Is joy made or given?

I've been feeling more joy in my practices this week.

Not entirely sure why there's been a shift, but it seems to be easier to access and easier to sustain. What may make it a little easier is the shift I've made from seeing emotions, sensations, thoughts, and anything that arises as objects, to simply being in the awareness of whatever comes up.  I am moving towards a more intuitive feeling of non-duality.

In doing this joy becomes less of an object to be grasped, and more of a type of awareness to be experienced. It is a particular colour and feeling that wisdom takes on.

I see my sensations these days as a kind of x,y grid.  Calm and alert on the vertical y grid.  Pleasant and unpleasant running along the x grid.  Joy kind of runs along the pleasant side of x.  But not too pleasant that I have to worry about getting addicted to it. 

Buddhism believes that this joy is in everyone.  But what if it isn't.  What if it is just a construct like any other emotion.

Would it matter?

What matters I guess is whether there is a cost to spending too much time in joy.  Real joy, not manic over excitement or overly heightened expectation.  Is there a cost to resting in quiet the confidence that there is enough for myself and for everybody, that happiness is not only possible, but sustainable, and that joy can be the thread that binds us.   Is there an advantage to living in the sustained fantasy of deprivation and alienation, self hatred that we believe is natural?

Put this way it's so obvious, and yet we are pulled towards the bad dream again and again.

Lucid Joy

What I'm feeling these days as I intensify my practice is close to what is felt when you wake up from a dull or distressing dream. A gratitude for my sanity, strength, grip on reality.

I'm keeping up my commitment to 2 hours of daily meditation.  I'm spending weekends mostly in self-directed retreat. I'm also following Mingyur Rinpoche's course on reality and reading a great book on the stages on emptiness.

In recent weeks I've been contemplating and meditating on how suffering cannot co-exist with wisdom.  Resting in the knowledge that there is a mind that is outside concepts of time and self, is deeply liberating. Lucidity grows every moment I stay in that place.

I love the intensity of Goenka's Vipassana technique, the constant and determined body scanning.  But I realized yesterday that I was missing something important.  Joy.  I'm still falling too easily to intense cravings for food and drama.  But gratitude added to equanimity makes hard for cravings to thrive.  Joy tells the mind and the body that we have enough. I think that cravings are a sign that life has become joyless, so the distorted pit of dis satisfaction grows.

Joyful wisdom is truly the antidote to most of what has plagued in my life.

May I not forget that. May I find a way to share that insight with others, especially Ben.