As I wrote in a previous post, when I created my Garage Club, it wasn’t long before I developed the feeling that its real name should be “Club Joy”. That’s what felt right. And not long after this realization, I found myself reflecting on what, exactly, I think “joy” is.  

            I used to think of joy as something that popped up in my life. Joy has always seemed different to me than happiness, which I’ve tended to see as a more or less enduring state that results when a certain set of external or internal circumstances comes together. By contrast, I thought of joy as a momentary experience, like the blink of a light in the darkness.

            As for how we come to experience happiness and joy, here’s how I used to distinguish between the two: Happiness comes on gradually. It’s something you consciously create, by setting an intention to build it. Then you take certain steps that you believe will move you toward your goal of a state of happiness.

            What about joy, then? I used to feel that joy just, well… happens. It’s something we receive, not something we create. Either it arises, or it doesn’t, and we have very little control over whether that happens. 

            I tended to see joy as akin to a total stranger who knocks on your door and then, when you open it, both totally surprises you and presents you with pure delight as a gift. You never imagined this scenario, and yet, here’s Joy, showing up on your doorstep.

            Then, somehow, just as inexplicably, Joy fades away, vanishes into thin air. Sure, this visitor will most likely pop by again some other day. But you’ll never know when to expect it. Joy isn’t the kind of visitor who gives you a heads up so that you can mark your calendar and look forward to its arrival. 

            And because we never know when Joy might show up again, a thin layer of disappointment can settle over us once our unexpected visitor leaves. “Come back!” we want to call after it. But it’s gone, and it didn’t leave us a phone number or an email address. Not even a snail mail address. And that’s too bad, because if it had, we would definitely mail off a note, probably even an engraved invitation, and invite it to drop by again soon. “How about next Tuesday? Is 3:00 good for you?”

            Seeing Joy this way – as an unpredictable, even unreliable, guest, whose visits we are powerless to control, can take its toll on us. We want to spend time with Joy again, but we don’t know how to go about making that happen. We’re left feeling that we have no agency – that all we can do is wait passively until Joy deigns to knock on our door again.  

            In reflecting on this over the years, I concluded that, indeed, we can’t make Joy show up on our doorstep on command. Even so, I believe that we do have a certain kind of agency in our relationship with Joy: We can enter into a kind of collaboration with it. We can initiate this collaboration by creating a welcoming space in our heart and mind. Think of it as a cozy, peaceful guest room with Joy’s name on it.

            The first step in creating a guest room in our mind and heart is to let go of any disappointment we might be feeling at Joy’s absence. Then we place our focus on reorganizing and spiffing up the space in our mind and heart. This process is similar to what I did with my garage when I was working on my physical Garage Club/Club Joy. I started out with a dusty, unkempt garage, full of unappealing garage items; some genuine garbage that needed to be gotten rid of; and stuff to be recycled or tossed in the compost bin. I had a vision in my mind of how I wanted Garage Club to look, and I kept my focus on that, as I rearranged the contents of my garage and added new, more lighthearted elements to the décor.

            I don’t want to give you the impression that it was all smooth sailing, setting up Garage Club. I was really discouraged at first, right after I hung up the string lights on my bare garage walls. There was no way that struck me as fun or welcoming. Would anyone really enjoy sitting there? I could have obsessed over how disappointing it looked, then slipped into concluding that it would never look right, and then end up by abandoning the project entirely. 

            But I didn’t do that. Instead of focusing on what was wrong with the space, I kept returning in my mind to my vision of how I wanted Garage Club to look. And, little by little, it came together. Now I love the space, and my visitors seem delighted by it, too. I think it seems like such a surprise to them, this moment of joy that’s popped up unexpectedly from behind a garage door. And yet, Garage Club – Club Joy! – did not just happen. I had a vision for it, set my intention to create it, and then methodically went about moving toward my goal.             

            So, how can we go about creating the internal equivalent of Club Joy, a space in our mind and heart where Joy will feel like plopping down in an easy chair for a nice, long visit?  The very first step is to create a door in our mind and heart that we can open up to Joy – like my garage door, just in your mind.

            This is such an important step! The door to Joy’s guest room is a special door: a portal that will make it possible for Joy to join us. So, in our mind, we consciously create a door, and express a strong, clear intention as we’re doing so. Something along the lines of, “I’m creating this door so that I can open it up and invite Joy to come visit.”

            Setting our intention this way is like hanging a lovely sign on the other side of our door that says, “Coming Soon! Joy Guest Room!” Maybe it even makes note of some appealing perks: “Three meals a day included. Plus unlimited chocolate”. As soon as we do this, our intention – to welcome Joy as our guest – filters out beyond the door, out into the space where Joy is roaming around, doing whatever it does all day and night. And Joy thinks, “Hmm. This is intriguing. What’s going on here?” From that point on, Joy’s going to make a point of stopping by every so often, to see whether your guest room is open for visits yet.

            Once you’ve stated your intention, you can begin working on creating the interior of this room for Joy. And, based on my own experience setting up my physical Club Joy, my advice to you is this: Don’t wait until everything feels ideal and perfect inside your mind to open the door.

            Don’t think you have to have a perfectly calm and peaceful mind and heart in place before you open the door to your Joy guest room. If you put that pressure on yourself, you’ll never change the sign on the door from “Coming Soon!” to “Open for Joy!” Make peace with the fact that, if you’re at all like me, there will always be mental or emotional cobwebs in your mind, just the way my garbage pail and all my garage-y things are still in my garage.

            When I was setting up Club Joy, I didn’t have the goal of taking all of that distracting stuff out before I invited visitors in. I knew that was neither practical nor possible. Instead, I just set up a cute wooden screen at the back of my garage. Sure, anyone who comes by knows that the screen is there for a reason: There are things behind it that I don’t particularly want people to see. Not because they’re bad things, but because having to look at them might distract us from our visit with Joy.  Putting up the screen also conveys my intention: I choose not to focus on all of that stuff right now! After all, this is Club Joy, not Club All-The-Stuff-You-Associate-With-A-Garage.

            And so, my physical Club Joy is open, and no one seems deterred by all the unappealing clutter behind the screen. Folks come right on in. And so does Joy. Joy heard there was a club with its name on it, and it headed right over.

            So, as you’re creating your internal Club Joy, you don’t need to worry about all the odds and ends that are knocking around your head and heart space, either.  Just take the first, intentional step of creating the door that you can open up to Joy. And Joy can’t wait! It’s so excited for Opening Day.

* * *

         Because creating a door and opening it to Joy may feel a bit daunting, I’ve recorded a meditation/visualization that will guide you through that process. (And the text of the meditation follows, below the audio player.)

Opening the Door to Joy – Guided Meditation

Let’s start by finding a way to sit that will be comfortable for about ten minutes.  Or, you can lie down, if you prefer. Close your eyes, if that feels good to you. Otherwise, just lower your gaze so that you won’t be distracted by your surroundings.

Let’s take in one nice deep breath, and then let it out, slowly.

Then do that two more times, at your own pace.

Now, imagine that right in front of you, there’s a door. You can imagine it in your actual living space, or just in your mind, or in your heart – wherever you want it to be. Imagine whatever style of door appeals to you.

Now imagine that there’s a sign on this door. And the sign says, “Joy”. What this “Joy” sign on the door is telling you is that, right on the other side of that door, is Joy. It’s there right now.

I invite you to imagine your door once again. What color or colors would you like your door to be? Now, imagine that painting the door that color. And if you’d like to take the “Joy” sign off while you’re painting, that’s fine. Go right ahead. Just imagine taking it off and setting it down on the floor next to the door. Joy is still there on the other side, even if you take down the sign.

Go ahead and paint your door, using whatever color or colors you’d like.

Now that it’s painted, would you like to decorate your door in any way? Add a design? Or a picture of a person or an animal or a place you enjoy? Take a moment now to decorate your door.

Now, take a step back, so to speak, and take a look at your door. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t finished decorating it. You can come back another time and do more. The door that you can open up to Joy is a work in progress.

Now, let’s look again at the sign that says “Joy”. I invite you to hang it back up on the door, if you took it off earlier, and make any changes you’d like to the way it looks. Or, you can get rid of the sign entirely and just write the word “Joy” directly onto your door.  It’s up to you.  The main thing is that when you’re done, you should be able to see the word “Joy” on the door really, really clearly, even from a distance.

So, go ahead and take a little time to label your door “Joy”, in whatever way appeals to you.

Wonderful! So now you’re standing before your beautiful door that is labelled “Joy”. Really imagine standing in front of it. In a moment, you’re going to put your hand out and take hold of the doorknob. But first, check in with yourself.

How are you feeling about opening this door to Joy? I ask, because this idea of opening the door to Joy can be trickier than it sounds at first. Maybe you sat down with the thought that you’d just throw that door wide open, then stand there in the doorway with your arms wide open, and shout, “Come on in, Joy!” Maybe that’s how you’re still feeling. But maybe it’s not. Maybe the idea of opening the door to Joy leads us to put a little or a lot of pressure on ourselves. We might feel pressured to not just open the door to Joy, but to feel Joy, once the door’s open. Thoughts might come into this lovely room we’re starting to set up here, thoughts like, “Okay, I have to do it now. I have to feel joy!” or “What if I don’t feel joyful once I open the door?” Thoughts like that can come into our mind space. That happens.  But they can be a big distraction, and at the moment, we don’t need them here, not when we’re trying to focus on opening the door to Joy. So, we’re going to move them to another part of our mind space. That way they won’t distract us.

So, imagine a folding screen, made of whatever substance you like: wood, metal, ivy… Make it wide enough that it can stretch from one side of the space behind you to the other. Turn around and put this screen in place. Now, mentally gather up any worrying or pressuring thoughts into your hands. Then toss them up and over the top of the screen. Imagine the thoughts sinking to the floor behind the screen. They’ll sink because they’re heavy, and they’ll stay there, on the floor behind the screen.

Now turn your attention back to your door that opens to Joy. Spend a moment reacquainting yourself with the beautiful door you’ve created.  Look at the details. Look at where you’ve written the word “Joy”. 

Now let’s get ready to actually open your door to Joy. You can open it as far as you want: just a crack, or all the way, or somewhere in between. It’s entirely up to you, and any amount of opening is perfect. So now, in your imagination, reach your hand out and take hold of the doorknob. And open your door to Joy.

Now, no matter how far you’ve opened the door, just rest in that openness. And allow yourself to experience Joy, in whatever way it is present with you at this moment. Joy might arise as a feeling somewhere in your body, or as an image, or a thought. Or you might not notice anything at all. That is totally fine, too. No pressure. So let’s relax in this space of openness for a minute or two and receive whatever arises. And I’ll let you know when we’re done with this part of the meditation.

Okay. Great.

Take another look at your door to Joy. And, no matter what you experienced in this last part of our meditation, I invite you to inwardly give thanks for that. And even if it seems to you that you didn’t experience anything at all, know that Joy was with you in the space you’ve created. Know that Joy is always there, on the other side of that door that you decorated and labelled with the word “Joy”.

What you do now is up to you. You can leave the door open, or close it. Whatever you want. And remember that you now know where Joy is located: Right behind that door. So that now, you always have access to it, and to the Joy behind it. You always have the wastebasket, too, in case thoughts come in that want to distract you from opening your door to Joy.  I invite you to visit your door often. Open it up and see how Joy appears to you.

Now we’re going to start gently and gradually returning our attention to where we’re gathered together.

As you’re ready, I invite you to open your eyes.