Make Your Own Joy

Instead of buying it.

You have to take responsibility for manufacturing your own joy. If you try and outsource this skill, you run the risk of getting lost in the maze of depreciating choices.

I used to buy all my joy from the world outside. Money, Fame, Love, Relationships, Status. I had them all. In fact, I still have them. But I found the more I got them the more I wanted more. It was frankly getting to be an expensive affair.

So I tried a different experiment. To try and make my own jam of joy. One that needed no shopping. Here is my recipe…come, have a spoon.

The Recipe:

Break open your Heart.
Cut the Ego into thin slices.
Boil in your Darkness.
Add a cup of fresh Values.
Stir your Silence.
Pour into a clean jar of Gratitude.
Share it Every day of your life.

The first step (Break open your Heart) requires a venomous strike of despair to shock you. I don’t wish you one but it’s a necessary step for the mind to stop its default mode ruminations and experience a deep loss of something dear. You must not fear this. But you must have the courage to bear it.

The second step (Cut the Ego into thin slices) requires an ego desecration. Listen to Sam Harris and understand this fundamental truth about who we are not and see that your ego is an illusion and just another thought.

The third step (Boil in your Darkness) requires a good boil in your own confusion and darkness of discovery as you try to make sense of who you are now that you know you are not your ego.

Listen to Jordan Peterson talking about the need to embrace your own existential despair first before rising from the ashes with a seed of your higher self. This will take you down a lot of rabbit holes of your past belief systems where you will meet the things you have avoided thinking about for so long. You have to go into this valley and grow through it. It is another necessity, if, you seek your own jar of joy.

If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?- Rumi

Then, in the fourth step (Add a cup of fresh Values), you have to start to write down the new values by which you wish to see in the world around you. You have to want them like you want air when you are drowning. These values will slowly rise from your depths and start to swim around you as you seek a more authentic life. Make a long list and then prune and then try and use them like a mantra in your daily life. So for example, if you want a life of adventure then go seek them and act them in your daily life. No big deals are needed here. Just small acts of adventure that will echo back and compound.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion. Bewilderment brings intuitive knowledge.- Rumi.

In the fifth step (Stir your Silence) you have to make meditation a daily practice. A time when you watch your mind from a distance. It’s the secret sauce of finding your own joy factory inside. Sam Harris and his Waking up app has been a lifesaver for me and taught me so much about how little I knew my mind.

The closer you are to the truth, the more silent you become inside.-Naval Ravikant

In the sixth step(Pour into a clean jar of Gratitude) you make Gratitude a habit. Every time you feel less or feel a lack in your life, instantly replace that thought with an utterance of gratitude. Our lives are jam-packed with goodness. We just have to see them as that. I just watched a woman suffering from Covid-19 speak to the camera before dying and she said the only wish she had was to be able to breathe again…

Gratitude is the gift we give ourselves of never taking anything for granted.

In the final step (Share it Every day of your life), you share yourself with those you love. You renounce all Getting and replace that with Giving. You start to live daily in service of your new self-ideal.

“Point in the distance and live in the day.”- Jordan Peterson.

Coda

You have now made your own jar of Joy.

It’s full of your fears and suffering and pain that has been fermented by the strength of your courage and compassion. It’s a version of you that now lives in freedom from the inside and has no need for shopping for it on the outside. Now nothing can stop you from spreading this and healing those who are hurt.

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This post was previously published on Medium.com.

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