From Pleasure to Happiness to Joy
How to enjoy extraordinary living with ordinary means
Tak C. Poon, MD
January 22, 2021 4 min read
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Life has been even harder for most people now, in this pandemic. There is no better time than now to master a sure-fire way to ensure joy out of nothing, regardless of what happens in life.
Countless millions have benefited from this time-honored activity. Most call it meditation. Some call it a breathing exercise. I consider it an instant mindset reset. It’s akin to rebooting a computer for optimal function by keying Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Then, it’s like magic!
If you can breathe, you can do it. All you need is a to sit alone in a quiet space with your back straight and not leaning on anything. Then close your eyes and breathe normally. The key is not trying hard to achieve anything. The hardest part is doing nothing, not even thinking.
Not thinking about anything is so difficult that the next best thing is to focus all your attention on your breath going in and out. Most beginners can only do that for a few seconds. People who try too hard or chastise themselves for losing patience often get frustrated and give up.
The trick is to stay with it for just a few more breath cycles the next time; and keep at it at least once a day. After a while, you’ll settle at a length of time that is effortless, comfortable and welcome for you. And that daily time interval will feel timeless. If for a brief moment you feel nothing, you’re getting close.
That’s the reset.
As a cardiologist, I can reset an ailing heart to beat again in a proper rhythm by delivering an electric current by the push of a button. But it took me years and years of training and practice to be able to do that.
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Similarly, it took me weeks, if not months or even longer, of disciplined daily practice to get to a point where I can readily enjoy a meditative state of indescribable joy almost instantly and on demand.
It is an open secret. Anybody can do it. Plenty of tutorials for various styles of practices are available for free online. Try one you like and feel most comfortable with and stick with it. You’re also welcome to try this link. Almost any of these can take you to that destination inside of you.
. . .
Pleasures in daily life are essential for our sanity. Even just simple pleasures. Still, they usually need certain provisions. Some are even guilty pleasures for which we pay a price later. Most pleasurable sensations last only a short time. Then the craving for them can be unpleasant and much longer lasting.
Happiness is deeper than mere pleasurable sensations. But it requires conditions to be even more favorable, for a longer time and on a bigger scale. Sure, we all try to be happy. We know it’s not easy. In life overall, things are good only about half of the time, being counter-balanced by the Yin-Yang duality of reality. The craving for it also causes stress and suffering. Yet, we don’t give up.
Joy, to me, is different. Feel free to pick another descriptive term for yourself. What I’m referring to is that built-in state of wellbeing that is always within all of us. We all have it or we wouldn’t be alive. It naturally counter-balances all the inevitable negativities in real life. It prevails by a thin margin as long as we live.
So, this joy is always here, waiting for us to settle back in.
Pay close attention to any living thing and you will notice this inherent “joy”. It is the “life force” that keeps it alive. A plant or a pet shows it clearly. Even an inanimate object, like water or a rock, has it. It is that inexplicable something that gives everything its very existence.
This “joy” is my basic state of being. It requires nothing outside of me. When external conditions are difficult and demanding, it’s only natural that we get distracted from it. That happens a lot in real life. And when outside conditions are favorable, we tend to be too busy being happy and neglect it, too.
Yet, this joy is always here for me to truly en-joy. It takes a little time and a lot of mindful attention to return to it. Daily practice shortens that time and lessens the difficulty.
No one can tell you how this joy feels like. You must experience it firsthand. You can acquire this extraordinary experience with very ordinary means.
Warning: It is habit-forming, addictive even.
So often, I cannot contain this joy. So often, it becomes my work. So often, it overflows into my life.
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WRITTEN BY
Tak C. Poon, MD, PharmD, ABHIM, FACC, Preventive Cardiologist, now developer of a non-profit wellness blog and a lifestyle habit-forming app at www.metacardio.org, and confessor of hard lessons I have learned in life.
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