Christie Pennington's Blog

• "Living With Light"

  2007 Nov 07

  
  
  
  Happiness Or Joy
  
  How are you currently feeling about your life? Is it really really good, just tolerable or terrible? Do you feel you're using some, all, or none of your abilities in most aspects of your life? Do you move through life with the routine regimen of an automaton droning out just another day? Are you happy or are you joy?
  
  Our lives are meant to be lived in joy. That doesn't mean the feeling many call elation or happiness. The way you feel when you've just bought a new wardrobe or a new home. It's not the jump up and down feeling you had when you were ten and came down Christmas morning and found a bebe gun under the tree. If you recognize that reference then you know that I'm guilty of being sentimental , I watch "A Christmas Story" every Christmas....in fact I watch it several times.....it makes me happy, for the moment, but that's not true joy. Yet if I connect that happiness to the deeper feeling I have inside that there is actual truth revealed within that story, I transition into my foundation of joy.
  
  Elation isn't sustainable, it's not meant to be, if it were we wouldn't come to joy. Joy is an underlying sense of trust in goodness. It's a foundational principle that abides within us. Joy is the knowing that despite outer circumstances, we are always safe beneath the whims of personality's cravings. There lies within something greater. Call it God or any name you choose, it's our connection to a greater love. It's beyond words, deeper than our normal experience. It transcends daily life yet infuses it with meaning. Joy motivates us to challenge ourselves, appear to fail and try again. To realize that what we may call failure is really an opportunity to grow.
  
  We've all heard happiness is a choice, it is. That's why so many of us are in debt, because we make the choice consistently to feed ourselves the fleeting experience of happiness of the new and improved, and then we wonder why we feel so empty. We think the elation of happiness will fill us up, we eat, drink and purchase our way to happiness and it's still not enough, so we do it some more. Instead let's choose to delve deeper to uncover the joy that already lies within us.
  
  If we look more deeply into ourselves and ask "What is the feeling I want to achieve here, why am I trying to fill myself up? What is it I really want to feel? Worthiness, purpose, appreciation, love? We discover the feeling we're trying so desperately to achieve is one we can give ourselves. We can feel the essence of these, we can grant this to ourselves.
  
  We must come to the realization that we're not empty vessels. We don't need to add anything. It's already there. I'm not saying we shouldn't strive to improve aspects of our personality but that's a natural byproduct of aligning with our soul, this is where we find our joy.
  
  When our personality is urging us on like a horse running wild, we need to rein it in and remember who we really are. We are unlimited radiant courageous divine souls. Joy is our natural state of being.
  
  I'm not discouraging those occasional flights of fancy called happiness, neither am I minimizing the unhappiness and suffering we sometimes endure. Yet if we can remember how amazing we truly are, remember where we come from, we can return to the arms of joy.
  
  In Light.....Christie
  Christie Pennington is an intuitive coach, channel for The Lightspeakers writer and workshop facilitator. Her ebook Transform Your Negativity;Ten Short Visualizations is available here at Lulu.
  http://www.thelightspeakers.com/
  christie@thelightspeakers.com