Hi, welcome back to Day Five of this meditation challenge on Coming Home to Yourself. I really hope you enjoyed yesterday's session with Melli, where you were exploring, moving from longing to belonging. And I hope that connected you to, um, your inherent self-worth and gave you an ability to access more of an experience of belonging, if that's something that you've been lacking. So, uh, I'm really excited about today, where we're going to be exploring awakening joy. Awakening, joy.

Now there's a quote that comes to mind when, whenever I talk about joy, it's by Alan Cohen and he says, "Don't postpone joy until you've learned all of your lessons." Joy is the lesson. So notice how that lands for you at this point in your life. You know, I, I, one of the things I've found in teaching about joy And practices that inherently cultivate joy, is that we have a lot of obstacles to joy. Not just external, yeah, those can be there, but I'm talking about mental obstacles. A lot of reasons that we don't feel like we deserve joy or we're not worthy of it, or we can only have joy when we fix that or fix that, or somebody's going through something difficult so how could I possibly experience joy? And I think the invitation I want to make to you today to, to start, um, is just the, the potential, opening to the potential that it would be okay to experience joy amid everything going on in your life and in the world.

And that, perhaps it's one of the greatest acts of rebellion and also the thing that is most needed, because in order to sustain ourselves for the work that we're passionate about, the healing work that we're trying to do, taking care of other people who are suffering, we need to be able to experience joy. It is the thing that rejuvenates us, that restores us, that that fills our energy reserves to continue to show up for a lot of suffering that is in the world. And so if we're putting it off until this gets fixed or that it gets fixed, or there's no problems left, we're going to go an entire lifetime, because there's always something more. There's always something that can be better, that can be changed, that can be more just. And we have to do that work for sure, but it's also okay to be open to the pockets of joy that are available to us when they're there.

So I hope you can take that in. And also as a practice, as you're going throughout the day, you can start by just exploring for yourself, what is your particular flavor of joy? Because a lot of times we think it's this big ecstatic experience, or we're just going to be totally overwhelmed with a smile and bursts of goodness. And that might not feel as accessible right now. Maybe it is, and that's great. But yours might be more of a flavor of, uh, we could say self compassion or a sense of ease, ease, or peace or balance, or even neutrality can be experienced as, uh, a feeling of joy when we really allow ourselves to appreciate that.

Oh, there's nothing happening right now. And this also represents the absence of all of the things I'm often pushing away or don't want. And when we do find our flavor of joy, which, you know, once this is over in the meditation, you can assess throughout your day of like, where do I find some joy and how can I find more of that? And since there are an infinite number of permutations of what that can look like, I'll, I'll leave that journey for you to explore, to take some time to understand. But once you identify a few things, the real key thing is letting yourself take it in because a lot of times we just pass by it. As Rick Hanson says, the brain is like Velcro for the negative Teflon for the positive.

But what he suggests is giving yourself about 20 to 30 seconds to really feel the experience of a positive emotion, really feel the experience of happiness. And what this will indicate to the brain is that this is an experience worth paying attention to. This is an experience worth taking in when it's here. And that is what will rejuvenate us. It will restore us.

So we'll, we'll do some of this in our meditation today, giving you the opportunity to feel into some joy and cultivate some joy. But as you go about your day today, see if you can notice like first what your flavor of joy is and where it shows up for you, where you can help facilitate more of it and really let yourself take it in when it's there. Thank you for your practice and let's settle in for today's meditation.