Committing to Joy

When I was a young teenager taking aptitude tests for college, I took a test to see what occupation I might be best suited for. After taking the test, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I grew up, but what I knew without a doubt was that I wanted to be happy. Even the Dalai Lama says that each person’s primary job is to make themselves happy, that if each one of us concerned ourselves with being happy, then the entire world would become a much more loving place. Lately, cultivating my own happiness is my full time job.

Some of you may be surprised to read this, thinking that my job is to help others and guide them on this path of spiritual enlightenment through the body. The truth is that I do this work because it makes me happy, I do this work because I am committed not only to my own joy, but to helping others find that same commitment, and ultimately, to have the experience of pervading joy in life.

From my earliest years I imagined what it would be like to wake up happy every day. There has always been a temptation for me to try to get happiness from outside myself. But even when I was younger, I knew that true happiness would come from following the path that Spirit had laid out for me. Even before I heard the call of Spirit to shamanism and to tantra, I knew that there was important work for me to do, that I had a unique contribution to make. In every pursuit in my life, I began to ask the question: "is this it? Is this the thing that will bring me joy?"

It took a lot of courage and hard work, motivated by pain and dissatisfaction, to find my way to joy. My life had to get really uncomfortable for me to make the changes that led me to where I am now. I committed to meditation because I was having intense full body panic attacks that kept me from normal functioning in life. I committed to bellydance to fill the emptiness I felt after my first divorce. I committed to yoga because it helped with my anxiety and morning sickness when I was pregnant. I am committing to a primary relationship with Spirit because I am tired of creating unsatisfying relationships with men. So you see, my commitment to joy is partially an aversion to pain.

I don’t like feeling sad. In fact, I would almost do anything to not feel sadness and fear and anger. But feeling these emotions and letting them pass through my body and down into the earth is part of my practice, because I am human. Because I am human I want to feel everything. I want to live. I want, as Osho says, to "have a little salt" in me. I don’t want to be a garden variety mystic or tantra teacher. I want to be fully expressed. To know what that full expression is for me, I have to FEEL. Because if I want to feel joy, I have to be willing to feel pain.

So that is the catch, that I can’t feel happy unless I also feel sad sometimes. I have learned through long practice that shutting down the negative emotions because I don’t want to feel them also shuts down the positive emotions. And I have to believe that my creator made me this way for a reason, that She wants me to feel, to open, to be vulnerable. I also know that over time, my creator has healed me of most of my FEAR and SADNESS. My commitment to joy is rewarded by walking the path, by doing the daily practice of living a shamanically tantric life.

Every day I meditate, even if I don’t want to. Today I really didn’t want to. I was sad when I woke up, and grieving several losses in my life. I wanted to stay in bed and pull the covers over my head. But I got up. I dragged myself down to the garden to meditate. I felt a little better after watching the phoebe catch his morning bug breakfast, and seeing the brightness of the flowers in my garden. I went back inside and heard Spirit telling me to also take some time for movement today. I didn’t want to do it, and procrastinated by doing household chores. But eventually I pulled myself to the living room and practiced dancing meditation, and after that, I felt even better. Now it is afternoon, and I am feeling happier, and the fog of sadness is lifting. Today I have kept my commitment to joy, and the feeling of lightness in my heart is its own reward.