Mindfulness of Choosing Joy
“Choose Joy! Don’t wait for things to get easier, simpler, better. Life will always be complicated. Learn to be happy right now. Otherwise, you’ll run out of time.”
-unknown author
I found these words somewhere recently in my mindless scrolling. The words jumped off the screen and reminded me how important the mindfulness of joy is, especially when we find ourselves in challenging times. Joy is often an elusive concept for most of us as we grow into adulthood and find ourselves inundated with bills, obligations and work. How do we turn the mind towards that which is life affirming and get out of the worried state, which so often plagues us?
I have sometimes felt like I was sleepwalking through life and that every day was groundhog’s day. How do we awaken the parts of ourselves that are more vital? How do we call out to the part of us that is living radically, fiercely alive? It can be so easy to feel submerged in the to-dos and monotony of every-day life. Other times, we are in challenging scenarios for a time and we spend our mental energy thinking, “When this is over and things are different, then I will feel good and happy”. This is the illusion we are often living with. When that time is over and you get to that ‘other shore’, are you filled with joy? Often the answer is no. Things just go back to baseline. How can we face difficulty with fierce joy and presence?
There are so many layers to our experiences and the stories we tell ourselves about these experiences are how we create meaning in our lives. When I have struggled, I have often found myself telling myself stories about how things will never get better and found ways to avoid the pain in order to move on to the next thing. When we are in struggle, our scripts from childhood rise to the surface of the waters of consciousness like a ferocious shark threatening to devour us. It is so easy to find ourselves in victim narratives when we are challenged. We succumb to the hardship, letting it lord over our experience of life. When I struggle and I conceptualize myself instead as a warrior capable of facing psychological battles, my awareness begins to shift into openness towards the situation as well as internal strength.
In order to make this internal shift, it is not a one-time choice, but rather a continual process of choosing joy. We have no guarantees about whether life will get easier or harder, but we do get to choose how we show up. Mindfulness practices such as meditation can help to cultivate the ability to turn the mind. Turning the mind is having the ability to shift our attention towards something that is intentional. An example of this may be if I do something wrong and I start to criticize myself, potentially turning the mind to notice how much less often I do that wrong thing than I used to. Much of meditation is the practice of focusing our mind on one thing. In our current technologic age, focusing can be incredibly difficult; therefore, cultivating the ability to focus gives us more power over our internal experience. Choosing joy is simply the intention to continually commit to shift towards one thing in your experience that brings you joy no matter how small that thing is.
Focusing can be challenging when we are too ambitious about our focus. Try focusing the mind by trying a simple mantra throughout your day, such as I choose joy; no matter how difficult the situation I always have the opportunity to choose joy. Maybe your affirmation is as simple as I choose joy. The key with creating a mantra or an affirmation is not just to say it once, but to continually repeat it to yourself throughout the day. It is easy to say the affirmation at the beginning of a day, but how about when you are knees-deep in your most recent work project? Try saying your mantra many times throughout the day and turning the mind to focus on that which brings you joy. We cannot change our circumstances, but we can change how we relate to them.
Part of this process of choosing joy is having the self-awareness to notice when you have gotten off track. Instead of beating yourself up for getting off track, simply notice and turn the mind towards joy. I select an intention every day and I find that the moment the intention becomes the most powerful is in those moments when I am NOT living my intention. In that moment, I simply redirect my thoughts towards noticing something in my environment that aligns with my intention. Retraining our brain is challenging work, it takes constant effort and attention to change our mental patterning. The more you practice joy (and it is a practice), the closer those synapses grow together in your brain that make it easier to experience joy in the future. Repetition is the key!
