Word of the Day Joy!

What is joy?  A three-letter word, a feeling of happiness?  The opposite of depression?  Much confusion surrounds this small but powerful word.

Most people in Playa del Carmen are there as a tourist and they always seem to be experiencing Joy.  Is it joy, happiness or inebriation?  What is true joy?  Can you experience it despite “bad things” happening around you?  Do you need something to good to “happen” before you will let joy settle in to your heart?

That’s the thing about Joy, it comes from within not somewhere outside of you.  One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is to experience joy while in the midst of anger, fear, loss, regret or any other negative emotion.  Negative emotions feed upon themselves and create more of the same.  Joy is the one emotion that will catapult you into a state of mind which will actually wash away the negative feelings as they try to spread like cancer into every area of your life.

So today look for opportunities to experience joy, even in the so-called “bad”.  Can you feel a sense of joy even when your boss is yelling at you?  The dog is chewing up your new pair of Manolo Blahnik’s.  The computer just crashed with your homework, manuscript, month-long project.  You just fell while jogging and cannot work out for another three weeks.

Joy is finding an opportunity where your habitual mind sees old behavior.  Can you see the joy in laughing at your boss or empathy for him or her?  Can you see a moment of clarity as the dog chews your shoes.  Can you slow down to appreciate that you have a computer at all or can you bless the moment while free-falling that your body is a healing machine and you will be jogging again soon.

Joy is not faking a positive attitude.  It is shifting your heart to a place of acceptance and acknowledge that you are an incredible, unique, wonderful, talented individual expression of all that is magnificent in the universe. 

You are JOY!