Remembering to Remember - A pathway to Effortless Joy

I was inspired to write this post based on a workshop my good friend and soul sister Teri Jo Wheeler and I are teaching this Sunday called Lighten Up! Falling into Effortless Joy.

But I woke up this morning, and I wasn't feeling all that joyful. And I started having self doubt like "how am I supposed to teach a workshop on effortless joy and how happiness is already inside us when I don't feel happy or joyful all the time?

And how am I supposed to write a blog post on the subject when I'm not feeling it?"

And it caused me to look deeper into the whole notion of Effortless Joy, and I realized that in reality, having an expectation that we should be totally joyful and happy all the time is unrealistic, because we are human, and there is a whole array of emotional experiences we are here to have. 

Emotions come and go, thoughts come and go, experiences come and go, but what is it that is always here? In a world that is constantly changing, what is the one constant, effortless, unchanging element?

Meditators know what I'm talking about, and it's defined by many names but can never really be defined, because it is the one thing that exists outside of concepts, and within which all concepts appear.

It's Presence. Consciousness. Awareness. The One Eternal Witness. 

The experiencer of what is experienced, 

The seer of what is seen. 

No matter what emotions and thoughts are on the surface, joyful, excited, sad, frustrated, there is still this aware presence within it all that remains unchanged and uncolored by the experience.

This aware presence has no agenda to fix or change what appears within it, it simply notices it with neutrality. It's our human ego, which is constructed out of thoughts and beliefs from our conditioning and forms our identity that judges what shows up before us and within us.

And I realized today that the goal is not to try and feel Joyful all the time, the goal is to Remember to Remember the One who witnesses it all, (because we so often get sped up and caught up in our humanness and forget). 

The more we remember to remember, the more time we spend noticing the one who notices, and resting back into the experiencer of the experience, the more effortless life becomes on all levels.

Emotions flow through us like passing clouds, instead of sticking around and multiplying, churning into a full on storm. 

When we rest in awareness, we stop resisting the emotions, and they come up and out of us naturally, revealing the clear sunny skies that are there behind the clouds always. 

The sunny skies are like our natural resting place, which is happy, joyous and free. Like a baby, they don't have to try and find the "bright side" in life, they just live there, and when emotions come up, they express it and let it go in the moment, and then rest in the happiness and wonder of Life again. 

It's a process to get back to that state of complete surrender and absolute union with pure Consciousness, because through our conditioning and the development of our human ego, we have accumulated many sticking points in our awareness, areas that pull us out of the moment and into human drama again. And that's okay! That's why we become human beings, so we can fall asleep, get identified with limited ideas about ourselves, just so we can have something to experience waking up from!

The key is compassion for ourselves, forgiveness for the ways we still get caught up and pulled in, and a commitment to gently bring our attention back to the One, the Eternal Witness. 

We just need to Remember to Remember, as often as we can, and inevitably, Effortless Joy and abiding Happiness and Freedom will become our experience.

In Love, Joy, and Compassion for all human hearts,
~Jessica

P.S. If you live in the Seattle area, come on out and join us for our workshop this Sunday September 9th from 3-6pm at East West Bookshop! Click for details