April 12, 2025
“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.
James Baraz, Awakening Joy: 10 Steps That Will Put You on the Road to Real Happiness
If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”
Dear Friends,
How are you? At New York Insight’s weekly Wednesday community gatherings, this month’s theme is joy – one of the seven factors of awakening. Why talking about joy when there seems to be so much suffering in the world right now?
And yet…it’s exactly during these times, when the fabric of life feels torn, when fear or grief sits close to the surface, that we need to turn toward joy. Not to escape the pain, but to remember what gives our hearts breath. To remember what we live for and love.
Joy sustains us. It nourishes the roots of our resilience. It gives us the lifeforce we need to keep showing up—for ourselves, for one another, for this Earth we love.
One thing I learned about teaching about climate resilience is that fear is not going to be a great motivator for people to act. Love is. Love for life, for the natural world, for beauty, for the humans and non-human beings that we care about — that compels us to protect what we hold sacred.
Changing the world requires sustained energy, patience, perseverance, clarity, and faith. It requires a deep well of inner strength and conviction, and we can’t build and sustain that if we don’t have joy and love as the nourishing sources, the ground that fertilizes wholesome states of mind and actions. Joy is not just a nice feeling. It’s not a luxury. It’s a spiritual necessity.
But how do we open to joy?
When I first stepped onto this path, it was through heartbreak—I was going through a divorce that shattered the version of life I thought I knew. In the midst of that pain, my teacher Jonathan Foust said something that has stayed with me ever since:
“Your capacity to receive joy is directly related to your capacity to hold pain.”
That blew me open. It made me realize: If we don’t have the capacity and the confidence to hold and process our pain—to really be with it, to let it move through us—then we will forever hold joy at arm’s length. We’ll fear it. We’ll grasp at it or push it away before it can slip through our fingers. How often, even in the most beautiful moments, do we think, “Oh this will be over soon.” And with that very thought, we close the door on fully feeling the joy. Then we react – we either try to control it and want to make it last, or we pull ourselves back from fully savoring the joy.
Accepting and embracing impermanence is a key doorway to experiencing joy. One of the three characteristics of the nature of reality in Buddhist beliefs is that nothing lasts—not pain, not joy—and because of that, we can actually open more fully to both.
Mary Oliver captured it beautifully with her poem In Blackwater Woods:
“To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”
There’s a kind of quiet bravery in that. The more we allow ourselves to meet love, and the pain of losing what we love—to really be with it—we begin to trust in our own capacity to survive it. And with that trust comes freedom. We are more willing to take risks and be vulnerable. We no longer have to shrink from love or joy or beauty out of fear that we’ll lose it. We can receive it, savor it, and let it move through us like a song.
“Life is 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows,” an often-used quote in meditation teachings. Yet life rarely separates joy and sorrow into neat compartments. More often, they arrive together—entwined:
The joy of cradling my newborn son just moments after the agony of long labor.
The bittersweet pride of waving goodbye as my teenage son heads off on his first school trip abroad, already sensing the empty nest on the horizon.
The warm laughter of a family reunion at my father’s gravesite during the spring Tomb Sweeping Festival—feeling the deep love and the ache of his absence in the same breath.
In Buddhism, joy and happiness are different. Joy, pãti, is defined as deep and enduring, arising internally, independent of external circumstances. A wellspring that rises from within, untouched by the ever-shifting world around us. It’s a sign of spiritual maturity.
Happiness, on the other hand, is fleeting and external, often seen as a temporary emotion that arises from positive experiences or external circumstances. A good meal with friends, cherry blossoms in the spring, the thrill of skiing downhill – Buddhism doesn’t deny these pleasant experiences; what it asks us to do is not to be attached to them.
For me, enduring joy often comes from gratitude. A deep gratitude for being alive, in this human body in this lifetime, for the gifts and challenges that life has given us. It comes from appreciating the preciousness of fleeting happiness and the pain in life that leads to growth – it is a state of mind rather than circumstances. I am fortunate to have parents who are both easily content with life. While they live on low incomes and have no material wealth, they always find joy in their life and feel that life has given them enough and that they are fortunate. “A grateful heart is a joyful heart,” as James Baraz would say.
And it is this enduring joy that will carry us forward. May you find joy in the coming spring days that sustain and nourish you.
Blessings and love,
Lin
Photo: The Orchid Show, New York Botanical Garden, 2024
GoFundMe: 2025 -2027 Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Leadership Training
Pay it forward: I’ll be joining the next Community Dharma Leadership (CDL7) training at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. This program includes five retreats over two years and costs ~$14,000. Your contribution will help me cover these expenses. No contribution is too small—every donation is deeply appreciated. Thank you for your support!