JOY NOW
Peace, love, and joy, are the three most beautiful experiences. This week, we explore new ideas about joy, how to find it, how to appreciate it, and and to live it today.
Image: Courtesy of Amazon
Imagine if you could remember all of your moments of joy, since you were born. “A Private History of Happiness: Ninety-Nine Moments of Joy from Around the World
Categorized by common genres of happy times, including Morning, Friendship, Garden, Family, Leisure, Nature, Food & Drink, Well being, Creativity, Love, and Evening, philosophers and writers share their thoughts on mostly simple pleasures with deep emotion. For example, John James Audubon found joy in a bevy of Jackdaw’s in the mist above a delicate babbling stream on October 11th in 1826.
“The fog arising from the little stream only permitted us to see its waters when they made aripple against some rock. The vale was all mist, and had I not known where I was, and heard the notes of the Jackdaws above my head, I might have conceived myself walking through a subterraneous passage.” -- John James Audubon (“Jackdaw Song Breaks the Mist” -- writing in his travel journal, October 11, 1826)
Other wonderful simple joys shared include:
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“The Urge to Linger in a Warm Bed,” by Marcus Aurelius
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“The Freedom of Dancing Through the Night,” by Frank Burns
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“Flowers & Fruits Blaze for a Birthday,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“The Celebrated Pine Tree, by Matsuo Basho
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“Winter Sunshine on a Warm Wall,” by William Blake
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“A Shady Grove on a Hot Day,” Sappho
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“A Thousand Kisses,” by Honore de Balzac
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“Moonlight in a Chateau Garden,” by Washington Irving
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“The First Glow of Sun on a Wet Rooftopby,” by Hsui Hsia-k’o
Psychologist Bruce Davis advocates nurturing joy through “heartfulness meditation.” He prescribed seven steps in a recent Huffington Post article, including,
Step One: Nurturing Joy
Saying yes to joy in daily life calms the mind and opens our heart.
Step Two: Present Moment Heartful Awareness
Heartful awareness is more than being in the moment, it is being in the moment with awareness of our heart.
Step Three: Offering
As we offer everything we are busy with in our thoughts, we begin to be free to meditate.
Step Four: Being in our heart.
As we slow down to the nakedness of the moment, letting go of the various things occupying our awareness, we are in our heart. We breathe into the gentleness.
Step Five: Awareness Expanding In The Heart
We practice receiving the soft openness of our heart. There is a great presence, a whole universe in our heart waiting for our discovery.
Step Six: Receiving the beauty, innocence
Meditation is teaching us about receiving instead of compulsively thinking and doing. There is so much inner beauty unveiling to enjoy.
Step Seven: Discovering Our Ground of Being
The inner resources found in the heart are our ground of being -- a wholeness, trust, an inner joy independent of the world around us -- a source of creative wisdom, fun and spiritual fulfillment.
Photo: Ruth Marlowe Davis
Davis, along with his wife, Ruth Marlowe Davis, a devotional dancer, run The Silent Stay Retreat & Hermitage, in Napa Valley, CA, a 5-star European-style luxury retreat home dedicated to silence, meditation, and nurturing inner peace. It offers up to 9 people a beautiful setting, amidst hundred of acres of farmland, for heartful meditation.
Daily Heartfulness meditation opens the gifts of inner joy and an experience of coming home within yourself. Read more
"A retreat is a time to come home inside yourself, where the mind stops and silence of the heart begins." - Ruth Davis
Photo: Courtesy of IMG artists
Music is a joy, but singing, and singing in groups, in particular evokes a special kind of bliss.
“Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others
Singers speak about the joy and strength they gain from the weekly ritual of singing some of the “greatest music humanity has ever produced,” including: Ode to Joy, Handel's Messiah, and the Requiem Mass.
Horn relays new findings about the chemical cocktail on tap in our brains that is released when we sing together. So the collective joy of a choir makes sense. Read more about it in tomorrow’s post, “The Nature & Science of Joy.”
Recently launched, Happier.com is the world's first social network meant exclusively people with a passion for joy. If you are one of them, or if you want to see what’s possible, you can share and view photos and status updates about thing that make you and other Happier members happy. No negativity allowed.
Image: Courtesy of Amazon
Gretchen Rubin began her systematic pursuit of joy in 2009, with her blog and first book about the subject, “The Happiness Project,” a #1 New York Times and international bestseller. It is a daily account of the year she spent studying happiness, from both an academic and personal perspective.
In her most recent book, “Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life
Many of her insights ring true. For example, she finds that true simplicity is far from simple to attain. She observes that, despite our cultural warnings, sometimes money can do a lot to buy happiness.
Both books and the blog blend memoir, personal experimentation, and research together with pragmatic tools and tips that can help you find and create more happy moments too.
Check out the one-minute excerpt below:
Download a sample chapter of Happier at Home
Listen to a clip from the audio-book
Check out the rest of our posts on Joy this week in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Mind/Body, Place/Time, Nature/Science, and Soul Impact. And enter this week's photo competition. The theme: Joy (Deadline, August 4th, 2013).
