I’ve been having the experience of connecting with an incredible amount of joy.   It’s an amazing, wondrous experience.  I walk around completely in love with just being. It is no mere coincidence that my memory of the beginning of this experience coincides with the beginning of my spiritual practice.  My experience of joy started slow, and gradual, like a slow drip.  At first I didn’t trust joy.  I was only open and available to small doses.  However, I soon found that each time I opened up to it just slightly, that more and more would come rushing in, to the point where I am now and have been for at least the last year, where I am virtually swimming in joy.

I’ve been having the experience of really seeing that joy is everywhere, and that it is always available.  This is incredible information to me, because I can distinctly remember how, for the majority of my years on this planet, I was completely cut-off from this experience.  I spent most of my life resisting and suffering.  When voices told me that I was no good, and that I was inherently bad, and that I would never be happy, and that ending my life was the only way to ending my suffering—I actually believed them! 

I can remember all of those times that I sat somewhere, tears pouring out of me, as conditioning slammed me around for being terrible, unworthy, ugly, and utterly unacceptable.  I was lost.  Confused.  Conditioning took the road map to joy and turned it upside down and inside out.  I had no bearings, no compass, and subsequently, had almost lost all hope.  Spiritual practice gave me a compass, and I started blazing my own trails, and creating my own unique map.  Blind, tortured wandering became purposeful, steady movement.  At first, that movement was based simply on a desire to escape from suffering.  Now, my experience of that movement is one of inspired adventuring.  I wander now not in blindness and despair, but for the sheer fun of new discovery.  What else will I see?  How else do I cause myself to suffer?  What other crazy voices have I believed?  There was a time when each new discovery brought mourning and a conditioning would slip in a warning shot of suffering meant to discourage future exploration.  Now, each new discovery is met with a joy that almost seems subversive.  Who would enjoy finding out the latest crafty way conditioning has been trying to hijack their life experience?  I do!  Oh, it’s so fun.

As I was considering my experience of joy the other day, I felt a deep sympathy for my past selves who were divorced from joy.  I didn’t feel sadness, but instead, a great tenderness in my heart for those past selves who were lost and confused.  Then, that tenderness grew to encompass people I know now who are also in the midst of great suffering and those people who believe the voices of conditioning.  The compassion I felt even extended to those who had physically and emotionally abused me in the past.  I thought of the famous passage by Plato where he talks about the people who live in the cave and think that life is only the shadows and reflections projected on the cave wall, and when shown the sun and vast outside world, they cower back to their dingy cave of distorted experience.  And so that’s how it was for me, wrapped in the harsh, prickly blanket of suffering.  I had come to believe that my conditioned projections of life represented my authentic self.  I resisted leaving my dark cave, and came to believe it was my only home, and that it is where I belonged.  Looking back now, I feel overwhelming compassion for my past selves who, beaten and frightened, decorated and defended that tiny prison.

I realize that my past selves are still here, tucked inside me, and that it is about time that they got to experience joy, too.  Some of them are just lurking about as cautious observers and some have come forward to claim their joy, but all of them are welcome to sit in my lap and see the possibilities I see.  Sometimes I tell them, “Hey, everyone, I’m here! It’s been a long time that you’ve waited.  I know some of you might not believe this, but joy is here.  Joy is available.  We can have it together.  We can share it with everyone. We can have it in infinite amounts.  And anything is possible!”

Seeing possibilities where before I saw nothing -- This is my experience of joy.  The appreciation I feel for this practice of compassionate awareness, for the Sangha that supports me and everyone in this work, for the Guide who made the path visible and accessible to me, for every thing it has ever taken from everything and everywhere that created this most perfect moment—that appreciation is also my experience of joy.

My experience is that joy is available now.  And it belongs to everyone.

Amazing, isn’t it?