Cultivating Joy

I can't take any credit for formulating the concept I'm writing about this week, but it's something that I want to share with you all anyway.It's a very simple idea and it is this:Joy is the default setting of our minds and if we can get rid of mental chatter we will experience abundant joy.When we enter a state in which our minds are both relaxed and alert a profound sense of joy spontaneously arises. This has been experienced and has been spoken and/or written about for centuries by many great teachers.This state of mind can be practised and cultivated so that it becomes easy to experience joy without any external stimulus. We often feel like our happiness and joyfulness depends on external circumstances. We feel happy or sad when we are appreciated/unappreciated by our boss in work, when we experience pleasure/pain, or when our football team wins/loses.This realisation that joy is available to us independently of anything outside ourselves is an antidote to greed. So often we are chasing money, pleasure, power, love in order to bring us joy and happiness but if we realise that joy really does come from within (and in a very concrete, practical and 'practisable' way) then contentment will also arise spontaneously.So how to practise this?There are so many ways to cultivate a relaxed and alert mind and the mindfulness movement is making great strides towards bringing these practices into the zeitgeist. But even during our ashtanga yoga practice we can aim to still the mind. The tools are all there inside the ashtanga system; breath, bandha, drishti and asanas. If we can let go of the striving to achieve this posture or that posture we can really start to experience this state where are minds are clear. It just takes a little bit more focus on the more subtle aspects of the ashtanga practice. Then joy, happiness and contentment will come.Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah.Inspiration for this blog post comes from the Finding Mastery podcast