But then we push ourselves so hard or other people push us so hard, we lose the joy of it. So the very things we enjoy tend to be the things that get worked to death in our culture. So there’s an old movie trope about this, right? Everything from a racehorse to a tic-tac-toe player, you see the same things happening over and over again. A child shows a capacity or a talent or a focus on a given skill. They’re good at it. Then people start encouraging them to be good at it. Then they do it for competition, then they do it for money. And then they’ve pushed it to a level where they’re exhausted by it and they’re just working so hard at this thing that once brought them joy that it no longer brings them joy.

Very, very common movie trope. And it’s true of all of us in a thousand little ways. So when I was thinking about this, it took me back to a bleak night at the Lamont Library, the library in Harvard Yard that freshmen go to where I sat bleakly contemplating the meaning of my existence and finding none. I remember thinking, I was looking at the graffiti that generations of students had left carved into this wooden booth carrel that I was sitting in. And they were all like, “What is the meaning of life? I hate everything and I want to die.” And sorry if that’s a trigger, go back, trigger it, un-trigger it.

I’m going to edit this in the tape, but I just realized I’m live. Sorry if that triggered anyone. So I was sitting in Lamont Library and I was looking at all the bleakness that many generations of freshmen had left there. And I thought, really, truly, what is the meaning of life? Why should I even go on? And then I thought, okay, here’s the deal. Emerson said beauty is its own excuse for being. I believe that. Joy is beauty in the experience of life. Joy is its own excuse for being. If I can feel joy, that would be enough reason for my existence. So I decided I didn’t really remember enjoying anything, but I thought I can at least try to find joy somewhere in the world. And if I can, then there will be a reason to be alive. So I was thinking about this today while I was painting because I was working on this painting that has been driving me crazy.

And a while ago I stopped enjoying it. I just got grimly determined that I was going to finish this thing. And I was not experiencing a lot of joy in the process. And I thought, wait, I’m violating my own stated reason for living, which is to find joy. I’m doing something that is in all the movies, taking something I’ve always loved to do and pushing it so hard that I’ve drained the joy out of it.

And there are so many of you out there, I know there are, you took a job because you were sort of in a field you liked, but the job is like sucking your soul out of your body and it’s not the reason you were doing that. One of the things I see a lot is people who are English majors in college, they’re great with literature. They love to read and then they end up going into law.

And so many of them say that law is not like reading the complete works of Shakespeare. Law is not the thing they initially enjoyed, but because they’re good at language and they’re smart, they go into this thing that takes language and uses it to do something they no longer enjoy. I don’t know what your job is, but chances are you veered toward it because it was something you vaguely enjoyed. Then you got into the job and you’re working hard at something that brings you no joy.

All right. If you go back to that movie trope where the kid learns to play chess and then he becomes a world chess master and then everybody’s pushing him and then he can’t enjoy chess. And then he goes, it always ends, he goes back to the park where he first saw people say playing chess when he was six. And then he sits down and he starts to play with somebody in the park and he gets the joy back.

There’s a football movie, I don’t know the name of it, where people, there’s this guy, he’s just pushing himself so hard to play football and he hates it because he’s in this incredibly, this pressure cooker environment. And then at the very end, he ends up playing a game of touch football with his friends in the mud, in the rain for no onlookers and they get back the joy of it.

There’s another movie about a guy who is a chef and he grows up in India tasting all the amazing flavors that his mother puts together and walking through the streets of Delhi and smelling all the food. And then he becomes a chef and he does this really intense five star Parisian restaurant thing. And at the end he’s really sad. Joy is gone from his life. And the janitor who is also from India brings a little tin of food that his wife has cooked for him and that the chef sits down and starts sharing the food that this man’s humble wife cooked for him and he starts to cry because this is the joy of food that he remembers.

You get my point. It’s over and over and over. So I thought, okay, here’s the deal, though. That’s how it works in the movies, but what if we decide “I’m going to get back the joy,” and the joy won’t come back? This is a problem that I’ve found is really common for my clients and it’s not uncommon for me in certain areas of my life that you’d go to do that. When I was painting today, I was like, “I need to enjoy this.” But I wasn’t really enjoying it and I didn’t know how to get back to joy.

So I thought, “What is the solution for me and my clients?” And what I realized is if you have a really, really hard-core work ethic, if you’re really good at getting things to happen, you can turn your work ethic to the search for joy. And the easiest way to do it is to start with small things and to start with a small level of joy. And that is why I am framing this as “in joy ment.” Because sometimes I can’t just say to myself, “Feel joy!” and feel it. But I can say, “Let’s see if I can get the enjoyment back, if I can enjoy something today.”

So the problem is that we work so hard that we sap life of its joy. The solution is that we can turn our hard work back into the process of learning to enjoy again. So this Gathering Room is about relearning enjoyment as a primary feature of your life’s work.

And as I thought about it, I realized when I’ve seen people try to manifest stuff like lots of money or a relationship or something they want, it’s only the ones who enjoy it, who enjoy the process of trying to manifest it, who seem to get it to work. And I’d never really noticed that. I thought, “Oh, that’s so interesting.” If you can begin to find joy in the things you’re doing, it’s the joy itself that brings in returns, not the work. Joy is more important for getting what we want out of life than work.

So here are some hardcore exercises that you can do as hard work to find joy again. First thing, all right, follow me closely here. Do something you know you enjoy and enjoy it. So this is something—not everybody does this. There are many things that I do every day that I enjoy, but I don’t let myself just enjoy it.

I remember when I was doing a lot of meditating in the forest in California and we had this little, it was a drought and we put out lots of water for the animals. And we had this little birdbath fountain. It circulated the water and birds, because there was so little water, they would mob this thing. And I would sit in meditation and I would watch these little songbirds fly and they would land on the edge of the fountain and they would look at the water. And you could tell they were kind of cautious about taking a bath because I guess they’re quite vulnerable when they’re in there. Maybe they can’t fly as easily or something. Anyway, they were very cautious. They would sit at the edge of the water and look at it. But I could tell they were getting ready to go in because their feathers would start to puff up.

Because when they take baths, they puff their feathers so the water can get to their skin and oh, they enjoy it. But I would watch their feathers puff up and like the anticipatory enjoyment that this bird was taking in the feel of water on its skin. And then eventually they’d jump into the water and they’d start to just like wiggle and flick their wings and really, really enjoy taking a bath. And I thought, I take baths, I enjoy baths, I enjoy showers, but when I’m taking my shower and my bath, I rarely just enjoy it. So I took a shower and I enjoyed it just for like 10 minutes, but I really focused on letting myself enjoy it. Then it was time to wash the dishes. I realized there’s a common factor. I like the feeling of hot water on my skin, not too hot, but hot water.

So I washed the dishes and I enjoyed the feeling of water on my skin. So these are little times. You don’t have to do it for 10 minutes. One minute is fine. We are doing remediation. We are returning our ability, our atrophied ability to feel joy and you can do it just a minute at a time. But what I found was if I started to do that, it began sort of slopping over into other activities.

Okay. So speaking of meditation, how about, here’s another thing. So do something you enjoy and enjoy it. Second thing, do a joy meditation. I have meditated on mantras. I have meditated by watching my own thoughts. I have meditated just watching my breath. I’ve tried meditation with the ideal of having no thought whatsoever. Very, very interesting, intense in its own way kind of work sort of. Very, very intense.

But I thought, what if I take as my mantra or my point of focus the enjoyment of something, what if I sit down for five minutes in the morning instead of thinking of nothing or just following my breath, find something to enjoy in the room like the look of leaves of light coming through leaves or a cloud outside or the way the electric light is casting a shadow on the floor. Just something interesting and just enjoy that. I find that the light through leaves thing is very, very intense for me. I don’t know if it will be for you, but I spent five minutes just enjoying the way light passes through leaves, just enjoying that. And when my attention wandered, I’d go back to that. And it was really sweet and I really enjoyed it. So that’s my second thing. Make joy a meditation.

And then secondly, I mean thirdly, my brain isn’t working today. Thirdly is make yourself open to enjoyment by looking for things to enjoy everywhere you go. Enjoyment is coming your way in tiny bits all day long every day. So you could enjoy the feeling of sitting down in a chair when you’ve been on your feet. You could enjoy taking a deep breath when you’ve been very intense and maybe you’ve been holding your breath a little. You could enjoy… Well, I’ll tell you what I enjoyed. I found that things were coming up all over the place. I walked into our living room and Lila, our five-year-old was there, and we were chatting and I was enjoying that very much. And then she said, “Look, I have to go to the kitchen. Would you take care of this chicken?” And I checked. And as she got up off the couch, I saw that there was indeed a live chicken on the couch because we got these little chicks a few weeks ago and now they’re middle-sized chickens. And because she’s been handling them every day, they’re incredibly tame. So this chicken was just sitting on the couch and I sat down by the chicken and I started to pet the chicken. 

And it reminded me of my time among the birds of California because the chicken closed its eyes halfway and looked at me with a kind of bliss and seemed to really enjoy being petted. Well, then I noticed how silky its feathers were and the delight of the chicken enjoying my petting it made me so enjoy petting the chicken. We just created this joy loop. It went from enjoyment straight into real joy is what I’m saying. I achieved joy today just by being open to it because you never know when someone’s going to leave a chicken on your couch, right? And you want to be able to find joy because of these things.

All right, so that’s the third thing. So again, do something you enjoy and enjoy it. Meditate, but meditate on something that is enjoyable. And thirdly, look for things to enjoy as you go through your day and really enjoy them. And I think this is the cool thing. This what I’ve learned from painting and meditating and writing and doing whatever else I’ve tried to do in my life. You do them in little bits. You make tiny discoveries, you have tiny epiphanies, and your brain starts to lock in the ability to go to those epiphanies and repeat them. What fires together, wires together and your ability to enjoy will increase very quickly. And then your ability to enjoy all the way to genuine full joy will become bigger and bigger and bigger. And in this way we can take life, which is something we’ve been pushing ourselves to do to the point where we have sapped the joy from it and we’ll reinvest it with our own delight.

And that is enough reason to be around. So I think. So now let’s do our meditation. And I’ve been changing it up lately because people seem to enjoy it. So let’s start with our usual meditation and we’ll just add a little special twist today. So the first thing is take a deep breath, enjoy it, exhale, enjoy it. Shake out tension. See if you can enjoy that just a little bit. And then begin to breathe deeply and regularly and ask yourself the strange question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Play with that image knowing that there is so much empty space in the atoms that make up the material world and that means there’s so much empty space between our eyes.

Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the space between my right shoulder and my left shoulder? Can I imagine the distance between the nape of my neck and the bottom of my spine? Can I imagine the vast space inside my heart and how it’s continuous with space to the furthest limits of my imagination? Can I imagine the silence beneath all sounds? Can I imagine the stillness in which all action takes place? Can I imagine the joy that stretches through the space between my heart and the hearts of the other people on this podcast watching this broadcast?

Can I imagine the joy of all these souls connecting with compassion and mutual caring from everywhere in the world? Can I imagine the joy that is available to all the living beings of the earth and of the universe in those moments when our existence connects with the things we were meant to love? Can I imagine the delight that is available for me when the connection between my heart and all other hearts becomes so clear to me that I can never stop feeling it? Can I imagine the stillness, the silence, the space filled with consciousness, filled with joy?

Okay. Now I will do some questions. Question: “How can you get yourself back to a place of joy? I experienced another devastating disappointment for a dream I’ve been working toward has died while trying…” Okay, that’s parenthetical. “How can you get yourself back to a place of joy (I experienced devastating disappointment for a dream I’d been working toward) while trying to hold to what you long for?”

Okay. It’s a difficult phrasing, but I think I know what you mean. You’re trying to get back to the place of joy after you’ve had devastating disappointment. It really does start by shrinking the focus of your attention and shrinking the ambition to experience joy. Like bring it down to “if I taste a lemon with my tongue and I sit with that sharp taste for 10 seconds, can I enjoy that?” Not “find joy” but “enjoy that.” To really enjoy anything, you have to come into the present moment. One of the things I always tell people to do is think of three things you love with each of your senses and imagine them vividly. So imagine smelling something amazing, your favorite perfume, tasting that lemon or something else you like, seeing a sunset or something else that’s beautiful and really, really focus on it. Just enjoy it. And immediately you find yourself in the present moment. And what that means is the devastating disappointment is not present because it doesn’t happen in this moment that you’re enjoying tasting a lemon. And your future prognostications about being miserable in the future, they’re gone as well. You’re in the present moment, you are experiencing something, and you’re also experiencing a focus on enjoyment in this very instant. At that moment, you are creating a future path that is far more benevolent than the one you just left behind. If we stay focused on the things that have disappointed us and then we brace against future disappointment, we almost always create what we are trying to avoid.

I’m not trying to scare you, that’s just the way it works. But we can sort of interrupt that, do a pattern interrupt. You’re sitting and thinking, “Oh, I was disappointed in the past. I’m devastated. Horrible things will happen in the future. I’m terrified. Wait, let me smell this one rose. Let me poke my finger against one of the thorns and feel the sensation of the pricklines without hurting myself. Let me get really here really now and do it by enjoyment.” And then you’ll slip out of it and you’ll have your fears and your regrets again. Come back to the present, come back to enjoyment. Coming back to the present is something everybody says to do. If you add enjoyment, it’s kind of a bonus, right? Who wouldn’t want to come back to the present if it’s something you really, really enjoy? So hypercharge the present moment by filling it with something that brings you enjoyment and then just exercise bringing your attention to now instead of to back when and maybe later.

Okay. Question: “What would you say is the difference between a joy and a serenity? The older I get, the more I feel like I crave serenity and the joy of simplicity.”

Yeah, joy—I think it runs the whole gamut. It can be there when you’re very excited, but it actually gets deeper when you’re at peace. And that is something that as I get older, I notice more and more. Maybe it’s because time measurement slows in the brain as you get older and things become less boring. So sitting in stillness is far less boring and then you can start to examine the topography of peace, which is vast and varied and the opposite of boring. And there’s such joy in that. But honestly, the feeling of joy goes all the way up and down the scale from wildly excited to deeply, deeply still. See if you can just add that as a component.

Just do the little exercises I’ve been talking about today and see if you can enjoy the serenity and the excitement and everything in between. Fabulous question.

Another question: “How do you stop the voice of fear and anxiety when you’re in joy? I find when I’m in joy, intrusive thoughts of medical issues or life intrude.” That’s so funny because life bothers us. Medical issues bother us because they threaten the end of life. So we’re basically fearing literally everything that could possibly happen to us. One thing is to laugh at that paradox and just notice, oh, my brain has a negativity bias. It’s a little bit like having a dog that…I used to walk our dog—in California, again—and she would veer into traffic. We were on these empty roads, but she would veer into the road. She always veered left and we were on the right side of the road.

And I had to constantly say to her, “Go right, go right, go right.” It’s the only command she ever learned in her life. She was not the brightest dog that was ever born. In much the same way, I am not the brightest dog that was ever born. So I have to go, okay, into joy, into joy, into joy. Away from anxiety, into joy, away from anxiety, into joy. It’s like a conditioned response. It really is like training an animal. You veer into anxiety, you go, “Oh yeah, that’s my negativity bias. Okay, let’s enjoy something in the present moment. Where’s something to enjoy? Where is something to enjoy?” Because we’re always walking through life going, “Where is something to fear? Where is something to fear? Where is something to regret? Where is something to hate?” Because the negativity bias makes us think that that’s going to keep us safe, but it doesn’t.

It puts us in a state of feeling like we’re always in danger. So learn to correct, correct, correct. You are not a slave to your thoughts. You can govern them. And not always, not all the time. Life is still going to have difficulties for sure. But as you’re going through every day, developing this capacity for enjoyment is a skill, and it’s something that you get better at the more you practice it. So practice it and see, that’s why they call it a spiritual practice. There’s not just a spiritual epiphany. You have a spiritual practice because it turns you over and over and over again away from your habitual dread and disappointment to the enjoyment of what is always abundant around you. Fresh air, air of any sort, colors, sounds. There is enjoyment to be found all over, all over your life. Just open up to it.

All right. “Is there a way to find more joy when you are grieving? I’m patient with myself, but I don’t enjoy things the way I used to.”

Paradoxically, you can enjoy the experience of examining the territory of sorrow. I remember being sad once for about six years. This was not depression. I was depressed for decades. But for about six years after a huge loss, I remember just walking around grieving pretty much all the time. And I remember there’s a beautiful poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that part of it says, “Before you can know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must lie down with sorrow. You must speak to it until your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you feel the size of the cloth.” So I remember thinking, “Oh, that feels like—” That poem felt like relief to me. 

And so I started looking at the thread of all sorrows, and I noticed that I really enjoyed good literature and movies and music if they were sad. There’s that paradox of “turn on the sad songs.” Why would you want to turn on a sad song? Why would you not want happy songs all the time? Because grieving is a way we learn as souls, and art about grieving is really, really powerfully engaging when we are grieving. And it comforts us. It wraps us in comfort. Is that a form of enjoyment? I think I could say that it is. Is it joy? No. But finding that resonance that someone else has created to express their own grieving and their way through it is gorgeous. I mean, the poet who wrote that poem had to go through tremendous sorrow to bring it to the world, and I’m so glad she did. So yeah, share the sorrows, find things about sorrow that are beautiful and in a strange way, enjoy those.

Question: “Can you talk about the dynamics of love and freedom? How does this relate to joy? I’m letting go of someone I still love, but I know who is not good for me right now. What about joy and grief?”

They can go up and down, up and down. Sometimes, as I said, if you turn on the sad songs, when you can bring on a true clear experience of grief as you let go, especially if you can cry or if you can shake, the body needs to get into it. There’s this sweetness that comes into the release that in its own… If you’re walking through your day looking for things to enjoy, I can say I’ve actually enjoyed that before. Even in the middle of grieving, it’s a really interesting paradoxical thing that joy and enjoyment, which is less of a tall order, can enter our lives almost everywhere we are on the emotional scale and almost anywhere we are physically.

Someone wants “tips for creating a job and generating income through joy?”

I actually got the idea for this podcast from a book about finance because the financial manager was saying, “If you enjoy your life, your money issues will be very different. You will be more able to manifest abundance.” It was very sort of a new age financey book and it put out the premise that it is joy that connects us to wealth instead of hard work, which shocked me a little bit and gave me enormous joy. So I thought I’d pass on the idea to you.

Last question: “I can easily find joy in simple things. My partner hasn’t been able to do that yet. How can we help guide others to find their own simple joys, or is it just on them?”

There are a couple things you can do. One thing is you can tell them something you enjoy about them and not as a smarmy canned thing, but just there’s so many things. You know, Lila came back to the couch to get her chicken and I could have not said, “Lila, I just love the way you love the chickens.” But I did say it because I knew it would bring her joy. I was in a state of enjoyment there and really joy myself, and I wanted that to continue, so I shared that with someone I loved. And I’ve noticed that when my loved ones share positive things about me, the overall enjoyment quotient goes sky high. So enjoy them and then share with them your enjoyment.

And then let people see you enjoying things. Laugh at hilarious jokes. Really enjoy playing your computer games on your phone. Really enjoy cooking dinner tonight if that’s what floats your boat. Really, really enjoy the things that you’ve always known you were meant to enjoy. We were all born for this and we’ve all worked our way out of the one biggest reason to be alive. So let’s step by step enjoy our lives, enjoy our way back into a state of joy that can start to permeate everything we do and everything we feel.

I enjoyed doing this Gathering Room, and I will see you all later. All you Wilder Community folks, we’re having a meditation in half an hour, so I’ll see you there. Much love to everyone all around the world. Bye.