Joy

Two weeks ago was the holiday retreat at Deer Park.  I left on a cloud.  I left floating in wonder and gratitude and bliss and delight.  Today, as I write this, I have joy.  Yesterday I had joy.  Last week I had great joy.  For as much as I blog about sadness, struggle, pain, and suffering, it feels good to write about joy.  It feels even better to experience it, to delight in it, to let it flow out of me and onto others.  I’ve been thinking about why the real struggle of my life – although most of what I write has to do with pain and discomfort – seems to be a struggle to accept happiness, serenity, peace, and joy.  There are so many reasons.  Some of them have a lot to do with how I grew up, but I don’t want to talk about childhood experiences here, not today.  I want to talk about the impermanence of joy.  Its emptiness (which is Buddhist for impermanence, not meaninglessness).  I want to talk about how I believe part of my struggle to experience joy lies precisely in my inability to let it go.  My inability to experience it as empty.  My compulsion to grab hold of it.  Grasping.  For so long, when joy arose, I clung to it like a desperately hungry person would cling to a piece of food.  I tried to devour it, to own it, to make sure it would not go away.  And then, when it would invariably go away, I would become depressed – sometimes even guilt-ridden.  I was suffering the painful delusion that if I lived, thought, behaved, studied or practiced “rightly” that the joy would not fade.  That I would experience unending delight.  I would pause for a moment and ask you not to bring up semantic debates about the meaning of joy as opposed to or distinct from happiness or elation or some other term.  I mean “joy” simply in a conventional sense.  Something that is like happiness, elation, rapture, delight, gratitude, love... I am not trying to have a metaphysical conversation.  I am simply trying to express what we have all (hopefully) known at various times in our life.  That non-manic delight that seems to permeate out of the deep parts of ourselves, and seems to find its end and beginning simply in our very experience of being.  Of being alive.  Of being a person.  Of being a person-in-relation.  So joy comes.  And joy goes.  Joy as a feeling – an experience.  In Buddhist terms (five skandhas) we could locate it in the realm of feelings, which, like all of the aspects of personhood, are empty.  They change.  

So joy... I always used to experience joy as the ultimate goal.  When it came, I HAD to figure out how to keep it.  And by the very nature of my quest, I chased it away.  And then I berated myself for losing it.  I was, again, seeing it as some kind of spiritual reward.  But the practice of mindfulness does not have joy as its final aim.  It has as its aim the practice of being present with what is.  So that when "what is" is joy, we can be present with that.  When I left Deer Park last week after the holiday retreat, my heart was overflowing with love and joy and gratitude.  The people I met, the conversations I had, the energy, the practice, the tofu.  It was magic.  My heart was full.  More than full.  And then it started to wane.  And I got scared.  I didn’t want to “lose it.”  But then I noticed something else in me.  An excited compulsion, underneath which was fear, to go back to Deer Park as soon as possible.  I began to feel like my joy was contingent on the people that I met and connected with.  That if I didn’t stay close to them, my joy would not last.  Or perhaps it was the place itself.  And without the monastics, without the long term lay practioners, without the white Buddha statue or the Ocean of Peace meditation hall, I would not be okay.  I thought maybe I needed these things for my joy flower to flourish.  And when I noticed the addictive pull in me to go back to Deer Park very quickly – the fearful feeling that I might not be able to live and be happy without it – I took many deep breaths.  I had to find the place in me not contingent upon Deer Park or my new friends.  “Be a lamp unto thyself,” said the Buddha.  Of course I inter-am with all of the beautiful people I met and practiced with.  But the teaching is not to rely on places or people or a group of friends.  The teaching is to find the awareness and awakening in oneself - to share and nurture that in community, but to find it in myself.  So I began to let go of my addictive clinging to this joy.  I began to accept that joy too is impermanent.  That this too shall pass.  

There’s the basic attachment theory in parenting that the safer a child feels in her attachment (connection) to her parents, the more willing and able she is to venture away from them.  She knows that when she returns, they will still be there.  Or when they go away, they will come back.  The child learns this from repeated experiences.... crawling out of the room and then turning around to see the parent is still there.  Crawling a little farther, out of eye range, starting to fuss, and having the parent respond to her fussing.  Mommy or Daddy is there... I am safe.  I can explore.  I do not need to be afraid.  Children who grow up without a healthy sense of attachment may have certain difficulties later in life.  Perhaps they seek that sense of safety and stability in unhealthy places.  Perhaps they feel disconnected from themselves and not at ease in the world around them.  Perhaps they do not feel like they can find a safe place within.  I think that my experience with happiness was always like this.  If it went away, I was never sure that it would come back.  My experience said it would not.  Or, perhaps my experience said that when it was around, I could not trust it.  Perhaps I experienced happiness like an alcoholic parent – something you learn to take with a grain of salt, never really trusting, never really accepting its word at face value.  But trying to cling to and prolong every good moment you can... because it’s all you’ve got.

 

Interestingly enough, I had to learn that I could survive without happiness.  That I could survive without joy.  I had to learn that I could face what was left when the joy went away.  And the past two years of my life have been just that.  Learning to face the pain – the loneliness, the loss, the fear.  Learning to grieve, deeply, and like I never want to again, but almost certainly will.  Learning to say I can survive whatever comes – I can be present to it.  There were times when the suffering seemed pointless... where I wanted to run back to old addictions or habit energies – where I wanted to turn away from the pain inside myself to be somewhere else.  And there were times when I did.  There are still times when I do.  When I eat or watch tv or fantasize or keep busy just to get away from the unpleasantness inside myself.  But at the core of my past two years was the discovery that I can be okay.  That I can face the pain within.  That I can be home, inside myself – no matter how hard or scary it might be.  So this past week when I felt the joy slipping away from me, after my initial impulse to cling to it with some sort of unhealthy desperation, I was able to look at it and say, “if you must go, then go, I do not need you to be okay.”  And something broke open inside of me.  I do not need joy.  I do not need happiness.  And the joy and happiness that THAT realization has brought into my life is one of the most absurd and ironic parodoxes I have yet to experience on the spiritual path.  My willingness (and ability, nurtured through painful, shitty practice) to be present with, face and experience my pain was the opening into a world that does not have to cling to joy and happiness.  Just like someone experiences profound release and freedom when they stop “needing” a relationship or a partner in order to feel okay about themselves, in order to feel “enough,” I stopped needing some experience of happiness, joy or elation in order to feel like I was okay – like I was enough.  And, the paradoxes continue.  True peace for me seems to come from being okay that I’m not always okay.  Healing seems to come from holding and embracing the wounds in me that might never fully "heal." 

Happiness comes and goes.  Joy comes and goes.  I feel a bit like the Buddha in saying this – because once upon a time it was believed that the Atman – the Self – was eternal, that this self was not other than the supreme ultimate – the Brahman.  And the Buddha woke up and said, there is no “Self.”  This does not “exist” in the ultimate sense.  And I think of spiritual teachers who say that joy is the true nature of our being.  That when we touch our true being, we touch joy, which is not dependent upon our thoughts or external conditions.  It is not an emotion, it is simply what flows when we are in touch with being.  Of course... with this description, joy still becomes a “thing” - and idea of something.  And once it’s a “thing,” like Atman, like the idea of Self, we can grab it and say “this is mine!”  So I just want to say that joy comes and goes.  It is not eternal.  And I don’t need it.  When it needs to go, it can go.  I do not need to try to hold it hostage.  Nor do I need to be codependent with it, where I think I can control its behavior with my behavior.  I am going to continue my practice of being present to the moment – of enjoying my breathing and the people around me – of looking for ways to be mindful and compassionate and open-hearted.  Then, if I experience joy, I will be present to that.  If I experience hurt or grief or loss or pain, I will be present to that.  If I experience fear, I will be present to that.  And if joy needs to leave to go somewhere or to take care of someone else, it can go.

Yes, yes, yes, maybe joy is not really that impermanent thing I am talking about.  Maybe joy the metaphysical thing I’m feeling when I let go of “joy.”  I don’t know.  I’m not too sure that I care.  All I know is that today, I don’t need to be happy any more.  I only want to be jonathan.  Today, in this moment – impermanent, empty self jonathan... opening to the world around me, coming home to the island within myself.  No coming, no going.  No birth, no death.  No arriving.  And yet... here I am.

And I want to say this:  it’s worth it.  Everything I’ve been writing about for the past many months/years.  That pain in the ass, pain-laced process of learning to be with your suffering... to not run away from it.  To hold yourself in the midst of it.  To walk into it instead of away from or around it.  It is worth it.  You need to find the practices to help you be able to do it.  The practices and the community.  But it is worth it.  Every step.  Every breath.  Because as soon as I could say to happiness, “I don’t need you”... as soon as I could say “I can be happy without you...”  everything changed.  Something has broken open inside of me, and, to sound overwhelmingly cheesy, a flower has bloomed in my heart.  And I am home.