Joy is the Standard

My mother's husband made his transition this past Saturday, and my three sisters and I are working together to assist our mom in finding a new place to live, as it is apparent that she, being elderly, cannot live on her own any more.

So I was thinking about Joy, and how to access it in the midst of such challenging circumstances as grief and life transitions. The thoughts we each pay attention to do create our own life experience as well as our experience of life. So the question is: what am I thinking? To what thoughts am I paying attention?

We have longings and desires, we have hopes and dreams, yet many times we are at a loss as to why these longings are not present in our every day experience. We want these experiences, these circumstances, these material objects, these conditions we are longing for, because we believe they will bring us contentment and happiness. So it is the contentment and happiness we seek. It is the longing for freedom and joy at the heart of it all.

So, what thoughts are we paying attention to? What feelings do the thoughts we are thinking elicit? Are we paying attention to the thoughts of what we desire, or are we paying attention to the thoughts of worry or lack? Thoughts are things.

If we are dissatisfied with our life experience, what are we thinking - really. And if we don't know what we are thinking, what is happening in our life experience? I am looking around at the manifestation of my thoughts.

The true measure of our success in life experience could be the joy we feel in it. What are we paying attention to that brings the result of manifested Joy?


"Whatever you love, you are."
~ Rumi

© Laura Basha, PhD, 2012

2012: Awakening to the Spirit of Our Earth

~ Montreal Garden, 2004 ~

"The grass grows in the fields, and the leaves on the trees, and every year they are, in great part, renewed. So that we might say that the earth has a spirit of growth; that it's flesh is the soil, its bones the arrangement and connection of the rocks of which the mountains are composed, its cartilage the tufa, and its blood the springs of water.


... its breathing, and the increase and decrease of the blood in the pulses, is represented in the earth by the flow and ebb of the sea; and the heat of the spirit of the world is the fire which pervades the earth, and the seat of the vegetative soul is in the fires ..."

~ Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)