Choose joy today and every day

Finding joy is a regular item on most people’s bucket lists. Nowadays, with all the business and life issues, shocking events and misbehaving people that affront you, it’s not surprising that you yearn for joy.

But what is joy, anyway? Joy is derived from an unfaltering inner calm that allows you to sustain your balance through whatever you encounter. “Joy subsumes happiness,” says Douglas Abrams, author of The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. “In its greatest sense, it is the investigation and experience of those things that make life satisfying.”

In the book, celebrated spiritual gurus like the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu help provide a roadmap to finding a sense of contentment and joy even in times of sorrow. The tome is a product of their combined struggle to propagate the gospel of joy, love, humility, and inner peace. It brings delightful insights into the friendship of the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu.

It is common knowledge that the Dalai Lama ran from the Chinese who conquered Tibet, and has lived in exile for most of his life. Tutu is a champion for human rights whose work, in part, led to the fall of the apartheid state in South Africa. Both men have agonized, privately and publicly. Yet both continue to commit themselves to living lives filled with joy. They challenge everyone to do the same.

The conversation between the Dalai Lama and Tutu took place over the course of a week at the Dali Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India. Abrams has retold it, drawing from history, science and third-party sources to support the stories and insights shared by the two elderly statesmen. The book is divided into three parts:  the trip to India; the meeting between the two and what transpires on that occasion; and the eight pillars for joy, namely: perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion and generosity. I’ve fleshed them out below.

• Get a wider perspective. This is possible by stepping back from your situation to see the bigger picture. Scientists call this practice “self-distancing.”  It allows you to think more clearly about your problem, as well as to reduce your stress response and negative emotions. This broader view also allows you to get beyond your own limited and immediate self-interest and into a perspective that takes into account the interests of others.

• Live with humility. Both the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu lead simple lives mainly dedicated to prayer and meditation. While both have enormous impact on people, they always recognize their humanity and that of others. When you live your life with true humility, without trying to outdo others, you are one step closer to living joyfully. Humility helps you remember your common bond with others. It helps you avoid isolation, judgment, and indifference. It helps you remember that you are “a beloved child of God,” as Archbishop Tutu would say, and to remember that you are just one of the seven billion people that inhabit the planet. Humility helps you remember that you are in it with other people.

• Laugh at yourself to develop humor. Humor seems like something that is spontaneous and natural and cannot be cultivated, but the ability to laugh at yourself and to see the ironies and funny realities in your life is actually like perspective — something that you can learn with practice over time.

• Accept reality. As both the archbishop and the Dalai Lama explain, this is the only place from which you can start to work for change, personal or global. Meditation is a practice that allows you to accept your life moment by moment without judgment or the expectation for life to be other than what it is. As the Serenity Prayer declares, “God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.”

• Be forgiving, because for every difficulty, there is a counterpoint. Tutu became the world’s leading spokesperson on forgiveness when he was asked to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa by then-president Nelson Mandela. Over the many decades since that pioneering effort to use truth, forgiveness and reconciliation to move beyond violent conflict, the archbishop has developed a process on how to forgive: tell your story, name the hurt, grant forgiveness, and renew or release the relationship. Forgiveness can be found through compassion.

• Embrace an attitude of gratitude. Tutu has cancer, a debilitating disease. Yet he is not desolate. What he projects instead is incredible gratitude for the life he has been able to lead and the days he has now with his treasured family and closest friends. He chooses to look back on a life well lived. There are regrets, but he does not dwell on them. It seems a challenge to follow in his footsteps, but Tutu’s joy comes from the choices he makes about the thoughts he chooses to dwell on and those he pushes away. Gratitude is an extremely important part of joy because it allows you to savor life and recognize that most of your good fortune in life comes from others.

• Cultivate compassion. Nurturing compassion — the impulse to help others — for even 10 minutes a day, can lead to 24 hours of joy. Expanding your circle of concern is essential for your well being as well as that of the world.

• Practice generosity. It involves material giving, spiritual giving, and granting freedom from fear. It is in caring for others that you experience the most joy.

• Avoid being the source of your own unhappiness. Sadly, many of the things that undermine your joy and happiness are of your own making. Often it comes from the negative tendencies of our minds, emotional reactivity, or from our inability to appreciate and utilize the resources that exist within us.

• Control the pain from your own daily disasters.  You cannot control the suffering from a natural disaster, but the suffering from your daily disasters can be directed. You create most of your suffering, so it should be logical that you also have the ability to create more joy. It depends on your attitude, your perspective, and your reactions to situations and the quality of your relationships with other people.

• Focus on your inner values. They reflect your authentic humanity. Materialistic values cannot give you peace of mind. Only this way can you have peace of mind and more peace in your world. Many problems like war and violence are the creation of people.

Joy does not simply happen to you. You have to choose it today and every day.

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