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Guided Meditation: Non-possessiveness and Joy

So welcome. Good to be with you. Let's settle in.

So, in any given moment, a million things will be right, and a million will be wrong. We afford ourselves the luxury of not needing to sort all of that out. Being supported by the million things that are right, and being softened by the million things that are wrong.

Although it feels maybe unsafe or irresponsible or something to momentarily put down the world, it's actually important for our heart. Rather than living in the realm of hope and fear, we put all of our hope into this moment and rest.

We don't always associate letting go with joy. Maybe we associate it with renunciation, or with how it can feel to unclench the closed fist of clinging. The movement from clenched to unclenched often has a flavor of grieving, and that's all real. But there's also this deep link between letting go and being reborn into a world of experience where so much joy is possible.

The heart that lets go is carefree and at ease, and totally not territorial. Letting go steps out of comparing mind, becomes so porous to the joy of others. We call it mudita^[1], sympathetic joy, joy in the face of the other's happiness, good fortune.

And so, as we sense into what needs to be put down, what can be surrendered, released, let go—such that I become more porous to the joy of others. The delight of others becomes utterly unthreatening. We put down our egoic clinging and are reborn into a world of experience where so much joy is possible. Anything might bring it.

So, calling to mind someone whose well-being, good fortune is totally unintimidating for you, something unthreatening, does not evoke comparison. Just bringing their face to mind.

Now, of course, there's dukkha^[2] in their life, it's a given. But there's much goodness, happiness, welfare. And so we attune to that. We make our heart porous and we just receive their joy.

Silently wishing in our own mind: May your happiness continue. May it increase.

I'm picturing their face. Their face in the wake of this joy, happiness, their good fortune. The particularities of their smile. I imagine what their inner life, what their body must feel like amidst their joy, success. I just let that into my body.

May your happiness continue. May it increase.

And we just abide, suspended in some delight.

When there is no self, there's just the world. The happiness of others is known precisely as our own.

In these last few minutes, the wish is that all the happiness in the world increase. May all beings revel. Happiness, may it increase.

And we even might extend it out beyond the beings born now to the future, maybe even the distant future. All the potential happiness contained in this moment. May all that goodness, all that richness, may that increase. May it be born and increased.

Sympathetic Joy

Thank you. Good to sit with you. The topic is mudita, sympathetic joy.

Sometimes when I think about joy, I think of kind of like those awkward family photos where the children are wearing these very forced, very artificial smiles that look basically like grimaces. It's like, "Be joyful!" Mudita, sympathetic joy, is a tricky one. It's a tricky one because joy is just this spontaneous upwelling. It's maybe a little trickier to incline the mind in a way that feels spontaneous and alive. And so I promise not to command you to be joyful.

A colleague, a friend of mine, Tuere Sala^[3], sometimes she's like the queen of mudita. Sometimes she just, I don't know, when she talks about it or guides something she just goes for it, and I wind up in a slightly dysregulated, ecstatic blur of delight. She's just sometimes relentless with it. So I wanted to share a little bit of what she said. This is from a retreat we did a year ago. It's a couple paragraphs from her. She says:

We've come to my favorite, favorite moment in all of Dhamma^[4]. I don't know when I opened this Pandora's box. It's not the way I grew up with this energy. I don't know anywhere in my life I would say, "Oh yeah, joy is what I would call life." I grew up in a very difficult childhood, spent the bulk of my life poor on welfare. Joy would not be the underlying feature of experience that I would point out. But somewhere in Dhamma I stumbled upon this mudita, and it's been a game changer for me.

So let me see if I can try to help you see where I'm pointing to. There's a great difference between mudita and the kind of worldly joy that we try to access regularly in our lives. I imagine that each one of us on this call, there's 56 of us, we all get two moments of joy in our lives this year. That's all you get, two opportunities of joy. And if you're like me, we've already used them up. So there's no joy for the rest of the year, you've already had it.

So the only way you can access a level of joy is it has to come from someone else. If I start telling you about some joy I have, because you're human, you'll feel it. If I begin to cry, you'll feel that. If I tell you about some sadness, some difficulty in my life, you'll feel that. And likewise, I realized that I could feel the joy of another person and there would never be a day or a moment in time when I would not feel joy. Never. It's not possible. There are billions of people on the earth, and at any given moment somebody somewhere is experiencing joy. All I have to do is to be willing to tap into that joy and feel it with them.

My granddaughter is four years old and she's learning about jokes and she just starts laughing. She'll say something like, "And then they said, 'go away!'" [Laughter] Laughing uproariously. And I'm laughing and that is not even funny, but I'm laughing because she's laughing so hard like she told some great joke. It's just another way of experiencing the human condition, that we're all interconnected.

So yeah, let us lean on each other's joy. Let us lean on each other's joy amidst pain. You know, it can sometimes feel like joy is a way of cheating on one's grief. It can feel like a certain kind of adultery, like cheating on one's grief. But one of the shifts in Dhamma practice is that our emotional life becomes more supple, and a moment of joy does not cancel out the grief. Our emotional life is more fluid and supple, and so a moment of grief can just be followed by peace, and then joy, and then maybe the heart circles back to whatever pain it might be connected to. But the joy is not cheating on the pain, it's okay. And we can depart from our homeostatic baseline into deep joy.

Sometimes it's easier to talk about removing the obstacles to joy rather than creating joy. I can't chide you, "Smile, be happy!" And so instead, the practice is really to examine: what obstructs mudita? What obstructs this delighting in the welfare of others? Possessiveness, comparing mind, envy, the machinations of ego.

The reflex of ego is really to incorporate all goodness into itself. It's like my ego tolerates no goodness outside itself; it must appropriate everything. That is a very fragile, dangerous way of living. To not tolerate goodness outside oneself, or to need for that goodness to affirm one's own egoic process, that's a fragile way of living. And so we're going to have to actually step, in some ways, out of self to truly enjoy other people's happiness, to truly enjoy it.

Now it just feels important to acknowledge that mudita is not a public policy. When I say we must relinquish envy or something like this, I am not talking about public policy. The disparities in health and wealth are not sustainable, and there are very understandable reasons for things like envy. I'm talking to the heart of a practitioner. We're going to have to step out of some of these egoic forces to truly delight in the welfare of others.

There's an essayist talking about the seven deadly sins—lust, gluttony, greed, laziness, wrath, pride, envy—and said of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all. And isn't that true? Envy is usually about two people, and jealousy about three. Wanting what someone has, versus wanting some relationship or connection in the case of jealousy.

And of course, these forces likely have real evolutionary benefit. They've been encoded into us. And still, it's important to remember that evolution doesn't care about enlightenment, even a little. We're here because we're the sufferers.

Here is an evolutionary psychologist:

Despite the manifold unhappiness jealousy creates, jealousy has a crystalline functional logic, precise purposes, and supreme sensibility. It exists today in modern humans because those in the evolutionary past who were indifferent to the sexual contact that their mates had with others lost the evolutionary contest to those who became jealous. As the descendants of successful ancestors, modern humans carry with them the passions that led to their forebears' success. The legacy of this success is a dangerous passion that creates unhappiness, but the unhappiness motivated adaptive action over evolutionary history.

To move against the forces of jealousy, of envy, is to move in some ways against the stream. The Dhamma is against the stream.

And these mechanisms of the mind, envy especially, really show us where we're identified. Envy highlights the insanity, really, of egoic life. Wherever we are identified, it impairs our love and our capacity to access joy, to receive the joy of another in an unthreatening, unintimidating way, in a way that does not diminish ourselves, that does not evoke the comparing mind.

This is Matthieu Ricard^[5]:

Envy is the product of a wound to self-importance and the fruit of an illusion. What can other people's happiness possibly deprive us of? Nothing, of course. Only the ego can be wounded by it and feel it as pain. These are the results of our having forgotten our innermost potential for affection and peace.

When we feel sufficient, when all the egoic melodramas of worthiness and unworthiness, of deserving or undeserving—when all of that fades, we can delight in the well-being of others.

When we're fluid in ourselves and we ask, "Am I that? No. Am I that? No." Then there's less and less to defend, and the delight of others is totally unthreatening. It just rushes into our heart, very natural, easeful, joyous.

So, I offer this for your consideration.