about Joy again and how it is different from Happiness. Joy is not ephemeral and intangible. Further, Joy is not Happiness. Happiness is external and its opposite is Sadness. So the happier you are, when the source of that happiness leaves you the sadder you get. It is cause and effect and the hermetic principle of rhythm. One extreme always swings back to the other like a teeter totter or those sets of silver balls that click on your desk. Joy is built in your life from within and is not dependent on external factors. My recipe card is not facetious. It is true. Just like laying a foundation and building something - you go through a specific set of...
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