Is any joy actually small?
There are two types of joy - there are those which are dependent of circumstances lining up in just the right way, which of course always leaves us open to the danger of things not lining up in just the right way, and therefore not meeting life with joy, and perhaps spending a lot of our life energy trying to get things to work out in those certain way. Not that there is anything wrong in things working out, it’s just where we are standing in ourselves that makes the difference.
Then there are those meetings with joy that are grounded in alignment with what is, that flow naturally from the soul, that resonate in authenticity and the beauty of uprightness, innocence and naturalness.
This brings the question then of which of these two ways does our life tend to lean? How did we get here? And how do we move to the more natural path in our lives? Because if we remain more in the direction of the first state that we are describing we are more often than not going to be searching and unsatisfied, even when we get what we think we want. We see and experience this so often as human beings that we can easily take this for being the nature of the world.
It might also be of course that our tendency is towards the more innate experience of joy but our conditioning means we are not really able to embrace joy, as it was for so long in my own life. We feel wrong in accepting this most profound and simple emotional gift, and it is vital that we learn to, for if we follow the trail of what joy actually is, it serves very well as a guide to what they would call in the sacred expressions of India ‘Bhakti,’ or the path of the heart. Now I know we’ve seen a lot of bad Bhakti in the last long while, spirituality often being more egoic and hedonistic than tender and actual, but you are here reading this - so you know the difference, or I would take it that you are willing to explore and find out and that’s the thing. We’ve already answered the question of course, it is the discernment between ego and hedonism, and tenderness, compassion, presence, illumination and even actual joy in the midst of the world, that makes all the difference. But of course true seeing never ignores the truth of what is right in front of us and indeed the element of compassion is central to our knowing of self and joy.
Within our practice, once we settle and stabilise in our sitting, we can allow our felt sense to show us if we are meeting this moment with an ego of grasping or rejecting? are we on this path simply to have good and wild experiences and gain credits in what we say we have achieved ie hedonism, or are we feeling the smallest aspect of the real and tender. Tenderness and compassion are the keys, the moment you feel that sweet drop of tenderness in your heart - that you cannot create but that you can find so easily in beingness - it is better than finding a chunk of 24 karat gold, because it is the point life itself. Each of the natural aspects of ‘the light that is throughout’ leads to this is we follow them as a path.
We cannot create this path out of thought or affirmation, or even seeking, because you cannot create what already exists. If we could then questions like how can we feel joy when the world is the way it is right now quickly come to the fore. Joy, love, tenderness, generosity, illumination, and again and especially compassion - are all natural and present within thusness/thisness, but they do not gloss over the way so many of us are living: reaction feeding reaction, for blame and gain, and fame and power across so much of our world. But your access to the natural states of ‘the light that is throughout’ - via your practice at first, and then more and more in daily life as you go - is the greatest counterbalance there is to the insanity that we are sold for the world. Your actual joy, tenderness and compassion is a light in the world, and it is not some hippy dippy, happy clappy bullshit to follow the innate path, it is the most vital thing you can do in all seriousness if we are to survive ourselves and fulfil our humanity in any meaningful way.
For Your Diary
16/17 May 2026 - We will be hosting a beautiful retreat in London for anyone who is sincerely drawn to knowing the path that is within all things. We’ve just concluded our chats today with the retreat centre and hope to be able to share full info very soon.
Loving this piece John, the perfect opener for my morning meditation❤️
a beautiful uplifting read...
✨️ to counterbalance by way of ultimate truth.
Thank you.