I’d like to turn to Muditta, the third of the four Brahmaviharas (Pali for divine abodes or dwelling places). Muditta or joy/sympathetic joy is probably the most overlooked or neglected of these sublime abodes. As I’ve often said, we’re hardwired to look for trouble and, especially recently, trouble abounds. That is precisely why this emotion is so important.
Recently, I ran into a woman in the grocery store whose husband had a scary cancer. She was able to report he qualified for a particular kind of surgery, had had the surgery and was doing great. It was easy to feel her joy and reflect that back in my own. This is sympathetic joy - rejoicing in the good fortune of others. Many of you know this well.
But there are many occasions when such joy is not so easy to share. When someone is favored over us, receives some good fortune that we wished for ourselves, then our own lack comes to the surface in jealousy or envy and we may find it hard to share in their joy. In such cases, joy as a practice is a wonderful thing to cultivate. It can be done with phrases much as loving kindness and compassion can be cultivated. The traditional phrases are these: “May your good fortune continue, May your good fortune increase, May your good fortune never cease.” These phrases can be directed toward ourselves, toward others or towards a group, towards those we naturally rejoice with as well as those for whom we may find rejoicing a bit more elusive.
One thing that such practice can bring to light is where we feel competitive, where there is comparing and we inevitably come up short, or perhaps where we interpret our good fortune to affirm that we are better than someone else. The practice reminds us that we really are glad for the other person’s good fortune, we don’t really wish them ill.
The beautiful thing about the muditta practice, according to Tuere Sala, a meditation teacher who has earned the right through her own hardships not to feel joy, is that we increase our own joy when we can share in the good fortune of others. She looks around for people to rejoice with because as well as adding to her joy and the joy of the other, it increases the amount of joy in the world. Sort of like those 2 for 1 offers we see all the time. Sympathetic joy is definitely a 2 for 1 proposition - or even 3 to 1 or more.
But you may ask, or you have already asked, how can I feel joy when so many are suffering? The Dalai Lama is reported to be one of the happiest individuals on the earth. But he is not happy all the time. When he comes into contact with suffering - his or someone else’s - he responds to that suffering. He may be sad at loss or feel compassion for someone else’s suffering. When he listened to his monks recount their suffering at the hands of their Chinese captors, he responded with appropriate emotions, disturbed by their story of suffering, compassion, gratitude for their escape. In other conversations about good fortune or with friends, he responds with joy or good humor or any number of other emotions. He lets the world in and lets the emotions go through him without grasping for one emotion or resisting another.
This is the skill we practice - learning to find joy when and where it arises, letting sadness or anger or jealously or other difficult emotions go through us, seeing them clearly, not grasping after the pleasant ones and pushing away the unpleasant ones. When we can maintain this kind of balance, we are open to the small joys and the larger ones when they arise. Perhaps as simple as hearing the sounds of birds quietly whittering to each other, coming across an unexpected bloom or a gentle breeze - being open to the wonders of the world and letting them in, this is a foundation for experiencing joy when and where it arises. Even in the midst of the sad and disturbing news of climate change and the destruction of ecosystems and animal species, nature is still capable of tossing up a beautiful day, and we too are capable, out of nowhere, of experiencing a momentary happiness, a surge of gentle joy.
Reinforcing our own access to joy is so important, it was addressed in some of the Buddha’s teachings. And Spirit Rock Guiding Teacher James Baraz wrote a book called Awakening Joy: 10 Steps That Will Put You on the Road to Real Happiness and designed a course around it which has been ongoing since it started.
Joy comes naturally. And joy needs practice.
We need to let it in, let it flower, nurture it, and understand that joy is a human emotion, part of our precious human lives on this earth, and worthy of our support even in the darkest times of our individual and collective existences.