What is Joy

As a new personality is slowly building up inside me, I realise that by partaking the spine & stomach treatment I had dropped behind in my immediate reality so many aspects that bound me to my old self: my family, my friends, my homeland, my possessions, even my mother tongue. I realise that by doing so, by staying away from parts of the old self, I can allow for a new one to emerge. Either physically- by getting new cloths, new body to walk and talk in, new look and shedding old hair. And also emotionally and psychologically. I feel as if it’s the first time since a long forgotten time that I know experientially what it REALLY is to smile.

For years I’ve been avoiding smiling because it had never felt sincere. It felt fake. It felt fake, because it was fake for me back then- I didn’t feel any joy or any happy feeling behind this stretching of the lips. Now, as more space opens up inside me for joy, as I laugh deep from the bottom of the belly, I can feel the smile, feel happiness behind the smile. As if up until now, even in the rare moment that it came, the smile was only a mechanic motion. And now there is something behind it- a feeling of joy or of fun, of gratitude or merely of welcoming and merrily gesturing hello. Or in a 4th way dialect- the emotional centre is partaking in a gesture that up until now only the automatic moving centre possessed.

I have been a traveller for so long now, forever trying to shed the physicality that defined me as I am, never aware of trying to do so. But only after holding a practice, holding an inner quest, acquiring tools for healthy emotional living, and finally physically opening up the knots in my body have I managed to do so- create a new little I in my personality to add to all the others- one that feels and understands and experiences joy.

A friend of mine wrote a book trying to explain to himself what is love. But for me, I find, rather then trying to explain what is love to another, first I need to experience joy to my selves.

What is joy? Joy is to laugh, but really from within. Joy is to smile not only from the automatic moving centre but also from the emotional one. Joy is to find happiness in life, in interactions with fellow practitioners, in eating as a fully sensual experience. Joy is when it becomes funny during a demanding stretch class, exactly at the moment of peak frustration. Joy is the little precious moments when I manage to drop the suffering and drop my own expectations of how one’s life should be.

In the same way that deep sorrow and mourning is lurking in the dark wells of ones path, so does joy can stand as a beacon of light through the bright turns of the way.

Along 12 years of indoctrination, I was asked by my teachers many questions in school, but I was never asked one of the most important: what is Joy?

Now that I found a path, now that a worthy teacher will be there, as a healthy adult I understand: Time has come to ask the REAL questions. Cause if i’m in a real quest, there’s some real quest-ions to ponder upon.

***

Sitting beside a friend in front of the waves, watching them come and go and splash their white foamy essence to the shore, I tell her: “I feel like my life is only just beginning, but I’m so lucky that it’s not starting from scratch.” I feel like such a lucky blessed adult, to have my joy and my child state inside me. To slowly let each centre tend to what is appropriate for it to do. To be the adult when it’s needed, the child when it’s needed, to start this life again with all the understandings I have gathered along the way.