The best drug-testing program is in the human brain. The brain has pre-tested hundreds of psychochemicals over five hunder million years. It has selected primarily the survival chemicals of stress to help us “win” and depression when we feel we have “lost”. The stress chemicals help us to keep going until we drop. The depression chemicals help us drop. We are on a neurohormonal carousel and only joy can help us slow that carousel for a more enjoyable ride.
Life is a series of painful or joyful moments, which follow each other in an endless cycle. Whenever pain comes near us, our only salvation is to seek places of beauty, joy and peace. Wherever there is joy, our souls can heal.
Joy has something very pure and innocent about it. It is a feeling that reminds us of the innocence of childhood and all its endless pleasures. A mind that is open to the charm of the world, can find joy everywhere. Joy is the path that leads to both love and happiness. Once we devote ourselves to cultivating joy, we discover that we are surrounded with positivity.
The Joy chemicals have also been well tested through the brain’s million-year drug testing program, but few of us are utilizing our “Joy” juices. We are often too busy coming and going, lifting and dropping, to notice everything around us. The joy response within our brains is pre-wired into the human system, like a new home with wiring. Except this response circuitry is going largely unused, or at least is underused.
Our healing psychochemicals produced within our brain are there for us, but we must make connection with them. The joy response is a reflex, a response system available on demand. This joy response is hidden away, far back in the brain medicine chest, behind the stress and depression.
Think of a time when you were more than happy. Think of a time when you were ecstatic, jubilant, delighted, exhilarated, fascinated, captivated, thrilled. It might take some time to think of that time in your life, but when you do, try to remember how it felt. That is “Super Joy”. It is real, but all too rare in our life experiences.
We see the joy reflex in a dog when his master returns home and the face of a parent at the birth of a child, to name a couple examples. It is an experience that leaves us floating and it goes beyond just being happy, to being thrilled with being alive. It is the inner territory of our hearts, which we can visit whenever we want.
One of the most limiting words in our vocabulary is the word “overjoyed”. The problem in our society is really that we are underjoyed. The brain speaks in the language of stress and depression, which have become our immediate survival way of thinking. But the brain is much less fluent in the dialect of delight. Think of how difficult it is for most people to express their intense positive feelings. Anger talk comes easily, but love talk usually causes us problems. For most, it is just too personal. It is the most intimate of human experiences.
One reason super joy and super health have eluded us is that in our society we have grown further apart even as our technology seems to bring us closer together. We can talk to almost anyone in the world, watch them on television and send pages of typed text over wires to any country in the world. Machines can talk to one another on our behalf, yet we seem strangely isolated by all of these gains. Since we no longer have to be with people to communicate with them, we have begun to cocoon ourselves, to withdraw and send electronic signals back and forth between ourselves.
We can complain, mope, swear, demand, yell and degrade much easier than we can share our Joy. Overcoming our difficulty in sharing and describing our life joy is a major step in becoming more joyful. And when we learn to talk more about Joy with others, we are more likely to experience Joy more often ourselves. Our experience of the world is defined by the way we perceive things. We can choose to dwell on sorrows or to fight them through joy. We can decide to be miserable about the bad things or to focus our energy on celebrating the good things.
Super Joy is another way of knowing about the world. Once you begin experiencing Joy more regularly, everything you see and do, everyone with whom you interact, takes on new meaning and context. You come to know in an intuitive way, beyond everyday reasoning and logic. Whenever we feel depressed because of our life circumstances, we must remember that it is in our power to change things. If life does not bring us joy, we must seek activities or places where joy is still possible. Joy is a fragile feeling and unfortunately our minds sometimes sabatoge us. When our hearts are filled with joy, our brains might play tricks on us to think negatively. By paying attention to each moment and cultivating positive thinking, we transform each day and in all that we accomplish into Joy.
One of the richest sources of joy is getting totally immersed in an activity and putting all our heart, soul and talent into it. ThJ joy of creating or accomplishing something can give us an incredible boost of power. Joy is such a powerful feeling that it can rarely be communicated through words. Joy is better expressed through dancing, singing, laughing and is about freedom, passion and happiness.
To learn Super Joy, you will have to make time to develop your awareness and perception at several levels of consciousness. Super Joy is the increased appreciation, even amazement, for even the smallest details in life. Try to appreciate the details of the simplist elements around you, and you will find a joy that has always been there. Find Joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, activity. It is that special element that gives texture and flavor to our daily life. Without it we are left with closed hearts and minds. We need to learn how to find, grow and share it with others. Joy is connection and shared happiness.
We miss out on joy when we fail to attend to the simple aspects of daily living. We too often are frightened into such attention by a crisis which leads us to living an overly busy life. We should not wait to be forced to pay attention to our life around us. Life and living are truly amazing, we just need to take notice. And, the secret to joy is that the more you bring it to others, we receive it right back. It is contagious! Joy is like a gift and can be multiplied by our own existence and experiences.
Our joy can be the source of our smile, but sometimes our smile can be the source of our joy. For, it is not in things, it is in us.
