The Three Base Practices for Joy

Joy, part 3

Some spiritual practices might be your thing -- or might not be. Other practices are worth a try -- even if you end up only doing them once. Then there are the kinds of spiritual practice that are slogans to keep in mind and try to live by. Beyond these three categories are the basics for a life of joy. (They're all listed HERE.) The basics are things like: Get Enough Sleep. You can’t be happy if you’re sleep deprived.

Exercise has actually not yet been the subject of a "Practice of the Week" post, though I expect it will be, and “Nourish Your Brain” is listed as a “keep in mind” exercise. A healthy diet and exercise are also among the basics of a life of joy. I’ve seen people sick in hospitals and in hospice who have a deep inner joy, but if you don’t have to be sick, doing what you can to be healthy and vital helps with joy. Taking care of yourself is a form of self-compassion, which is a practice of and for joy.

I also include in the basics category three practices that aren’t just some people’s thing but help everyone, aren’t just worth a try, but are worth sticking with, and they aren’t just for keeping in mind because they do require setting aside some dedicated time -- every day if you can, or at least every other day.

Three practices, 10-15 minutes each.

So, yes, if you do all three, we’re talking about half an hour to 45 minutes a day, and I know your schedules are already full. But I have a duty as your spiritual leader to tell you what I know about building more joy in your life, and this is what I know. Whatever else you are able to do of all those practices that are described on the website, these three will lay down a base that will facilitate all of them – will help you be better able to keep in mind the "keep in mind” practices and will deepen and enrich your “your thing” practice, and will strengthen the experience of the “worth a try” practices.

Most people find that the morning is the best time for these, and doing all three one right after another is a good routine, but, really, wherever you can fit them in, fit them in.

One: Journal for 10 or 15 minutes a day. (See also: "Morning Pages.") A cautionary note: not all journaling is equal – there are some ways of journaling that are just perseverating about one’s unhappiness, and that really doesn’t help. I’d say start with listing some gratitudes. There is a post about journaling at cucmatters.org that will provide you with some further helpful perspective.

“Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory....The power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness.”

Two: Read wisdom literature. Wisdom literature is writing that’s inspirational or spiritually insightful. Choose for yourself what counts as wisdom literature for you, though I’d say the latest spy thriller or romance novel probably isn’t it. Essays of Thomas Merton, or Thich Nhat Hanh, or Pema Chodron, or writings of Rabindranath Tagore are certainly good. The poems of Mary Oliver or Walt Whitman, perhaps would work for you. The post on “Study Spiritual Texts” provides a sampling of over 30 titles just for a start.

In my own morning study, I find myself returning periodically to re-read certain ancient sources: The Dao De Jing, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible’s Book of Psalms. There are always fresh.

Pick a book. Dip into it for a 10 or 15 minute period each day. When you finish, move on to another. Spending some time learning and reminding yourself each day of the wisdom of the ages builds joy.

Three: Just attention. Not attention TO anything predetermined, not moving, not talking – attention that is JUST attention. Find a posture that will allow you to be perfectly still without having to adjust yourself for 10 or 15 minutes. Decide beforehand how many minutes it will be, and set a timer, so you don’t have to be glancing at a clock to guessing when you’ve been at it long enough. Almost but not quite close your eyes. Sit motionless. Bask in silence. Start off by bringing attention to your breath – the sensation of air going out and coming in. When a thought arises, notice that you are thinking that thought. Watch the thought, watch yourself thinking that thought. Under this watchful attention, the thought will fade. Return to watching the sensations of the breath. And so on, until the timer rings.

You are not your thoughts. Thoughts are just things that happen to you. Once you truly grasp this, your own thoughts don’t have such a grip on you, and that’s very freeing, and very joyful.

So those are the three base practices I encourage. A final note about joy, and maybe a caution.
One of the sources that I have adapted from in several of the Practice of the Week posts is Jonathan Robinson’s book, Find Happiness Now: 50 Shortcuts for Bringing More Love, Balance, and Joy into Your Life. Another of the sources I draw on is Norman Fischer’s book, Training in Compassion. I mention these two titles by way of pointing out that finding joy and training in compassion turn out to be the same. So that’s the caution. This joy thing and the compassion thing go together. Joy makes us more compassionate, and compassion brings us more joy.

If you’re not interested in being a more compassionate person, then you might want to stay away from the practices that cultivate joy. If you’d really rather focus on guarding your resources and making sure other people aren’t taking advantage of you – if you’re more interested in assessing other people’s worthiness for whatever you might offer than you are in just offering it freely and profligately – then maybe joy itself isn’t your thing.

Is it?

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Joy"
See also
Part 1: Joy and Happiness, Evolution, Money
Part 2: Joy Practice
On Joy
On the Journey: 2017 May: Joy

Joy Practice

Joy, part 2

Practices that help cultivate joy (SEE HERE), I have grouped into three categories. The “Might be Your Thing" category has practices that are not for everyone – but one of them just might be what really works for you. These are things like:

• Gardening
• Cooking
• Quilting
• Art
• Martial Arts
• Poetry by Heart (making a practice of memorizing poems that provide insight or guidance for you)

These things really bring joy to some people. Any one of them might not be your thing. If it is, the question is, are you setting aside enough time to do it?

The second category is “Worth a Try.” These are practices for everyone, although perhaps not on a regular basis. I’m saying, try these one time. If you really like it you might start doing it on a regular basis, but even if you only ever do it once, it’s kind of a nice exercise to have done once. These include things like:

• Create a Home Altar
• Let Your Precious Go
• Failure Gratitude (make a list of your failures in life, and then reflect on reasons to be grateful for those failures)

Some of these "Worth a Try" exercises are for doing with another person, and require some care in selecting the suitable partner.

• Spiritual Intimacy (should be entered only with someone you’re prepared to be vulnerable with)
• Fall in Love with Someone (your spouse or partner, perhaps! Otherwise, be sure you're ready)

Some of these practices are “lift your spirits” practices:

• Watch an Inspiring Movie (includes a list of 36 films good for lifting your spirits)
• Create a Magical Playlist (pick your favorite songs and make a playlist on your iPod, or on Spotify, or, if you’re old school, burn a CD -- or, if you’re really old school, making a tape, if that's still possible)

A key part of your strategy for cultivating joy in your life is (a) noticing when you’re kind of bummed, (b) making an intentional decision about what to do about that, because sometimes grief is appropriate and you need to let yourself be in that space for a while, and (c) having ways to cheer yourself up – if you decide that being cheered up is what you want.

The May issue of On the Journey explores the theme, Joy. The issue mentions several of the "Worth a Try" practices:

• The Mirror Exercise (where you look yourself in the eye in the mirror and tell that person how much you appreciate and are proud of them)
• The Year to Live List (where you imagine that you had one year to live, and make a list of what you’d like to do in that year, and then, maybe some of those things you go ahead and make plans to do, or else do something a little bit along those lines -- for instance, if “go to Tibet” would be what you’d want to do with one year to live, but that wouldn’t be responsible in your current reality, maybe you could make plans to visit, say, the Tibetan monastery in Woodstock)
• The Birthday-Funeral (invite friends over, perhaps as a birthday celebration, and ask them to not to bring a gift but come prepared to share a favorite memory about their connection with you – the kind of stories that too often don’t get told except at funerals)
• Create a Pain and Pleasure List (write down 10 things you like to do, 10 you don’t like doing, and then notice how much of your typical week is spent on the “don’t like” items -- see if you can move yourself to spending a bit more time doing what you do like)

All these are worth a try for everyone – at least once, and return to them as needed. This is how we pay attention to intentionally cultivating joy in our lives.

The third category are the “Keep in Mind” practices. These are things for everyone to just keep in mind, try to cultivate as you go through your day – try to make into a habit.They aren’t particular exercises, other than sometimes making them a focus of your journaling. Mostly these are little reminders to give yourself, habits of being to tell yourself to try to exemplify.

• Be Patient
• Pause
• Slow Down
• Take Many Breaks
• Honor Your Temperament
• Love Your Inner Child
• Enjoy Humility
• Accept the Limits of Your Influence -- and at the same time:
• Do What You Can (Unlearn Helplessness)
• Cultivate Self-Acceptance, and Have Compassion for Yourself
• Don’t Take Anything Personally

Each one of these has its own post on CUCmatters.org detailing what’s it’s all about and how to do it.

You’ve got your “Might Be Your Thing” practices – find one that is your thing. There’s the “Worth a Try” practices – give each of them a try once, and stay with the ones that seem helpful. And there’s the “Keep in Mind” practices that are slogans to live by and try to make into habits

Beyond these three categories there are simply “The Basics” for a life of joy.

Next: The Basics

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Joy"
See also
Part 1: Joy and Happiness, Evolution, Money
Part 3: The Three Base Practices for Joy
On Joy
On the Journey: 2017 May: Joy

Joy and Happiness, Evolution, Money

Joy, part 1

I do believe there’s a difference between happiness and joy. A British website called psychologies explains it this way:

“Joy is more consistent and is cultivated internally. It comes when you make peace with who you are, why you are and how you are, whereas happiness tends to be externally triggered and is based on other people, things, places, thoughts and events.” ("Joy vs Happiness," 2015 Sep 1)

OK. Joy comes from a place of peace – peace with who you are, peace with your world. Happiness often comes from a place of excitement.

But if you think of happiness as not just a moment of happiness, but the overall happiness of your life, then you’re getting a good measure of joy. Joy may be different from happiness, but if you’re unhappy, it's hard to be joyful. In fact, if you’re unhappy, you don’t really have a heart filled with peace, hope, faith, or love either. For that reason, it seems OK to go ahead and take happiness as a proxy for joy – understanding that we’re not talking about the momentary happiness from momentary circumstances, but your overall norm of cheerfulness about your life. The more you cultivate happiness, the more you’ll also at least contribute to cultivating the abiding joy that is a fruit of the spirit.

So how do you cultivate happiness and joy? Oh, I thought you’d never ask. OK, so maybe you didn’t ask. Either way, that’s the question I have been answering for you week after week for more than three years: the "Practice of the Week" posts describe practices for cultivating joy. But before I talk about that, I want to set the stage with a couple items that came to my attention in the news this week. One of them illustrates that challenge – why it’s hard to be joyful, why it takes intentional work. The other illustrates that our most common strategy isn’t all that relevant.

First, the challenge. It takes intentional practice to cultivate joy because evolution has designed us to be a little bit unhappy. A little unhappiness gave our hunter-gatherer ancestors a better chance of surviving and reproducing. They needed to be focused on dangers and problems and competition. We have inherited that tendency. This news item from just this week about that was about was about Homo Naledi, a human relative unknown before bones were discovered in South Africa in 2015. It took a while to get a good measurement on the age of the bones, but on Tue May 9 it was revealed that they are roughly 236,000 years old. That’s a lot more recent than the original guess that had them at about 2 million years old. It means that homo sapiens – us – and homo naledi were living at the same time. We already knew that Neanderthals were living at the same time as homo sapiens. Now we know that Homo Naledi was also among the competing homo species – and that only homo was equipped to win. The article I saw concluded with this observation:

“We are a competitive, resource-gobbling species today, and the new research helps confirm that, for better or for worse, we always have been.” (Time Magazine, 2017 May 11)

We evolved to really want to get stuff, to out-compete others at getting more of it. That’s the recipe that brought us into existence and allowed us to survive, but it’s not a recipe for happiness. The circuitry of anxiety and stress and continual acquisition that improved survival among our ancestors is no longer functional for us, so we need ways to override that circuitry. So that’s why it takes intentional focus – because we’re rewiring our circuitry to override aspects of our evolutionary default.

The other news item this week has to do with our usual strategy for making our life better: earn more money. On the one hand, there is such a thing as not enough. It’s hard to be happy amidst the insecurities of extreme poverty – not impossible, but hard, and it takes a rare level of spiritual attainment. On the other hand, there is also such a thing as too much, as when too much of our life is spent tending to finances and too little on the things that really make life joyful. For those of us without the level of spiritual attainment that makes abject poverty acceptable, how much is enough? There seems to be some geographic variation on that. A recent Gallup study looked at how income affects people’s daily emotions in 12 U.S. metro areas.

• In Atlanta, the annual salary that correlates with peak happiness is $42,000.
• In Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Phoenix, and Wahsington, DC, it’s $54,000.
• In Boston and Houston, the annual salary that correlates with peak happiness is $75,000.
• In New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Los Angeles, it’s $105,000. (Time, 2017 May 8)

Interesting! That’s the peak – so people who made less than that as well as people who made more than that weren’t as happy. But, of course, that’s the general population – people that aren’t particularly doing the work to cultivate happiness. Do the work and you can override the circuitry of unhappiness with less than the salary correlating with peak happiness. (Or, for that matter, with more.)

So, what does this work look like? I have had a lot to say about that in the “Practice of the Week” posts I started posting on the CUUC Matters website back in 2014. Almost every week in your E-Communitarian newsletter (links to which are posted on our Facebook page HERE) you’ll find a title of a practice, a brief blurb, and a link to the full description. As of this writing, there are 127 different posts at cucmatters.org describing various ways to cultivate joy, and there are new ones still coming most weeks. Many of them overlap, and a few of them are the same practice, explained in, I hope, a helpfully different way.

NEXT: About the practices.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Joy"
See also
Part 2: Joy Practice
Part 3: The Three Base Practices for Joy
On Joy
On the Journey: 2017 May: Joy