Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Awakening Joy: Practice as a Path of Happiness

With James Baraz recorded on January 13, 2019.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

Joy is both a Factor of Enlightenment and one of the four Divine Abodes. Today, as we are bombarded with news that heightens our fear and sadness about the world, more than ever it’s vital to understand the importance of joy as a central aspect of spiritual practice. We need to remember how to stay connected to that place inside that makes life worth living. In this session we explore principles and practices from the teachings to incline the mind towards true well-being.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Catherine McGee – Week of April 25, 2022

    This week’s theme is “Exploring and Developing the Power of a Light Touch”. A light touch can allow our practice to unfold more easefully, make the depths of our hearts more available and create a greater agility in our relationships with the world. With our body as the primary ground for our practice we will explore different ways to cultivate this kind of attention, enjoy the fruits of our efforts and attend to what might hinder this natural capacity

    Read More

  • Daigan Gaither

    Getting Real with Spiritual Bypass

    Spiritual bypassing is a superficial way of glossing over problems in a way that might make us feel better in the short term, but ultimately solves nothing and just leaves the problem to linger on. This session is an opportunity to begin to understand the concept of Spiritual Bypass (as coined by John Welwood in his book “Toward a Psychology of Awakening”) and how to practice with it.

    Read More

  • Stephen Fulder

    Trust and Faith (Saddha) – The World is Not Against Us

    How can we develop trust, steadiness and inner freedom, qualities which contribute to our well-being and resilience, and help us to help others? Trust (saddha in Pali) is the first of the Five Spiritual Powers, which are Trust, Energy, Mindfulness, Calm, and Wisdom. Trust is the primary means to dissolve and transform our anxieties, fears,…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of February 13, 2023

    This week’s topic is “Awakening in the Midst of Life”. Our relationship with life is revealed through our words, thoughts and actions. Reflecting on these in the light of the Dharma opens up possibilities of transformation and wellbeing. During this week we’ll explore ways of perceiving and engaging with experience that can help us to deepen our understanding and awaken to a fuller way of being in the world.

    Read More

  • Joy is Always Available

    On autopilot, our mind often resists opening to joy with: “But right now in my life, there is …” So we explore what stands in our way of the unexpected ordinariness of joy. We’ll discover how the awakening factor of meditative joy (piti) illuminates our capacity to open to delight and rapture, allowing our hearts…

    Read More

  • Pamela Weiss

    Faith: Cultivating an Undivided Life

    The divisiveness we see around us begins in the binary mind: self and other, me and you, us and them. In each moment, we like and don’t like, pick and choose, evaluate and judge. How can we untangle this tangle? This talk will explore how practice helps liberate us from our views and opinions, and…

    Read More