Today's
quotation:
Joy is what we are,
not what we must get. Joy is the
realization that all we want or need
in life has been
etched
into our souls. Joy helps us see not what we are
"going
through,"
but what we are "growing to"--a
greater
sense of understanding,
accomplishment,
and enlightenment. Joy reveals to us the calm at the end of the
storm, the peace
that surpasses the momentary
happiness
of pleasure. If we
keep our minds
centered on joy,
joy becomes a state of mind.
Iyanla Vanzant
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Today's
Meditation:
Joy
always has been one of the most difficult concepts for me
to comprehend. The way I see joy, it's a feeling of
complete happiness, peace, and celebration, and something
that seems to be out of reach for me. Seems to
be. I've learned as an adult that as an Adult Child
of an Alcoholic, one of the tendencies that I'll always
have is that of not trusting happiness and positive
feelings--there's something in my mind that tells me that
they won't last, so I'd better not let go and give myself
up to them. I believe that's why I find joy so hard
to conceive of--I've never let myself go to experience it
fully, so it remains elusive.
As
time goes on, though, I'm beginning to think that I'm
joyful much more than I think. When Iyanla says that
"joy is what we are," I start to think that I
determine each day my own level of joy, and that it's up
to me to decide just how joyful I'm going to be. I'm
also learning that joy isn't the ecstatic feeling that
comes as a result of those special moments when everything
seems to come together perfectly, but it's more the
feeling of peace that comes to me when I feel at one with
the world.
In
short, I've always seen joy as a sort of pinnacle of
happiness, a running-through-a-meadow-while-singing-at-the-top-of-
my-lungs feeling, while in
reality I may be expecting far too much from it. The
idea that joy can be a state of mind for me is somewhat
liberating, and I can go about looking for joy in many
more places and situations, knowing that it has as much to
do with what I bring to it as it does with what I find.
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