Dear Friends,<\/p>\n
In Joy on Demand<\/em>, Chade-Meng<\/span> Tan describes four sources of joy, two of which he says are short-lived, and two which are “very important and highly durable.”<\/p>\n The two that he describes as short-lived are the joy of novelty, and the joy of perceived agency. The joy of novelty is the excitement of experiencing something new, and the joy of perceived agency is “discovering that what you initially thought was totally beyond your control is something you can make some choices about.”<\/p>\n The joy of novelty quickly wears off because the new thing quickly becomes not so new any more (e.g. ask anyone who got a new smart phone\u00a0a year ago). The joy of perceived agency dissipates because we get used to being able to do it.<\/p>\n As an example of these two types of short-lived joy, Meng<\/span> told a story from\u00a0when his daughter was about 3 months old. He had a little toy car, and he showed her how to push the car forward. She picked up the car and pushed it forward, and burst into laughter from being able to do this amazing feat! And a second time, and a third… But after a few minutes, the laughter died away as the fascination with this new skill faded.<\/p>\n In the Q&A session of the fourth talk<\/a> in the Daily Life Practice Retreat, Andrea Fella<\/span> describes a similar type of reaction that you might have noticed in the daily practices you picked. One of the participants commented that they noticed they initially were really mindful of their task, but felt that it went in and out after a while.<\/p>\n Her response (somewhat paraphrased by me):<\/p>\n You mentioned at first it worked well, and then it kind of dropped off. That is a very common pattern, and probably will happen for most of the participants this week. In the first couple days there will be a lot of juice, “oh here’s my tasks” and then there’s a little bit of “you can do it” – you might find yourself able to be with your activity.<\/p>\n But something about our minds – once we figured we figured something out, the interest drops. “Oh, I’ve got that. Check. Done.” And then we see the mindfulness fall away.<\/p>\n At that point, there needs to be a bit of a reminder<\/strong> – “oh, okay, I’m seeing this habit of mind to feel like I’ve figured it out and to let go of that interest”.<\/p>\n Sometimes the interest and incentive falls off too, when we see that there’s less reactivity or charge in a situation around the mindfulness. The motivation has been to reduce that reactivity somewhat, so when the reactivity reduces, we’re like, “oh, we don’t need to be mindful there anymore”.<\/p>\n So if you can, in those moments of seeing it fall off during the week, just see if you can reconnect with the intention<\/strong>. “Okay, I want to keep trying, keep engaging with this. There may be still more to learn here.” Maybe at that point, it’s not so much to force yourself to be mindful, but being more curious about why you’re not mindful<\/strong>. What is in the way?<\/p>\n You might start with some mindfulness, and then you see your mind drift off into thought.\u00a0So getting curious about that as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What have you noticed with your tasks? Feel free to comment below, or if you’re shy, you can share with just me by email.<\/p>\n What’s that? You wanted to know what the two important and durable types of joy are? Well, you’ll have to check the blog tomorrow!<\/em> \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n With best wishes, Dear Friends, In Joy on Demand, Chade-Meng Tan describes four sources of joy, two of which he says are short-lived, and two which are “very important and highly durable.” The two that he describes as short-lived are the joy of novelty, and the joy of perceived agency. The joy of novelty is the excitement of experiencing something new,\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[44,86,25,84],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jan-2017","tag-andrea-fella","tag-chade-meng-tan","tag-daily-life","tag-joy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1149,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions\/1149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grzesina.net\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAndrea<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"