---
ai_generation_date: '2026-08-26'
ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview
audiodharma:
  talks:
    - date: '2021-03-08'
      mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/13116/20210308-Kim_Allen-IMC-a_bouquet_of_joy.mp3
      speakers:
        - speaker_name: Kim Allen
          speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/4
      talk_start_time_seconds: 0
      title: A Bouquet of Joy
      url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/13116
      video_unavailable: false
location_city: Redwood City, CA
video_unavailable: false
youtube:
  id: nmAA5w3M5Jg
  imprecise_upload_date: '2021-05-04'
  title: 'Dharma Talk: A Bouquet of Joys'
  upload_date: null
  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
  uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmAA5w3M5Jg
---

# A Bouquet of Joy - [Kim Allen](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/4)

_This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers._

## [A Bouquet of Joy](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/13116)

Good evening. Tonight's topic is joy.

You might first consider what you feel when you hear that word. For some people, joy is almost the aim of the path; there's a sense of maybe seeking bliss or something like that. For other people, there might even be a slight negative connotation: "Joy, really? I don't know, it feels a little bit fluffy, maybe denial. There are so many problems in the world; surely joy is a little bit surface-level, lightweight, or something like that."

Whatever your response is to that idea, I encourage you to consider for tonight the possibility that joy has some significant depth to it. It's not lightweight, actually, and neither is it solely concerned with bliss and ease. It has some substance. It's not an escape from meeting suffering. I'm going to talk a bit about how it plays an essential role on the path to liberation. We need joy, actually; it's important on our path.

Joy is a very beautiful quality of heart. It points toward abundance in an essential way. So we're going to talk about several different kinds of joy tonight. I'm going to offer kind of an abundance or a bouquet of different experiences of joy that come on the path. Just as an overview: there's appreciative joy or empathetic joy that we can feel for the success of others. There's meditative joy that comes when the mind becomes stiller and more free of the hindrances. And there can be joy in the path, in the practice, in the Dharma itself. There are even other kinds of joy than that, perhaps, but that's what we'll try to cover tonight as a kind of a bouquet of different types.

## Appreciative Joy (_Muditā_)

Let's start with this experience of joy at the success or happiness of others. This is a kind of joy that's also called _muditā_[^1]. It's one of the four _brahmavihāras_[^2] or heart qualities that we cultivate on the path. The others you might be more familiar with: _mettā_[^3] (loving-kindness), _karuṇā_[^4] (compassion), and _upekkhā_[^5] (equanimity). Those three, along with _muditā_ (appreciative joy), are the four _brahmavihāras_ or divine abodes.

These are relational qualities, and they acknowledge that we live in a world that does include happiness. We see people getting what they like, we see them succeeding, we see them achieving goals and gaining praise. And one quality of having a mature heart is the ability to celebrate the joy of others in a simple, happy, natural way. The Dalai Lama said, "If I am happy when good things happen to other people, billions more chances to be happy." So really, this is a wonderful thing. All the time in the world, there's actually a lot of good things going on. There are acts of generosity and kindness being done at every moment somewhere in the world, and we can tap into that.

Now, if this is sounding a little bit difficult, often one way that we can touch into appreciative joy immediately is through animals, like a dog. Dogs are excited about so many things, and you can catch the excitement of the dog. Or watching a kitten playing with a leaf in the wind that it's gotten attracted to. We don't want to project too many things onto animals, but I think it's pretty easy to tell when there's a sense of joy or excitement in an animal, and we can catch that feeling. [Laughter] I read a study, by the way, that cute cat videos have been shown to reduce stress, so there you go.

One good thing as we're connecting with joy in this simple way is to start to feel what joy feels like in our body. What is it like to have that sense of uplift, and just simple uplift at someone else's joy? Start to feel where that is in the body, how the energy moves, so that we can be familiar with it and so we can experience it more often. It has a feeling in the mind, too: a lightness, an openness, a warmth in a certain way. We can get familiar with that, and then we can cultivate it for people also.

One way that we do this is to say phrases. The common phrase for _muditā_ is, "May your happiness and good fortune continue." So we wish well for the success and happiness of others. When we do that, we can also feel the joy in our body, and maybe imagine an image of the person being happy or joyful, and allow that feeling to mature in us—to cook in us, if you will.

Another form of joy practice is to evoke somehow that feeling of _muditā_ through an image or a phrase, and then drop the object that we were thinking of and actually just radiate that feeling from our heart. Concentrate it into the heart center and just feel it like a light shining from inside. It's a wonderful way to cultivate _muditā_.

It's natural, of course, that as we try to cultivate appreciative or empathetic joy, we will run into what gets in the way of that. This is normal; it doesn't mean the practice isn't working. The "far enemy"—the thing that really opposes our ability to feel _muditā_—is envy. Somebody else gets some success or gains something, and we think, "Well, why did they get that? They didn't deserve that." Or we think, "I should have gotten that. How come I didn't get that instead?" So there's a turning toward the self, or some envy. It's helpful just to notice that this blocks our appreciative joy.

One thing that fuels envy, and the reason that we might have such feelings, is there can be an idea that in order to be happy, we have to get something. So seeing somebody else get something, we feel like we didn't get something. But if we can learn to feel this joy for others receiving, we feel a great amount of relief. We can realize, "Oh, actually I can be happy without getting something." There is a kind of happiness that doesn't come from that, and so this is actually quite a wonderful discovery for us. Like the Dalai Lama says, it greatly increases our chances of happiness in the world.

We don't, of course, have to feel joy at somebody else's joy. It may be that they're feeling joy about something that's a little bit unwholesome, or that we suspect is not going to be good for them in the long run. So it's not like you have to experience joy if someone else is feeling joyful. If we see that it's not leading in a good direction, compassion would be a better response. Just so you're aware of that.

There is also what's called a "near enemy" of _muditā_, of appreciative joy, and that is giddiness. It's not a word we use very often, but you can get the sense of it. It's like a sort of over-the-top excitement about something, getting caught up in somebody else's pleasure and joy such that we lose our own balance. We fall into it, and we're no longer aware, present, and centered in our own heart. You can feel when that's happening; we've probably all experienced that tumbling feeling of giddiness. Just be aware that's not really _muditā_.

Overall, _muditā_ is a great way to reduce our self-focus, like all the _brahmavihāras_ are. We undermine this subtle belief we sometimes have that we need to be receiving, and getting, and being praised and bolstered all the time in order to feel happy. We don't, actually. There are many other forms of happiness available, and it's an expansive feeling of heart to be able to tap into _muditā_. So it's much recommended as a cultivation.

## Meditative Joy (_Pīti_)

In addition, there's a whole other flavor of joy that comes from meditation, and this is something that the mind starts to feel when it has less of the hindrances and is less caught up in sense pleasures and our usual pursuits. This comes again through sitting practice. It's called _pīti_[^6] (p-i-t-i), and I'll get to it in a moment.

Often when people start sitting, there's not a lot of joy in the sitting, and that can be because we're busy dealing with body pain, or we've somehow taken on sitting as an obligation or a chore, and we're just trying to be with the breath or bring the mind back all the time. It's a sort of work. Where's the joy? Where's the joy in that?

But there is an accessible way into meditative joy. We practiced it during the meditation, which is that even being mindful has a slight amount of pleasure to it. It's not our usual kind of sense pleasure, like eating chocolate or something, but being present, as opposed to being lost or caught up in something, is actually slightly pleasant. It's a very subtle kind of joy, being there, being present, and we can tap into that.

Even when what we're mindful of is something unpleasant or a little painful, the fact that we're present for it, we can start to appreciate that that's better than being lost. And so that's an easy, accessible way to start. Every time you get lost—which we do all the time in meditation—when the mind comes back, we wake up. "Oh right, meditation, mindful." We notice at that moment, "Ah, it feels better." There's a clarity that isn't there when we were lost. And that clarity is slightly pleasant, then we tune into that. The mind wants to be present a little bit more often. So that's our first little taste of meditative joy, actually, just being present.

It's also just fine, as we did in the sitting, to notice as we start to feel some degree of ease, or peace, or softening in the body, a slowing down of the mind—anything that's some direction toward well-being. It's totally fine to notice that and appreciate it. We don't need to grab onto it, try to make it bigger, and try to hold onto it. That will only cause more difficulty. But you can appreciate those good feelings that start to come in meditation and just let them be nourished by our attention to them. Let them be naturally present. That's also a nice way to slowly cultivate meditative joy.

Eventually, at some point, we will start to feel some genuine sense of well-being emerging from meditation. We know that it's coming because we're sitting there with some seclusion of the body, some seclusion of the mind. We start to feel an internal sense of well-being, and it's often felt most strongly in the body. We may even feel some kinds of _pīti_, meditative joy, feel almost like tingling or energy in the body. Sometimes the hair stands on end. It's kind of delightful, these little feelings that we have, and then it can also settle a little bit more and be more pervasive. This is a wonderful development when it starts to come in meditation. Maybe you'll have it once and then not for a while; it's not like it comes and then stays forever. But just start to notice when these feelings come.

One way that we can know that what we're having is meditative joy is that full, balanced _pīti_ leads to tranquility. Now, this is not our usual mode with joy, right? It's not your usual kind of excitement, which tends to agitate the mind. Meditative joy is pleasant in and of itself, and it leads to tranquility. It's almost like there's a little core of tranquility with this joy wrapped around it, and we touch the joy first. As we settle into it and deepen into it, we then touch the tranquility that's at its heart.

You might reflect for a moment: do you know anything of this kind of joy, even a little bit? A sense of settledness and well-being that can come through the meditation? Mostly, meditative joy comes as the mind softens and becomes more continuously mindful. We don't have to try to cultivate it. In fact, that's sometimes counterproductive. It emerges from a mind that is soft and more or less continually mindful.

Here's a nice simile from the _suttas_[^7] that I wanted to read about this:

"Just like a lake with spring water welling up from within, having no inflow from the east, west, north, or south, and with the skies not supplying rain, so that the cool fountain of water welling up from the lake would permeate and pervade, suffuse, and fill it with cool waters, there being no part of the lake unpervaded by the cool waters. Even so, the meditator permeates this very body with the rapture and pleasure born of concentration."

So there's a sense of a lake with a well within it that is bringing something up. It's coming from meditation itself. What is the value of this joy? There are a number of benefits, of course, but the main one is this deep sense of well-being that starts to train the mind that something besides sense pleasures, and thinking, and our usual ways of trying to get pleasure—there's something deeper than that that's actually more satisfying.

This is from the _Dhammapada_[^8]: "Tasting the flavor of solitude and peace, one becomes free of distress and evil, drinking the flavor of Dharma joy." It starts out talking about concentration, the settling of mind that leads to this joy, the solitude and peace. But then this last line, "drinking the flavor of Dharma joy"—that's going to lead us into the next section.

## Joy in the Practice (Dharma Joy)

I want to turn now to the kind of joy that can come from the practice itself, of joy in the practice and the path in the Dharma. There isn't just one word for this, like _muditā_ or _pīti_. It comes from a whole bunch of different places. Now we really get to expand our bouquet of different kinds of joy. I'll go through some ways that the practice itself generates joy. I love this third kind of joy that we're talking about.

One way that it can come is through ethical conduct. This isn't anything complicated, heavy, or rigid. It's that when we've generally behaved well—we've said and done things that were wholesome enough—we get to the end of the day and we feel good about how that went. There's a sort of a sense of joy. It's actually called the bliss of blamelessness. We don't need to absolutize that; "blamelessness" sounds a little bit too idealistic to me. But essentially, we can get to the end of the day and feel like it went okay. That's actually a very precious feeling. It nourishes us to realize that we've generally said and done and even thought things that were good throughout the day.

It also comes from having confidence or faith, if you will, in the path. When we have a moment where we realize that we're confident that what we're doing is the right thing. I have times when I realize I'm just grateful that I have a path. I'm grateful that I have some way of managing the things that come up during the day, in my mind and my body. I have a path, and when I reflect on that, I feel a certain kind of joy just emerges naturally, kind of a delight. "Oh yeah, good. There's support. There's a way to deal with life."

Interestingly, joy can also come from renunciation. Now, renunciation is not usually our favorite word, but it really just means letting go. In this case, it could mean we don't have so much conventional focus on stuff, wealth, prestige, and identity. We're not so wrapped up in those usual kinds of pursuits that the advertisements and marketers tell us will make us happy. When we realize, "Not really, that's not really the path to happiness," we can start to feel a subtle kind of joy just in the simplicity of living a more balanced way. The mind gets clearer.

The Buddha describes a certain kind of joy that arises from the wisdom of renunciation, seeing things as they are. He says, "When by knowing the impermanence, change, fading away, and cessation of forms"—it could be any of the five sense objects, but material things—"and one sees as it actually is with proper wisdom that forms are all impermanent and subject to change, joy arises. Such joy as this is called the joy based on renunciation."

That's interesting. It's a little subtle, but it means that if I'm using this cup, it's a nice cup, it holds water, but I know at the same time that I'm looking at it that it's subject to breakage. It will not be a permanent source of happiness for me. I like it right now, but it wouldn't be wise to place all of my happiness in this cup. There's a certain subtle joy that comes from knowing that. Maybe a cup is a somewhat trivial example, but we can think about how the path and the practice allow us to not take the bait of things in the world quite so easily. Of course, we still do sometimes, but there can be a certain joy in having that strength, knowing, "Okay, I know that all things change, they're going to pass. I shouldn't rely on this completely." If you do feel that, if you have some sense of that in some areas of your life, take joy in that. Not everyone knows that. It's a kind of wisdom and a kind of joy.

## Joy in a World with Pain

We should get also to a question that people sometimes ask at this point, which is: how can we be joyful in a world with pain? In the face of pain, why be joyful?

First off, let me ask: why not? Seriously, why not?

I do encounter people who think it's some kind of a betrayal to be happy, joyful, peaceful, or light when there is so much suffering in the world or in a difficult situation. Why wouldn't you just fall into that and get agitated and worried like everybody else to show that you care? But I would ask a little question: betrayal of what?

The Buddhist teachings point us toward a happiness that is unconditioned. What does that mean? That's a word we don't use very often either, but it means a kind of happiness that is not subject to the conditions of the world. It's not dependent on things being a certain way—where you can be happy if they're this way, or that way, or this other way. It doesn't mean that at every moment we're skipping down the aisles and laughing; that wouldn't be appropriate in every situation. But there's a way in which we have a certain happiness of heart that can be present with anything, in various ways appropriate to that situation.

We can look for that in our heart. We can look for ways that we can find joy. At the very least, we have the joy of presence. If we're present for suffering, yes, we may feel compassion for the suffering, concern, wishing to help. And in that deep presence or that wisdom of being there for something, there is actually a little bit of joy. There's still that joy of presence. Subtle, but it's there.

Jack Kornfield says it this way: "In joy, we are not afraid of pleasure. We do not mistakenly believe it is disloyal to the suffering of the world to honor the happiness we have been given." So if we have some happiness in our life, we're not being disloyal to appreciate and enjoy that.

Or this from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a wonderful minister from South Africa: "It helps no one if you sacrifice your joy because others are suffering. We people who care must be filled with joy, so that others recognize that caring, helping, and being generous are not a burden. They are a joy." How about that? We people who care must be filled with joy so that others recognize caring is a joy. It's so valuable to see radiant, joyful helpers of the world. It is so inspiring and necessary, uplifting. They offer some hope, some vision, even in the face of suffering.

My friend spent some time in South Africa, and she was fortunate enough to be working at an art museum where Archbishop Tutu came for some event that was being held there. She managed to be standing just about six feet away from him, and she said he lit up the room. He was made of pure joy.

There's just something so valuable in this quality, and so many ways that we can touch into it in our practice. There's _muditā_, the appreciative joy for others. There's the meditative joy that can come from settling the mind. There's the joy in the path, the practice, the Dharma itself that can fuel us through times in our practice that are difficult, or through meeting the world and its difficulties.

## Conclusion

In the end, joy is one of the factors of awakening. There are seven factors of awakening; one of them, right in the middle, is joy. It is a necessary component for awakening. So that we have a mind with some degree of lightness, some happiness that is coming from the heart, from the path itself. When the mind is in a state like that, as well as possessing a number of other wholesome factors, that's when it can awaken.

I encourage you to touch into this very beautiful quality that's accessible in a number of ways: through seeing other people, through the presence of mindfulness, through reflection, through the settling of the mind, and through wisdom, through ethics. Almost everything can be a door to joy if we are looking for it and are open to that.

To whatever degree you're able to touch into that, whether it's just a little bit or whether you feel the opening of the heart happens to be tonight, I encourage you to really appreciate that and let it fill your being so that we can help others with that.

May your practice, and your path, and your heart be joyful. Well.

---

[^1]: **_Muditā_:** A Pali word meaning sympathetic or unselfish joy, or joy in the good fortune of others.

[^2]: **_Brahmavihāras_:** The four "divine abodes" or sublime attitudes in Buddhism, consisting of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

[^3]: **_Mettā_:** A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, or goodwill.

[^4]: **_Karuṇā_:** A Pali word meaning compassion.

[^5]: **_Upekkhā_:** A Pali word meaning equanimity or balanced awareness.

[^6]: **_Pīti_:** A Pali word for a mental factor described as rapture, joy, or delight, often arising during meditation.

[^7]: **_Suttas_:** The scriptures or discourses of the Buddha.

[^8]: **_Dhammapada_:** A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best known Buddhist scriptures.