Abundance of Joy

Creating New Understandings

“Joy is a sound investment that delivers great returns.” —Words from Spirit

Life can be viewed as an investment.

Each day we invest our time and energy in making deposits and withdrawals into our ‘life’ savings account. Joy, love and laughter are examples of energy deposits that credit our personal account; they make us feel good, and they improve our life experience. Guilt, blame and stress are examples that draw down on our account; they lessen our enjoyment of life.

The personal energy investments (PEIs) that we choose to transact each day are vitally important because these investments are the ones that return to us a healthy (or not-so-healthy) state of wellbeing; these are the ones that determine how much pleasure we get from life.

This book aims to teach you how to enhance your PEIs through engaging joy. Becoming more conscious of your daily PEIs and using joy as a tool to improve them is one of the best measures you can take to increase your investment portfolio!

Before you progress to the many joy-enhancing techniques and derive the most from them, there are a few understandings that I need to bring to light.

The Truth about Joy

Joy is a great feeling that is very beneficial to our lives. It has many positive effects on our health and wellbeing. However, not many of us live each day with joy! Why? Most of us wait for joy to happen in our lives. We wait for good times to occur, for our lives to improve, for happy occasions to manifest, for hard times to change, for relationships to blossom. We wait until life conditions are good, and then we feel joy.

This is not a very effective method, for a lot of time can be wasted in waiting for the right circumstances to appear in our lives.

There is a better way, one that involves less waiting and more creating! This technique, which you are about to learn, provides greater opportunities for joy to flow through your life daily. It differs from the norm because it takes a holistic approach to joy and because it teaches you how to channel your personal energies in the right way. In applying this method you will see that life conditions don’t have to be exactly as you want them to be in order for you to experience joy.

Fabulous!

Sourcing Joy

Most of us have learned that joy is a delightful physical emotion found in satisfying experiences, material items, great relationships and happy thoughts. These sources—which bring pleasure to the body and mind—are wellsprings for joyful feelings.

To increase our ability to experience more joy throughout life, we need to expand our options. A key point that helps expand our ability to experience joy is in the understanding of where joy originates. Identifying the point of origin of joy means we become privy to a source that is rich in joyful feelings.

Where Joy Begins

Contrary to what we may think, joy does not begin as an emotion. Our emotions are lifted as a result of feeling joy, but the source from where joy springs is deep within.

Our spirit—our spirit-self—is the birthplace, the abode, and the point of origin of joy. It’s the source, the feeling from where joy blooms.

This understanding is quite different from the norm. Most understand joy as a physical emotion (as opposed to a feeling) that delights the body and mind. But if we understand joy purely as a physical emotion our potential to experience joy becomes limited.

When we understand that joy is the fabric and the very nature of our spirit-self, and that we have the ability to tap into this rich source of joy, we harness our full potential.

Being able to access joy of our spirit-self is what takes our experience of joy to a whole new level. It’s the cornerstone to experiencing greater joy throughout our lives.

Our Spirit-Self has Value

To try and understand the nature of joy without including our spirit-self in the equation is a mistake, for it means that we miss out on a whole load of fabulous feelings that deeply enrich our lives, feelings that have the potential to sustain us in joy for long periods of time.

Our spirit-self has many life skills to offer. In fact, when it comes to joy, it has an abundance of skills to offer, and the good news is that learning to access the joy within our spirit self is easy. It’s my area of expertise, and I will show you how to tap into this amazing resource. Excellent!

So our approach to joy will be all-inclusive. All aspects of our being—body, mind and spirit—have a role to play when it comes to joy, and all aspects are important.

Relating to Life

Along with our holistic approach we will also take into account how we relate to the energy of life through our PEIs and how the energy of life responds to our daily PEIs. There’s a lot going on that we don’t see.