Are You Happy Or Joyful? A Process Of Self-Actualization

Are You Happy Or Joyful? A Process Of Self-Actualization.

By Bart Sharp

Are you happy or joyful?  Do you know the difference between the two concepts?

Happy is more of a state of doing while joy is a state of being.  We do things that make us happy.  Joy is a perception when all of us feels complete.  For most people joy is a transitory emotion because somewhere in their childhood they lost their connection to joy.  Somewhere they bought a lie that they not wonderful and lovable. As a child our natural state is joy but somewhere we believed it was not so.

Happiness is the satisfaction of doing, having things and/or life being successful.  What is most misidentified with happiness is that people seek joy through happiness.  Thus they require them selves to seek activities, things and relationships that they like. They feel better in the activities but the experience does not permanently fill them.  So they seek more happiness provoking experiences.

For those who lost their joy and seek to find it we begin a process of discovery.  It is the process of finding where we have become separate from that joyful self in our past. For many it is looking at our childhood at the pains, abuses, disappointments and more where we lost faith and believed we were not love or deserved love.  With each part we heal we experience a new level of wholeness and joy again.  The more that we resolve joy comes into our life.  Through the process of uncovering many of these misidentifcations we reach a critical mass that we go over the top and joy becomes our state of being.  It is naturally inside of us.

The critical mass is a place that is a level of change that is different for everyone.  Something shifts inside of us that we relax into our selves and joy is us.  It is no longer a state that we achieve and then lose it.  Then doing things that makes us happy are different, we no longer need them as much.  We can enjoy them but they are not to raise us out of a deficit.  We are no longer lacking, we are joy.

In addition, there are experiences that do bring a deep sense of completion inside of us whether we have joy within us or not.  I find this when I commune with nature, sometimes in mass, meditation, a heartfelt experience with another or an inspiring movie.  Just to name a few that I have experienced.  However if you experience these things and it feels like a plateau of joy.  Then later goes away and you return back to a place that you feel lacking you have yet to hit the critical mass where joy is permanent.  However, these experiences are worthwhile as they show us what we have to look forward to.

It keeps coming back to letting go of our pains and discovering who we are underneath our anguish.  It is well worth the adventure.