Discover What Sparks Joy!
Close your eyes and think about what made you feel full of joy and happiness as a child. When you felt light and free. What was it, and how does it make you feel?
Joy is one of the many things that makes life worth living. If you want to enjoy life, then it’s your personal responsibility to find out what uniquely evokes feelings of joy for you, and how you can cultivate more of it in your life.
Contemplate how much of your energy and time goes to things that spark genuine joy in your life. And then consider how much of your time and energy goes towards things that do not spark joy in your life. Perhaps they even induce dread, anxiety, unhappiness, a lack of meaning, or can feel like a dark cloud above your head or a deep pit in your stomach.
When you align your life with the things that naturally light you up, that fill your whole self with joy, you are living the life your soul naturally desires to live. Our sense of freedom is ultimately about how much we feel 100% ourselves and how effortless and easy it is to express who we truly are, in all aspects of our lives. And like most children, we feel most free when we are having fun, playing, and expressing joy. Your joy is your freedom, your purpose, your guiding light. Follow it! All good things will come.
During meditation I began connecting with the feelings of joy. The emotion came to me as a teacher. It encouraged me to explore the joy in life and follow it. To discover the things that truly and personally spark joy. In this process I developed a meditation exercise to connect with the feelings of joy.
Joy Exercise
So I began meditation and thought of every single thing that I appreciated and enjoyed in life. It was an exercise in intuitive feeling. I wrote a list of all the things that I thought I enjoyed, and then one-by-one ran down the list using a feeling exercise to record the sensations in my body. I would think of the thing that I thought brought me joy, and I allowed my body to feel it and respond accordingly. A feeling would rise in my body and it would tell me the answer if it indeed sparked joy.
For things that naturally sparked joy, I immediately felt energy rise somewhere between my heart chakra or chest and my third eye or head. A sound of “eeee” of excitement would release, my heart would burst, and light would rush to my head. Some of the things that sparked joy made me smile so big, as if I was going to burst with joy!
For things that sparked less joy, I felt energy somewhere between my root, sacral and solar plexus chakras, existing somewhere in my stomach.
If it was lacking in joy, it would feel like a vacuum, sucking the light down into a dark pit downwards. I felt a sense of darkness, and/or a draining of energy.
Oftentimes we think or believe that certain things bring us joy and happiness when in reality they don’t. So much of what we believe is tied up in our ego, our programming, our identities, and our societal roles. People create identities for themselves, and many of the things that we believe make us happy are really there to reinforce the concept of that identity. This intuitive exercise is meant to bypass the ego and concept of self, and to use feeling instead of thinking in order to determine what truly brings joy on a personal level.
You can try this experiment with anything. Your list can even extend to things that are outside of your known sphere. You can think of things that you’ve never tried before or have little contact with, but somehow you think of them anyways. You can use your intuition to create a list and be open to all sorts of possibilities. Perhaps you may even discover and consider a new pathway for joy in your self and life.
Things that spark joy can be seemingly big or small. They don’t necessarily have to be hobbies, they can also be everyday little details or common occurrances in nature. Meditate upon what lights up your soul. What sparks joy. What fills your body and being with so much happiness and smiles that you cannot deny? Trust in whatever naturally makes you feel light, alive, at peace, joyful, and free!