By Dr. Laura Heaphy
Published August 2, 2022
Everyone has hard days (including therapists!) and I find myself looking for reading that inspires me or helps me as I work every day with people who are searching for ways to enjoy life more.
I’ve recently been reading “The Book of Joy” by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. This book has helped me to further accept that there aren’t magic solutions to emotional pain or instant fixes to my problems; although, that doesn’t mean I’m always perfectly peaceful and accepting when I’m having a moment of sadness or frustration! I’ve found that reading this book has helped me to connect with some of the patience and acceptance exhibited by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.
The Dalia Lama explains that people often ask him for the quickest way to ease their suffering. When we are feeling emotional pain, we want the answers, and we want the pain to go away. However, as the Dalia Lama highlights, it is often impossible to quickly change that feeling. Archbishop Tutu also emphasizes that feelings and reactions are normal, but oftentimes those feelings are made worse by frustration. He says, “So much of what causes heartache is our wanting things to be different than they are”.
The idea of accepting our emotions sounds so simple. However, for me it is certainly trickier in practice. There are many wonderful conveniences associated with the modern world, and it is also very hard to be a human right now. It is easy to feel like the only way to live is to always be busy and always be multitasking. That means it takes concerted effort to carve out time to check in with how I’m feeling and to accept why I’m feeling that way.
The Dalia Lama shares his view on the cause of anxiety saying “Stress and anxiety often come from too much expectation and too much ambition. Then when we don’t fulfil that expectation or achieve that ambition, we experience frustration.” So…if we want to be happier, we need to want less? This is contradictory to the encouragement most of us have gotten to work hard throughout life and to have ambitious goals. The book explores how when we see that love and connection represent our basic emotional needs, we can be more conscious about how we live and avoid getting pulled into the daily achievement-oriented grind.
So where do I go from here? My takeaways from this reading (so far) are to meditate more, try to have simpler, achievable expectations, and to be kind to myself when I (inevitably) fail at being more present and get stressed out. This seems to be at least a good starting point to making more space for joy.
Reference:
Lama, D., Tutu, D. & Abrams, D. (2016). The book of joy: Lasting happiness in a changing world.
New York: Avery.
