Lesson 3: Joy For Its Own Sake

In this lesson I want to place an emphasis on following joy for its own sake and really putting a priority on the level of happiness and joy you experience every day. I find that a lot of students first get into studying energy and meditation because they want to get past, overcome, or alleviate some condition in their lives.

If that’s where you are, that’s ok, but at some point it becomes important to realize that following your joy IS the essence of your desire. Following your joy is the experience that you seek. Rather than looking to get over or get through some circumstance, with happiness and joy being a secondary consideration, try to focus more intently on the process of pursuing joy.

In Module 2 we talked about how joy is important because it physically pushes your vibration higher. It literally moves you into a higher level of consciousness and a higher state of being. In this lesson it’s applicable because as you start to look at the symbolism of your desires and begin to look at the root origin of your desires, you will find that the root of all desire is to experience joy, bliss, love, peace, security, and passion. All of these concepts are interrelated.

When you start to see every single desire as a desire to express or experience more joy-bliss-love-light, it becomes increasingly obvious that the only thing you need to do in any moment of any day is to find the thought or action that is the most joyful thought or action for you in that moment.

The Motion Towards

When you start to view desire and following the chain of joy in this way, you start to realize that the purpose of any desire has nothing to do with the thing that you think that you want, and everything to do with the process of moving towards that desire. This is the process of closing the vibrational gap, of moving from the state of energy that you’re currently at to the state of energy at which your desire already exists.

The actual act of attaining your desire is always secondary. It hardly matters. It’s the motion towards that you want to focus on.

If you think in this way, pretty soon you’ll start to realize that it is the process of becoming, of emerging into, and moving forward with a desire that IS this exhilarating experience, this feeling of passion and excitement, a thrilling exuberance that you can take to every single day.

Moving towards your desire IS the essence of following your joy and experiencing the desire itself.

Exercise: Create a “Happy List”

As you start to prioritize the path of following your joy and focus on feeling good despite any circumstances, one of the best resources you can develop for yourself is to have an arsenal of techniques you can always use to lift your mood.

I call this my “happy list.” I encourage you to create a list of at least 10 things (but better if you have 20-30) that you can always count on to lift your mood.

It helps if you divide this list into the amount of time that it takes and/or the space that you need to do it. For example, I like to keep my list in categories of things that take less than 1-2 minutes to do, things that take 5-10 minutes, and things that take 20-30 minutes.

The list can include absolutely anything. The point is to develop actions that work for you. For example it might include: doing a few pushups, listening to music, doing a quick dance, sitting down for a long meditation, going for a walk, reading, etc.

Include anything that always makes you feel better. The point is to have a list of things to do when you notice you ‘re feeling negative, so you can get moving and lift yourself out of that negative spiral. Having this list can jumpstart you into feeling good all of the time.

Exercise: Moving in the Flow

For this next exercise you’re going to need an entire day in which you don’t have to do anything. Try to do it on the weekend or another day off, so you don’t have any outside force dictating what you have to do.

I want you to practice moving for an entire day of just following your train of thought into better and better feeling states. Whatever you feel the inspiration, the impulse, to act on, you do. Whatever makes you feel good in that moment, you do.

This might be getting up and going for a walk or a run, it might be sitting down and reading, it might be playing some music, or cooking. Anything that makes you happy, you do, but the point is that you don’t plan to do. You’re not planning your perfect day off, you simply plan a day in which you have absolute freedom and space to move with the inspiration you have in each and every moment.

This might feel a little odd, perhaps even crazy at first, but it’s actually your most natural way of being. We’ve simply trained ourselves out of it; we’re used to relying on our minds to dictate everything that we do every day.

Exercise Reflections and Recap

After you’ve taken your day of practicing following your inspired action, take some time either at the end of the day or the next day, to reflect on what happened.

Notice if in the moments in which you felt complete happiness, utter exhilaration and passion throughout the day — in those moments you felt abundant, if you felt peaceful, if you felt a connection with the energy, the flow of life. Notice that trend.

You may have glimpsed this state only for a second, but I do hope you glimpsed it. Even if in the next second you went back to the same old story of lack, or thinking you should be doing something, that’s ok, but I want you to realize that connection between happiness/passion/enthusiasm and abundance.

In the moments when you feel joyful, you have everything that you need and everything that you want. This is the experience of abundance.