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Happy Hour: Joy and contentment as support in challenging times

Welcome to Happy Hour, everyone, wherever you are in the world and whatever conditions are arising for you right now. For today's practice together, I would like to speak about and also do a guided meditation on joy and delight.

These are challenging times. We are all affected in different ways, and our hearts may be breaking seeing the suffering of people that we care about around us, and people that we don't even know around us. People sick, dying, affected financially—people everywhere around, both near and far away in different countries and continents. No matter who they might be, we are all part of this human family.

Besides our own suffering and pain, our own worry and anxiety, we are affected the way the world is affected. We are not to turn away at all from the pain, the sorrow, and the challenge, and yet, we must not only give weight to the difficulty and heaviness. We also need to take time to honor joy, gladness, and delight in our lives and in the lives of others. We are not turning away from the challenge, but we are also taking opportunities to nourish ourselves and our hearts, and not feeling a shred of guilt about our own joy and happiness.

Why is it important? Why do I even dare to bring in this concept of joy, happiness, and contentment in the midst of all this? That is not to be callous, unfeeling, or self-centered. It is actually seeing joy, happiness, contentment, and delight—these wholesome qualities of the heart—as a way to support ourselves. We give ourselves gladness so that we can be more available, more present, and have more resilience to be with challenge and difficulty, so that we are not completely overwhelmed in sadness and depression.

By honoring and valuing what brings delight and gladness, it allows us to be more spacious, available, and stable. Let's just call it having more stability. Letting our minds have more stability so that we can contain more and be more present for the challenges. Our hearts will not be as overwhelmed because they have been rejuvenated and have had a refreshing drink from the fountain of gladness and joy. It is as if you were sitting under the cool shade of a tree on a hot day and having a cool drink for a moment, gaining your composure and feeling the delight and joy. It can make you more available to then head back out into the heat because you have had a bit of a respite. In the same way, welcoming joy when it is available, turning the mind to what is good and wholesome in the heart, can be incredibly supportive.

What brings us joy might be very simple. For example, just as you were introducing yourselves—people from the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Cruz, the East Coast, the middle of the country, from Canada—as I heard your beautiful voices all together in this human family, I felt joy tonight. It's not fancy, it's just a little joy. While here we are, I feel delight. Pāmojja^[1]. I feel that delight, or pīti^[2], joy. This bubbliness. I am glad, and that nourishes my heart in this moment as I sit here sheltered in place in my home in Mountain View, California. A sense of gladness, a sense of feeling connected to you beautiful human beings around the world gives me gladness.

Whatever it might be as I lead you, there will be various suggestions in this guided meditation for gladness. Again, I want to emphasize that this is not to be approached with a sense of self-absorption or guilt, but to really see it as what can be nourishing and serve as a resource for you, both in your own life as well as in the way that you support other human beings around you.

Poem: A Brief for the Defense

In the last moments of the sitting, I would like to share a poem with you and let that wash over you. The name of the poem is "A Brief for the Defense" and it's by Jack Gilbert.

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our gladness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness.

Uninvited Guests

Thank you all. I noticed that we have been visited by a Zoom bomber. Let's wish them well, that they feel a necessity to come and share challenging, difficult appetites. Let's wish them goodness and ease. Hurt people hurt people. There must be so much hurt in someone's heart that they feel they have to hurt others, so let's wish them well. May they be happy.

I'd love to ask you, actually, what's arising for you in this moment? Just one word maybe popping up before we go into groups briefly. Feel free to unmute yourself and speak.

Okay, not much is coming up, that's fine. It's all good. So let's get into small groups of three just for a few minutes and have some personal connection. That's one part of these practices that are quite lovely in terms of getting together and exchanging with people around the world who are doing this practice together with us. The prompt is: How are you? How are you doing right now? How was this practice for you, and what did it bring up? There's no right or wrong answer. The invitation is to support each other by offering your full attention and awareness with kindness as the other people are speaking.

Reflections and Q&A

Welcome back, everyone. The floor is open for any reflections, any questions, comments, or complaints. Please raise your hand either physically, or if you press the spacebar that's one way to also raise your hand and I'll call on you. I would love to hear from you your reflections and reactions.

Dündar: I loved your meditation, it was very calming and very soothing. So thank you for that. It was sort of different than other meditations that I do, but it was very pleasant. Thank you very much.

Nikki: Thank you very much for that. What we did was some grounding in the body. The idea of suction cups just came up for me, and it worked for me. Did it work for anybody else? I see some smiling faces. You can write in the chat window if it worked for you or it didn't, I would be curious. For me, it created the sense of all these tiny suction cups. I have this image of animals that walk on ceilings and walls that apparently have tiny suction cups all over their fingers and toes. Maybe they're geckos, they're green! So I have an image of all these suction cups being tiny, little, green, and cute. For me, it's like, "Oh, this is how I'm really connected and rooted." If that worked for you, please feel free to use it sometime. New things come up in the Dharma anyway! Okay, thank you. Sandra Jo, your hand is up.

Sandra Jo: I just wanted to say thank you so much. I felt a sense of joy, because it's been a difficult time for me, but I was able to find some stillness. Thank you.

Nikki: Thank you so much. And tell you what, actually I'm going to put a link to that poem in the chat window. Here we go. There are many poems on this page from Jack Gilbert, and "A Brief for the Defense" is the last one on the list.

Barry says in the chat, "Suction cups made me think of breathing in at the nostrils." Ah, interesting. Was that helpful for you then, Barry?

Barry: Yeah, that's the first thing that popped into my mind, the breath in my nose being sucked down and pulled out. I do like the poem. I'm glad you put the link because I wasn't present for all of it. I really like being able to connect on a small group level because I'm always curious to find out about other people's practices, and I love the opportunity to connect with people and find out where they are with the practice.

Nikki: Thanks for saying that. Thanks for participating in that. I find it very meaningful to have the one-on-one connection in this way. It's very unique. It's very different from having work Zoom meetings; this feels very different. This is facilitated, and really hearts connecting, so thanks for mentioning that.

Another thing I wanted to say, actually in connection to what Dündar said earlier about this meditation feeling very different from what he's used to: I wanted to say that besides the settling that we did at the beginning, the practice of muditā, vicarious joy, which is one of the four brahma-vihāras^[4], is not taught that much either. People teach mettā^[5] or compassion, maybe some equanimity, but muditā gets short shrift.

I think muditā is so important at this time to support ourselves with all the brahma-vihāras. Yes, there is mettā, of course. There's plenty of compassion because there's plenty of suffering in the world right now, and equanimity, we need that in order to not get completely out of whack. Let's bring some more attention to muditā, vicarious joy, happiness for other people's happiness, or just the sense of delight. When muditā is turned towards ourselves, it becomes gratitude, which is happiness for our own happiness.

So it is 7:00, and I'm going to formally end the session. Thank you all for coming tonight and practicing together, for both yourself and to support all beings everywhere through your practice. May all beings be well, may all beings be free.

After closing formally, I'm going to stay on for ten minutes until 7:10 if anyone has any burning questions, the same way I would wait in the hall for an extra ten minutes. Thank you, and whoever wants to log off, see you maybe tomorrow. Bye.