Marcia's Musings: When Happiness Comes Calling
/I’m happy. Right now, I can’t believe how often I am happy. The best news? I no longer wonder how long this joy will last or how to extend it. I’ve come to see that when I’m happy, I can just be in my happy place for however long it lasts.
What prompted me to recognize this was, as is so often the case, a heartfelt, sometimes raw, and other times funny conversation among women (you know what I’m talking about). On an April trip to Santa Fe with three longtime women friends, I asked each one over the first evening’s dinner: What are you feeling in your life now? Each answer elicited thoughtful stories and insights. Late into the conversation, Lolita asked me, “And how about you, Marcia, what have you been feeling of late?”
No one was more surprised by my answer than I. I felt it in a flash as it bubbled up and through me like flowing water: “I feel happy,” I said.
Of late, when happiness knocks on the door of my Internal Island of Refuge, I welcome it as a particularly beloved guest and settle down to enjoy it, knowing it will, at some point, end its visit and leave through the same door (as all guests do – and should).
There is a day, a week – even the occasional month – when my mind recollects the phrase “what tickles your fancy?”, which alone can create waves of happiness. My mother and father used these words with me as I grew from childhood into adulthood, whether about what I’d like for dinner, what I’d like to do on a particular day, what presently was causing me to feel and express happiness. I actually can hear the words resonating from a source deep within me whenever I feel contentment and joy – my definition of happiness – moving through my physical, mental, and emotional planes. It feels like liquid sunshine at just the right temperature.
As with all human emotions, happiness comes and goes, an awareness that deepened for me in Mindfulness Yoga & Meditation and iRest Yoga Nidra classes and trainings. I didn’t know this for a long time. I thought my job was to figure out what made me feel happy and then to control conditions and circumstances to maximize it, pushing away any other emotion that was not happiness. These days, I rest easy in this understanding even when feeling happy: Troubled times will come calling again. Worry, fear, anger, and anxiety will visit. Try as I mightily did for so many years, I understand conditions and circumstances are in constant flux and often beyond my control or considerable sense of determination.
When I retired from that exhausting work somewhere in my late 40s, the nature of my happiness morphed. The most robust happiness I’ve been feeling these last two decades is called sympathetic (or vicarious) joy, mudita in the Sanskrit and Pali languages. This yogic and Buddhist concept, one of the “Four Immeasurables” that include equanimity, loving kindness, and compassion, means feeling joy for someone even if they have something – a physical object, a relationship, or experience, for example – that I do not possess at that moment. Said another way, it is the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people’s well-being. It is more satisfying and long-lasting than the “what-tickles- your-fancy” type.
Nothing comes easy when we do deep work so it is important to know this: Each of the Four Immeasurables has a near and far “enemy” that can diminish it. It came as no surprise to me to learn that the near enemy of sympathetic joy is comparison, a poison to the mind, heart, and eventually, the body. Who among us hasn’t grappled with comparison to others: how we look, what we earn, the size or design of our home, how much and to where we travel, how our relationships stack up to those of others in our circles, how our grief or suffering is greater, on and on. As this poison spreads throughout our systems, it destroys happiness and joy, or even the possibility of them knocking on our inner doors.
And the far enemy of sympathetic joy? Jealousy, that green-eyed monster that leaves wreckage as it tramples through our systems. Jealousy inhibits love, ruins friendships and other relationships, causes us to give into harmful temptations that hurt ourselves and others, and embeds bitterness in our hearts, a bad taste in our throats and mouths.
Exploring the concepts of sympathetic joy, loving kindness (you can find loving kindness meditations in our On-Demand Video library or in private lessons), equanimity, and compassion are tools that lead to enhanced and healthy happiness. If I have one wish these days, it is that more people would take just Mod 1 of our 200-hour teacher-training program where we go in for a deep dive into the science of yoga, that science being informed by the disciplines of philosophy and psychology.
The older I become, the more I recognize that sympathetic joy – delighting in other people’s well-being – works as a natural elixir or tonic on body, mind, and spirit. It helps to control the steep fluctuations of all the other emotions, and it helps us to determine which conditions and circumstances we wish to invest our resources into, whether they be women’s rights, equitable justice, the environment, education, community building, whatever.
Lean into happiness by leaning into sympathetic joy. Right now, today, consider how delighting in other people’s well-being makes you feel. Create a list of these delights and remind yourself of them when, as surely as the day is followed by the night, some of the other less-welcomed emotional guests rap on your inner door. This reservoir of sympathetic joy will help you deal with them until they, too, up and leave (as all guests do and should).
