How to Cultivate Joy in Meditation

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The development of meditative joy is one of the best things you can do for your meditation practice. It’s something that you can do right from day one – I’m not talking here about some esoteric meditative joy that you need to have wizard-level concentration to experience.

When joy is present, concentration comes faster and everything in general just feels much smoother. Meditative joy is the lubricant that helps you slide down the path of meditative progress more quickly, more easily, whilst having more fun, and suffering from fewer friction burns (impatience, frustration, and sometimes unnecessarily unpleasant insight experiences).

What is Meditative Joy?

Just to quickly resolve a potential confusion here, when I talk about joy in this blog, I’m not talking about the jhana factor of pīti. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it – I’m not going to be talking about it, but pīti is a particular kind of pleasant physical sensation that arises from samadhi; what I’m going to be talking about is more like a mood, a mental state, or a disposition.

Culadasa defines it thusly: “A mind that is in a state of Joy is predisposed to notice and preferentially attend to that which is beautiful, wholesome, pleasant, and satisfying, while at the same time tending to disregard that which is otherwise. The perceptions that arise in a joyful mind will tend to emphasize the positive aspects of whatever is attended to. The glass will be perceived as half full, rather than as half empty.”

Ok, so that’s what meditative joy is. How do you develop it? The key is in training awareness in a certain way. The rest of the blog will assume that you’re already familiar with the attention-awareness distinction that’s central to The Mind Illuminated; I’ll be using those very specific definitions of attention and awareness. There’s an explanation and some guided practices to give you a sense of that difference here.

Awareness in this sense is often framed as though it were merely a neutral tool like a radar, whose function is just to notice distractions. However, there’s more to awareness than this; awareness is also the key for developing meditative joy.

How do you train awareness to cultivate joy? It’s almost identical to how we cultivate extrospective awareness and introspective awareness. Let’s recap that briefly:

In the early stages you work to maintain extrospective awareness: ensuring that things like the position of your body, body sensations, ambient sounds, and so on, don’t fade from consciousness while you meditate. You do this by occasionally checking in – briefly shining the spotlight of attention on these experiences – to make sure that they are still present in awareness, and refresh them if not. Over time this becomes effortless.

Later, you focus more on cultivating introspective awareness, of thoughts, emotions, intentions, and so on. Here as well, we use a similar process to cultivate awareness: you occasionally check in, using attention to make sure that there weren’t any streams of thoughts etc. going on that you weren’t fully cognizant of. Again, this becomes automatic and effortless over time.

The basic principle is just the same when it comes to cultivating joy, except the object that we want to train awareness to maintain are any pleasant aspects of experience. Let’s try this right now.

The Practice

• Briefly use attention to notice and focus on what pleasant aspects of experience are present.
  
  
• Maybe there are some pleasant ambient sounds – the wind, rain, music, or even silence.
  
  
• Is there anything pleasant about your visual experience right now? A tidy desk, pleasant lighting, etc.
  
  
• In particular, take the time to find any pleasant bodily sensations. Maybe you’re comfortable, or there’s at least part of your body that feels comfortable. Maybe there’s some warmth somewhere. Are you relaxed? If there’s any tension, breathe into that area, allow it to relax, and notice how good that feels. Are there any aspects of the breath sensations which are pleasant? Notice that there are a lot of signals that your body is sending to tell you that things are ok – and you can tune into these. For example, you are breathing – you’re probably getting enough oxygen – and you can notice how much better it feels to be breathing than not to be breathing. If you’re not ill, and not in pain, these are genuine blessings which you can savour – just as most of us are acutely aware of for a day or so after we recover from an illness and are freed from nausea.
  
  
• Notice any pleasant mind states that are present: perhaps there is some peacefulness, some contentment, or absence of striving or agitation which you can appreciate. Maybe there is even some subtle hum of loving-kindness or equanimity which arises just by the simple act of opening space to look for it.
  
  
• Don’t over-analyse this, wondering “is this really pleasant?” or “is this really some loving-kindness that I’m picking up on, or am I just imagining it?” It doesn’t matter if you’re imagining it, and it doesn’t matter if you include a sensation which is “really” just neutral – as though there were a truth of whether sensations are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, independent of how we relate to them. As you do this practice more, you will find that neutral sensations can be enjoyed – and eventually so can even unpleasant sensations.
  
  
• As you’re moving attention around to look for pleasure in this way, don’t worry about the intensity of these pleasant experiences. Probably you’ll mostly be finding very subtle, very small pleasures, at least at first. The intensity really doesn’t matter at all. If the sense of pleasantness fluctuates and even fades out for a while, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to be open to any pleasantness that might arise. Let this be a relaxed practice – we’re not penetrating or deconstructing experience with a laser-like attention here. It’s just a gentle receptivity to what feels good – a light opening, so that you’re not closed off to that dimension of experience.
  
  
• Now, hopefully some sources of pleasantness are a little more at the forefront of your mind – you are more aware of them than before you started looking. Your mind is more sensitive to arising sources of pleasure – in other words, it’s in a state of greater joy! Now move your attention back to your usual meditation object, and just notice how this mind state of joy endures in the background for a little while even as your attention goes back to the breath. There are a few ways this can manifest in experience:
  
  
  • It may feel very similar to extrospective awareness, but the body simply feels more pleasant!
    
    
  • There may be a feeling like a warm ball of joy or even love that shows up in your chest while you meditate. 
    
    
  • The meditation object may feel much more enjoyable, or even seem to be somehow merged with a pleasant sensation in the body – as though you were breathing joy.
    
    
  • You may simply have a greater background awareness of comfort, peacefulness, etc.
    
    
  • There are other ways it can manifest, as well as in combinations of these.
    
    
    
• If you repeat this process, this state of joy will abide in awareness for longer and longer periods – until eventually it becomes an effortless and automatic part of your meditation.
  
  
• As I mentioned briefly earlier, as your skill in meditation develops, you will find that your perception becomes more malleable. You will get better at finding more and more subtle pleasures, and so the joy that arises from this practice will become more robust. Then you will be more able to find joy in stimuli which were previously neutral, like the sensation of your hands touching. Eventually, you will even be able to find the pleasant aspects of even painful sensations – a warmth or a pleasant vibration in the midst of pain.

The practice I described above is, I hope, a useful addition, however a simple way to integrate this into the existing practices described in TMI is this: when you are checking in on body sensations, sounds, etc. to cultivate extrospective awareness, simply restrict your focus range to pleasant sensations and sounds. When you are checking in on mental activity to cultivate introspective awareness, watch out particularly for any pleasant mental states (e.g. mindfulness, loving-kindness, peacefulness, non-grasping, etc.)  and wholesome mental content (e.g. thoughts about meditation, thoughts of generosity, kindness, etc.).