A guided meditation on sympathetic joy (mudita) with Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein.
We live in a society that believes in winners and losers. We spend many hours watching competitive sports. We are happy when our team wins, and we hate the other team when they win. We compare our own successes with those of our peers. We often envy and resent the success and happiness of peers as if they are taking something away from us, as if there is a little stockpile of success and happiness somewhere and they have taken more than their share, leaving less for us. The other person's success is a reflection of our lack thereof. Or is it? Is it possible that the amount of love, happiness and success available to worldly beings is not finite? How would it feel to rejoice in the happiness of our fellow humans?
Mudita (sympathetic joy) is a pure, profound and liberating state. Developing mudita unhooks us from the envy, avarice, comparisons and judgement, which underlie the unhappiness of the human condition. In the celebration of the happiness of those around us we create a brightness of mind and heart that benefits ourselves and everyone whose lives we touch - Charlotte Bell
Sympathetic joy is the ability to feel joy in the happiness of others. Its near enemy is a sense of comparison -- concluding that our experience makes us superior, inferior, or equal to someone else. This is the force of assessing ourselves in relation to someone else's experience. We separate ourselves and in our separateness measure, evaluate, and affirm ourselves in relation to someone else's life. Comparison itself, regardless of the conclusion we draw, is a source of pain and delusion in the mind. When we touch the spirit of sympathetic joy in our heart, it connects us with the happiness of all life. Sympathetic joy embraces all those enjoying happiness themselves and brings us together with them. Their well-being is our own. - Jack Kornfield
This teaching is given freely courtesy of Dharma Seed.
www.dharmaseed.com
May you know the absolute joy of your absolute nature.
The gift of the Dharma excels all gifts;
The taste of the Dharma excels all tastes;
Delight in the Dharma excels all delights.
The eradication of Craving overcomes all sorrow.
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