Teach Joy

Noticing that I have not posted for almost a year! This has been a wild one for sure, and deserves many posts to describe and to glean the nuggets of insight from the experiences of 2016.

Today, instead, I want to post 2 quotes that came to me in the "Wisdom for Advent & Christmas" course hosted by Spirituality & Practice:

I think we need a new word -- "comjoyment" -- as a companion to "compassion" to remind us that our greatest gift to the world may be in sharing what gives us the greatest joy.
-- Sam Keen in Learning to Fly 

and...

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught that the only thing worth giving your children is joy. Teach your children joy and teach the child within you joy. Joy leads you out of confusion and into clarity. Joy transforms negative thoughts into positive learning experiences that encourage freedom and creativity. Make joy your greatest legacy.
-- Shoni Labowitz in Miraculous Living 

I very much like the "comjoyment" coinage. As for Joy being taught, I am not sure. Rather we may teach our children that it is safe to feel joy, and that they have permission to feel joy. Joy is naturally occurring, and if not squelched will express itself and spread contagiously. 

We also do well to teach them the First Noble Truth, the unsatisfactoriness of life in this world. Sometimes this is translated as "Life is suffering", which I believe overstates the case and also causes resistance and denial. What I have recently awakened to (and it feels like a true "awakening", another level of waking up) is that regardless of how things should go, or ought logically to go, in this Life, they usually don't. If we expect Life to unfold the way it "should", we will be unhappy and frustrated. So rather than  being dismal and pessimistic, the First Noble Truth actually gives us a break - we are not doing anything wrong that our lives are not in order and our relationships are sticky. This is Life.

Once we grasp that, we can cut ourselves slack, and cut our loved ones, friends and all others some slack. SLACK is my new word for compassion. 

Happy New Year Everyone! May it be filled with mutual granting of liberal amounts of slack!

Core Paradox

Today I feel very good about myself* for this reason – not because I have accomplished what I hoped or made the comprehensive changes I intended, but because I have kept coming back to what is really important to me. And I have made progress, albeit slow. Today I understand that it is not my personal failing, but rather the Core Paradox that explains the condition of being able to see what "should" be, but falling short of achieving it. Yes, we mourn – but we do not allow our sadness to paralyze us, because it could be no other way.

It is only truly sad if we allow the disparity between what we hoped for and what is to defeat us.

Instead I'd call it a victory to have this insight, and to no longer hope to achieve a state of maximized potential – rather to celebrate the day by day integration of past pain and disappointment that leads to more wisdom, acceptance and happiness.

"Core Paradox" is another term for what Saniel Bonder coined the Core Wound. For more on this, see all the writings of Saniel Bonder or the excellent book Becoming Divinely Human by C.C. Leigh http://amzn.to/1Pep1C2

*feeling bad about oneself is socially acceptable, while feeling good about oneself invites judgments like "conceited" or "arrogant". So it feels like a stretch into vulnerability to allow myself this feeling. I am brought back to Jesus' admonition "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" – not love your neighbor instead of yourself or better than yourself. Feeling good about oneself contains feelings of love, acceptance and appreciation. It seems to me to be problematic and difficult, if not impossible, to truly feel good about other people if we don't feel good about ourselves.