TOPIC
Just enjoy yourself.
A seemingly simple command, yet we still find our way to misery, suffering and absurd seriousness.
I was once laughed at by a medicine man for my serious questions to which he eventually responded with, ‘all you need to do is enjoy yourself,’ something within me knew he was right and my serious mission suddenly lost its impetus.
So I made my way home to begin life with joy.
How do you enjoy yourself?
Do you have an awareness of new joys that appear? Or is your vision blinkered by a determined distant goal of future joy and happiness?
What if we enjoyed ourselves right now and understood that joy is a magical process that delivers us to a place beyond our imagination where all our needs and future needs are magically met.
Let’s piece together the fragments of reality collected by our individual experience and weave together a greater understanding of what it is to enjoy ourselves.
REFLECTION
‘Just enjoy your self.’
How, and what is joy to start with?
One human mentioned that happiness is to be with what happens. So is joy the same as happiness; simply being balanced in our present experience? Allowing all to be witnessed without a polarising inclination?
Or can joy be pursued in someway?
Perhaps this is our modern day trap in which we continue to layer conditions upon conditions in order to satisfy the narrow criteria of joy. What our society calls growing up; a continual smothering of our ability to be at ease with ‘what is’ with a taught and practiced reflex of control.
It seems to be a paradox.
Joy is here, available and ready for our awareness to tap into while we seek to find joy in the forever tomorrow or the long gone past.
Past joys can create precedents that we fold upon the present with anxious control leading to perpetual disappointment and misery as the universe is constantly changing. These disappointments leading to more precedents being set and soon our ability to enjoy ourselves narrows almost to the point of complete extinction. Sadly I would say that it has narrowed for many in this society to extinction as our whole culture is geared towards that which extinguishes joy; control.
The etymology of control comes from the latin words contra: check against and rota: wheel or role; contra-rota; checking against the role.
Inherent within control is craving and aversion. Wanting something to happen that isn’t happening or not wanting something that is happening. And its the happening that holds the happiness or joy. So how do we tap into the happening and undo our practiced habits of aversion and craving.
As Goenka ji says, ‘just observe the breath.’
The path of joy is through the breath?
Goenka might say that this is the first step.
S. N. Goenka, a Burmese business man, stumbled upon the Buddhas technique which had been held in its purest form in the Golden lands of Burma. In a strange yet prophesied coincidence he set out to teach his parents in India and ended up spreading it all across the world.
The Vipassana technique of meditation is said to be the purest form of Buddha’s meditation technique free of any religious veneer; Vipassana. Once Buddha became enlightened at the age of 35 he spent the next 45 years teaching this technique all through out India in order to liberate beings from misery.
To be liberated from the trappings of misery into harmony, peacefulness and happiness.
The technique is practicing a balanced mind whilst observing the emerging sensations that bubble up through the body. We have aversions to some sensations and cravings to others. Within the parameters of the retreat there is little stimulus outside of your own person; you do not talk or engage with anyone and you are meditating up to 11 hrs a day.
Everything emerging is coming from within and as you observe with a balanced mind we undo our habits of control stimulated by aversion and craving. These reactions are called sankaras and as we undo the layers of sankaras from the present to our entire lives to all the lives that have come before us we liberate ourselves to the ever flowing current of joy that exists in perpetuity within us all.
So when Papacho, the medicine man in Cusco, laughed at my seriousness and told me to simply enjoy myself. He wasn’t talking about pursuing the misery inducing trappings of craving and aversion but gently asking me to tap into the infinite joy of the phenomena of our existence through simply being with what is, as it is, forever changing.
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