The Seven States of Joy

What Is Joy?

In our modern world, joy is a seemingly elusive and ephemeral experience. So many daily actions are justified by searching for this distant state of being. People engaging in relationships, career-seeking, and nights on the town often have an expectation to experience joy, but then experience a corresponding anger and disappointment when joy is not found. When life’s circumstances appear to offer no possibility for joy, it’s easy to become mired in despair.

But what exactly is joy?

It is easy to label joy as a simple emotion, but joy is far more encompassing. You may not entertain the possibility of feeling joy and pain at the same time, and yet this occurs every moment of every day. Simultaneous joy and pain sometimes occurs for people who suffer from a fatal disease, and it even occurred in rare cases amid the horrors of Nazi death camps. Joy is not mutually exclusive from any experience.

People commonly think that they cannot feel joy and pain at the same time, or that they can’t feel joy in combination with another emotion, such as grief, remorse, anger, terror, or rage. It is this preconception, seemingly paradoxically, that largely blocks people from experiencing joy. With this pre-decision already made, you find myriad circumstances that justify why joy is always in your future, but not now. You feel emotions that preclude joy, therefore you think you must work to resolve them. You think you must attain financial stability to avoid fear, so you seek counseling to transform ”negative emotions”, and you think you must find a good stable relationship to “win” joy.

This is a never-ending battle. Joy is never in the present moment, but always over the next hill, and the next, and the next, until the hills become mountains.

And yet, there is always the possibility for joy to intrude under any circumstance:

During your walk home one evening from a work event, a freak thunderstorm occurs. You are dressed formally, and at first you’re miserable because of your concern and disappointment about the effect the rain will have on your clothes. You rage at your helplessness in the face of the weather. You start to feel cold and are afraid you will get sick. You are filled with thoughts and emotions of what an awful experience you’re having.

And yet, in a blink of a moment it doesn’t matter any more. Like a child, you start to giggle and dance in the rain. A sudden feeling of exhilaration takes over you, and you skip and jump, splashing water left and right. You even jump right into the biggest puddle on the street just to make a huge splash. Your concern over clothes and the cold has not disappeared, but it now it co-exists with joy.

Did the rain cause your joy? Of course not. Your joy was always there; it was simply that the rain gave you an opportunity to surrender completely to your experience. In this surrendering, you allowed yourself to experience exactly what was happening in the present moment. Through this surrender to the present moment, you discovered innocence — and joy.

Joy can indeed co-exist with all experiences. You can feel joy in getting angry at someone who crosses healthy boundaries; it is not that you enjoy punishing someone, but you enjoy stating firmly what you want. Anger is part of your wholeness. You can feel joy in intimacy, or joy in surrender to the experience of isolation and loneliness that occurs when a relationship ends. Many great works of art have been created from this heightened state.

The Root of Joy

The root of joy is a state of surrender, of allowing. And because it is simply surrender, which is available to you at all times, there is no experience you can possibly imagine that has no room for joy in its midst. Some experiences require more surrender than others to reach a state of joy, but this does not mean that there is no joy there. It simply means there is a lack of trust. Surrendering to the experience of a fatal disease, for example, requires tremendous trust, and society is built on distrust. However, even in such painful times, the potential to experience joy is there.

Joy falls on a spectrum, which relates to the experience of surrender and Love. The following spectrum shows a range of joys, from the most simple to the most all-encompassing.

The Seven States of Joy

The joy of survival; contentment to feel and breathe inside a human body.

The joy of community; connecting with others like yourself; a joy of being a part of something greater than you.

The joy of making an impact. Reveling in your desires without shame or control.

The joy of intimacy. Vulnerability and exchange with another, a truly opening experience.

The joy of childlike play. The world feels full of innocence and wonder, and you experience freedom and communion with others in the moment.

The joy of awareness. You feels the deep nature of interconnectedness with all beings, and your joy shifts to simply being.

The joy of oneness. You no longer experience any separation, and thus all ”problems” are not seen as problems at all, but as expressions of Love.

Surrendering to Joy

All of these states of joy build on each other in greater surrender. Each level encompasses the previous one, without anything denied – if you do not appreciate basic breathing and the feeling of being alive, for instance, it will be impossible to appreciate community or intimacy.

These states are available in every single moment in your life. From the most mundane office meeting to the most passionate lovemaking, and even to the most excruciating pain, joy underlies the experience that awaits your surrender. This joy does not detract from the experience, but provides support and awareness of it. Pain still exists in the midst of joy, but you witness the pain rather than get lost in it.

It takes great courage to find this level of surrender while in the most trying circumstances. It requires diving off a cliff of certainty about the meaning attached to your experience, and into the unknown. Joy is unknown, because it cannot be encapsulated by labels. Joy is beyond reason, beyond anything but the surrender of yourself to the state of not knowing — simply experiencing and allowing.

And because this is all it is, the never-ending flight that comes from taking that step off the cliff, the experience of joy is available to you in every moment.

I’ve spent the past ten days in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, far from my present home in the northeast but closer, much closer, to my true spiritual home, and during this time one of my specific goals was to immerse myself into a deeper connection with Nature. Though my home is in a semi-rural area, affording me an opportunity to frequently bike through rolling hills amid cornfields and farmhouses, I really don’t feel all that connected with the nature element of it usually. Perhaps it’s because I don’t connect energetically with the space, or resist a deeper connection; perhaps it’s the human element in a long-inhabited space that has overwritten the elements of nature, but in any case I felt a huge difference in my little cabin in the forest, a short walk from the beach, easily moving into a space of love and appreciation for Nature and my place within it. I spent several hours roaming the trails through the forest, meandering along the beach, and standing in the rain under the trees at night.

And then I upped the ante considerably and spent some time in a different forest last night.

I entered the forest under a nearly-full moon, bright on a cloudless night, and instantly I felt a different sort of welcoming, an embrace, an invitation. Through connecting with the trees who are themselves all connected and always aware of that connection to one another, to the earth, and to All That Is, I could reach back into time and feel roots tapping into the dawning of human consciousness on the planet with such primordial innocence that it took my breath away.

At the same time I was aware of every possibility that continues to stretch before us in time: possibilities for each one of us and all the myriad possibilities available at any given moment, every choice, every road taken and not taken, and I felt vast, knowing that I was a part of everything that ever has been and everything still yet to come. I was as tall as the trees and as bright as the moon, and I turned my face toward her, accepting the spotlight, fully acknowledging my completeness and perfection.

To say this was a joyous and magical experience doesn’t quite do it justice.

But it served as a wonderful reminder, one that I will take back to my home with me and one that I offer you now, that our connection with Nature is an essential of simply being human. It’s part of us, and to deny it is to deny part of Self.

Afterwards, I channeled this:

There is of course value in connecting with animals, trees, and other elements of what you consider to be “nature”. These elements, are of course, part of your home, part of your world, and are as such connected to you, to humans, in a very intimate way. You share space. You share air. You share resources. Not only that, but you share in the creation of your world, the global creation of the reality you know as life on the physical plane. And because of that, there is an undying connection between you as a human and ALL of the so-called “natural” elements of Nature.

Some of you feel this connection more deeply, more emotionally, than others. Some feel a return, when confronted with Nature, especially in her most raw state, to that innocent and childlike state of simply Being, existing, that lies dormant within all of you. And as such, you feel it deeply when one of nature’s children, one element of the intricate tapestry that is constantly being woven and re-created, moves through natural transition into another state. There is, for you, a deep sense of loss, as there is the recognition not only of the timelessness of transformation and the cycles of life on the planet, but also of the transference of human-type connection to an element of nature. You can mostly only experience connection with nature by transferring those feelings to a more human perspective, and when loss of an element of nature, such as a pet or tree, occurs, there is transference to the human state of grief.

We have mentioned the energetic connections between you and your pets and we wish to elaborate. Again, not only is there a very real symbolic connection here (discovery of Self, of Love, of perspective: these things were gained through and with your interaction), but also there HAVE in most cases indeed been some past-life associations. Though most animals live lives in mainly hive-type soul arrangements, there is a constancy of energy that can flow generation after generation through one individual animal to another, and even of course crossing boundaries of species. There has been for many of you, then, a common thread through many lifetimes of connection with various elements of nature, and it is this thread, now running through you and the pets you love, that has touched this present lifetime.

The lessons from connection to Nature are many and varied and often depend on the individual, but regardless of perspective there is ALWAYS growth opportunity through human connection with Nature. After all, it is your home. It is your LIFE. To deny Nature is denying an aspect of Self, and to fully EMBRACE Nature, to ACCEPT it in all its splendor, ugliness, and beauty, is a HUGE step in actually accepting your Self.