DOING FROM ENJOYMENT
Your natural state of joy
Fundamentally we all want to feel and be in a state of joy. Joy is, after all, our natural state of being. Yet there seems to be so many things that distract us from, or seemingly pull us out of joy. While we desire it, it feels hard as hell to maintain joy as a constant state from where we live all of the time. There are oh so many things that feel non-joyful to us. At some point we must ask the question as to why we tolerate not living in joy. We have rules, stories and beliefs which say that we can’t always be joyful. We create definitions and make life experiences mean certain things, which say that joy cannot be felt here. We think that things have to feel, be, or turn out a certain way in order for us to feel joy. Rather than challenge our definitions, meanings and stories, we find ourselves disengaged from feeling our natural state of joy and begin the waiting process for something outside of us to change so that we feel joy again.
What if you played a little experiment with yourself where you only allowed yourself to be in a state of joy? How long do you think you could authentically sustain it? 10 minutes, 5 hours, a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade? Many people might be able to get into the week range, but it’s almost guaranteed that something will arise inside of your experience, which you don’t like or prefer, that will take you out of your natural state of being joyful and feeling free. You will look out at something that is occurring, make a judgment, meaning or assessment of it as wrong, bad, not right, not perfect, unjust, a problem, and the like, and you will find yourself in resistance to what is. Inside of that resistance you will likely feel not at ease, not in joy, and not in flow. You will also probably not understand or see that you are creating a state of being inside of yourself that is not your preference. You will think that it is this or that thing, this issue or that issue, which is not working right and is causing your distress and lack of feeling joy. It will not dawn on you that it is you who is creating the experience for yourself of not being joyful.
Why is it so hard for us to see that we are creating our experience? I get that it really does seem that our life experiences determine how we feel. We fall down and hurt our hip, our body isn’t working how we would prefer, the business we want to create isn’t taking off how we hoped, our partner doesn’t respond to us how we want them to, and on and on. Yes there is impact on us in all of these things, but only the impact that we decide that they have on us. If we decide that any of these experiences mean something bad or negative then that is how we will experience them. I get that is a far stretch to look at some things that happen and see that they are somehow working out for us, but looking at them in this way is the solution to every problem we perceive. This is not spiritual bypassing, rather it is using the transformative aspect of your own consciousness to alchemize your perceptions of whatever it is that you see. Without utilizing our consciousness in this way will simply resign and wait for something to change so that we can feel a little bit better for a few moments until something happens again that we don’t like or prefer.
PRIORITIZING YOUR NATURAL STATE
Challenging your definitions & meanings
This brings me to doing only from and because of enjoyment. How often do you do things just get them done and/or because you expect a certain outcome from doing it? What if doing things just because you enjoy the doing was the only way or reason you could do things? To come purely from joy rather than an intention or expectation to make something else happen through your doing, is likely a foreign concept and experience for most. We are generally geared towards getting through things to get them done and then having some specific results occur through our doing. This near constant coming from agenda creates quite a taxing on our system whether we are aware of it our not. It is the taxing quality of not being our natural selves. We feel heavier, more constricted and tenser than we would like. We don’t really see any way around it. After all certain things just have to be done.
There is no denying that certain things do need to be done for our survival and to have our needs met, but there is no qualification put on any of those things that you have to do them from state of misery. Yet this is how we approach many things. There is a hurrying through or a dread of doing certain things that must be done and which we don’t perceive that we want to do. While the thing that needs to be done may not be optional, the hurry and dread is. The dread often comes from conscious or unconscious expectations. There are so many expectations that we have for ourselves and that we feel placed on ourselves from others. Those expectations are the death of our joy. Our obsession with things being a certain way, living up to our expectation, and our prioritization of the outcome over the experience, make for a pretty miserable experience.
Again I ask the question can we really come from joy all of the time? Can we really just be in our natural state of being from the time we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep at night? The answer is yes as long as we prioritize our state of being joy while engaged in the activities of life, over our expectations of our experience. While this is a tall order, it is also how we bring heaven to earth and how we create the world experience that we want for ourselves and others. This doesn’t come without work. There is a lot of self-awareness and inner discipline required to harness your power in the direction of being joy no matter what. This doesn’t mean that you don’t ever cry, feel sad, or have any of the other range of emotions that are available to you. It just means that you realize that everything you are experiencing is part of your expression of joy. You can simultaneously be crying and also be in the knowing that everything is working out perfectly. Coming from joy doesn’t negate the waves of emotion that your emotional body feels. It is more about where your inner orientation is pointing and seeing from, all while having the full human experience of sensations, feelings and emotions.
If it excites you to come from your natural state of joy more and more, first simply realize that it is possible to feel more joy. Also accept that you deserve to feel joy as that is your natural state. Being more miserable doesn’t mean you are learning more or that you are gaining points somewhere because you’ve been able to feel more pain. It doesn’t work that way. You are joy whether or not you feel it regularly. When you are not coming from joy in your doing, challenge yourself and investigate what you are believing about your experience in that moment. Unearth your resistances to what is. Through doing this you will find connection to yourself and unwind the definitions and meanings about your experience that don’t actually serve you in being your natural state of joy.
Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor & Heart Awakening Facilitator, Boulder, Colorado
Leave a Reply