Meditation Yields Joy

This past week I felt moments of a deep penetrating joy even though I was scouring my house for lice and experiencing holiday blues. How is this possible you ask? I would say, unquestionably, through practicing meditation.

Now you may be thinking, it sounds like this girl has been drinking the cool aid! And maybe I have been.  Maybe I have become a believer of sorts in the benefits of millennia-old practices in meditation. But hey, if it ain’t broke…

Some of you know, I recently went through the Jon Kabat-Zinn, UMASS-based, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction 8-week training this past fall. In the class, the teacher, Kate, said several nuggets of wisdom about meditation practice that are still working their way through me. 

One piece that I was reminded of in these last several days while I had time off from work and was spending time with my children, is that a meditation practice is like weaving a parachute. Each day you sit down and weave for 5 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour.  Any amount of weaving, any amount of meditation, contributes to a larger whole that leads to a greater sense of equanimity. This equanimity, or parachute, allows you to experience joy at times you would otherwise have been distracted by the external minutia that often overwhelms us.  Like, for example, doing loads and loads of laundry, changing bedding and bagging stuffed animals because my 5 year-old somehow got lice the day after Christmas.  Or, moving through the feelings associated with loss that show up each year at the holidays for me.  In the past, I am certain I would have been unable to notice that grounding joy inside me because my focus would have been elsewhere.

I have to say, I find this recent awareness about meditation very encouraging because it helps me increase my motivation and commitment (otherwise known as discipline) to continue a meditation practice even though sometimes it can feel like just one more thing to do in my already very busy schedule as a working mother.

Now for me, meditation practice has two other components: mindfulness and god.  I know it does not for everyone, as there is no one way to meditate.  But for me, this triad creates the whole.  Some people might call this “whole” a contemplative practice.

I first learned about contemplative practice from author Sue Monk Kidd. I was reading her book (one of my favorites!) When the Heart Waits, in which Ms. Kidd shares her earlier spiritual journey based in Christian Mysticism.  Recently, Oprah Winfrey re-aired her interview with Sue Monk Kidd on her show Super Soul Sunday, and she quoted from this same book: 

“There have been moments in my life when I sat in the utter quietness of a deserted room and had the noise of a firework show going on inside me.  And there have been rare times when I stood in a crowd of noisy people and tapped into a deep inner silence.  It is this interior quietness, a silence within us that is a door through which God can come to us.”

The past several days I was certainly not in the “utter quietness of a deserted room.”  My 5 year-old and 1 year-old were loud, my house was a mess from Christmas and lice-decontamination, and we had multiple gatherings to attend with the holidays.  But here’s the miracle, “the miracle of mindfulness” as Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says, at times, I still felt quiet inside.

I have heard Buddhist teacher and nun Pema Chodron use the analogy of leather shoes to describe the benefits of meditation practice.  She says we could choose to try to protect ourselves from the suffering of the world and our own emotions like fear and anger by exerting lots of effort to stay inside our little bubble of comfort as to avoid vulnerability.  Or, through meditation, we can cover our vulnerability, our feet, with leather shoes so that we can go out into the world and embrace our difficult feelings with the knowledge that we can tolerate it. We can handle it.  I’m coming to believe this too.

I’m also coming to believe that joy and happiness are two very different experiences. For me, joy is an ability to hold a deeper connection to what is most true and important in our lives (our children, our earth, our dignity, our own personal ethics, the fact that we are all here in this life for a relatively brief stay) no matter what else is going on around us.  Happiness, on the other hand, is a fleeting emotion.  Like sadness, fear, anger, boredom.  It comes.  It goes.  It comes again.  Meditation has also helped me to distinguish the differences between joy and happiness too.

The goal, then, for me becomes two-fold.  One, continue to meditate. Continue to weave my parachute- with as much frequency and regularity as I can muster.  And two, continue to notice the way mindfulness and god manifest as joy in my everyday comings and goings, whatever they may be.

I will conclude with this quote that sits atop author Dani Shapiro’s blogsite, and seems all together fitting this morning:

“Every day includes much more non-being than being. This is always so. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; washing; cooking dinner. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.”

– Virginia Woolf