Happiness & Joy

Hi Everyone,

I hope you all are enjoying this beautiful weather. I certainly am! This past week I was working on a talk I am giving in a couple of weeks on Happiness & Joy so I decided to share a little bit with my classes. 

This is a lofty topic. It really is the end all be all of what we all work towards. How do we cultivate more joy in our lives? It helps to understand the two types of joy and how they help each other.

One type of joy we experience when something good happens and the other type is the underlying joy that we can hold all the time regardless of what is happening. The first type- the situational joy (Pamoja) can help train our minds to be better at the other type (Sukha) if we learn to hold it lightly. What does that mean? Well, it means that we understand the temporary nature of it and enjoy it in that moment without grasping. Gratitude is a powerful way to create a bridge between these two types of joy and that is what we practiced on the mat this week. 

When we think of how it works in our yoga practice it can help. Pamoja is when we find ourselves in a pose that we didn’t think was available. Sukha is the full experience of the practice regardless of what we “achieved” that day on the mat. It’s the gratitude for the practice that helps us bring our Sukha with us off the mat.