Awakening Joy: 10 Steps That Will Put You on the Road to Real Happiness

Engage one of your senses to return you to the moment. What do you see, hear, smell, or feel? You might listen to a favorite piece of uplifting music or take a relaxing hot bath. Let yourself sink into that experience. Imagine the frightened, sad, or confused part of you as a young child. How old is that child? Imagine holding him or her in a tende

Because I wasn’t pushing away or denying those images and feelings, I found that my guilt and shame and sadness were diminishing. In their place a tender understanding of my ignorance was arising. I could see how confused I had been to think that any of my deceptions or betrayals or denials could bring me happiness.

In the early 1970s, a remarkable little book came out—The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas. One of the many points that rang true for me was Golas’s idea of “expansion and contraction” in describing various states of mind. He said: “We experience expansion as awareness, comprehension, understanding.” In contrast, “contraction is

A great twentieth-century sage known as The Mother, who with Sri Aurobindo founded the international spiritual community of Auroville in southern India, talked about how our greatest difficulties can in fact reflect our greatest possibilities. She said: “You carry in yourself all the obstacles necessary to make your realization perfect. If you disc

It’s one thing to not beat yourself up; it’s quite another to truly delight in who you are, and I still had a ways to go. The door to self-love had opened a crack, and eventually I would find the way to throw it open wide.

Sylvia Boorstein says this is like a slight shaft of sunlight peeking through the clouds in the midst of pelting rain. That sliver of light can give us the perspective to know all is not gloom and doom.

In written Chinese the characters for “busy” are “heart” plus “killing.”

The stories that limit you or free you are really all in your mind, and you can change them. I often give students a “prescription” to help in the process. Sometimes I write it down on a piece of paper and suggest they carry it in their wallet. “Whenever you find yourself getting reactive, withdrawn, or confused,” I tell them, “remember that you ha

This difference between expansion and contraction is directly linked to the Buddha’s distinction between wholesome and unwholesome thoughts and actions.

When you let go of thinking that things should be a certain way, you open yourself up to the fact that there are usually a number of options that you hadn’t considered.