🌿 Spiritual Sunday 🌿   

🌟 Why Joy Is Better Than Happiness 🌈

We hear people say, “All I want is to be happy” 😌. We all have a longing for happiness, for certain. Some of us make it the goal of our lives to be happy. If happiness is the goal in life, you will most likely always be wanting. Mainly because happiness is almost always circumstantial. It’s almost always something we experience, not actually something we can achieve. For example, “If I got a promotion, I’d be happy” 💼. “If I lost weight, I’d be happy” 🏋️‍♀️. If I were popular, I’d be happy” 🤳. “When I retire, I’ll be happy” 🏖️. “When I am in a relationship, I’ll be happy” 💞.

We want pleasures and comforts. “When I get what I want, then I’ll be happy” 🎁. I argue this and tell you that if our goal in life is to achieve happiness alone, then we will always be wanting. In short, we as human beings long for happiness but we are created for joy 😇.

Happiness and Joy… two entirely different things.

HAPPINESS: 1) Our notion of what happiness means is very self-focused, i.e. “how am I feeling?”, “how am I doing?” 🤷‍♂️. 2) We have this false idea that when we have a heightened sense of euphoria, that means we are happy. Conversely, if we do not experience this euphoria, then we must not be happy. It seems we just hamstring ourselves every which way if we pursue happiness alone 🔄.

JOY: Joy is the enduring and penetrating sense of positive well-being 🌻. When we look for and acknowledge our many blessings (and they are countless), and appreciate every detail of our lives, joy naturally grows within us, and shines outward…no matter what our situation is (job status, overweight, single, poor, etc.) ✨.

Well, what if you’re in the middle of a crisis, in the middle of sorrow, or uncertainty, sadness, etc. Can you still have joy… this enduring and penetrating sense of positive well-being? Yes, you can. Why? Simply put… Love ❤️. When you learn to love YOU, truly and unconditionally, you choose joy in every situation, in every circumstance. It then becomes easier to love others, forgive others, and to ask for forgiveness from others. You become a living example of what Love is. This all brings true inner peace ☮️.

So, I invite you today to choose joy 🌈✨.

By choosing joy, you are saying… “Regardless of what happens to me, regardless of my situation, I know that I am loved and I have the power to love others” 🌟. That is why joy is the gigantic secret of life. We’ve all met that person who is going through something really tough, but he/she wears a genuine smile and shares that positiveness with those around them. I promise you it is because that person has chosen JOY 😊.

Happiness is a wonderful feeling, but true joy is more… it is a deep-rooted, inspired feeling, a byproduct of appreciation and trust that we are infinitely loved beyond imagination 💖.

So, I hope life brings you those wonderful moments of heightened euphoria, remembering that they come and they go. But I invite each of you to purposefully choose joy, every day, and experience (as Matthew Kelly writes in his book, A Call To Joy), “the all-intoxicating feeling of becoming” who you were created to be 🌺💫.