Joy on Demand summary

If you’ve ever exercised, you know how difficult it can be to get started and how fulfilling it usually is once you do. Well, the same goes for meditation. This mental practice is initially challenging, but it comes with innumerable benefits, the first of which is an experience of profound calm.

In fact, through regular meditation, you can learn how to actively calm your mind. Naturally, this doesn’t happen overnight. At first, your mind will be susceptible to the same incessant thoughts that it’s prone to now. But as you practice, you’ll be able to reliably calm your thoughts during meditation.

Before we get into the mechanics of exactly how meditation works, it’s important to understand how you can make it a daily practice. It may be tricky, but it’s likely not as difficult as you think.

In fact, you can easily make meditation more accessible by harnessing the power of joy. Here’s how:

If you’re like most people, the last blink probably made you wonder how little effort you can put in while still deriving benefits from your meditation practice. It’s a natural question, and the answer is sure to take your breath away.

Quite literally, a single inhalation and exhalation are enough to experience some of the benefits meditation has to offer. Don’t buy it? Just try this exercise out for yourself:

Imagine walking into a room full of cash and being told you could take home as much money as you could carry. You probably wouldn’t settle for some spare change, right? Well, the same thing goes for meditation.

The breath you learned about in the last blink is the equivalent of spare change – and you can easily have much more than that. But to advance beyond this basic point, you first need to establish the foundation of meditation: settling the mind through anchoring.

Pour water out onto a downward slope, and it will effortlessly flow down it, following its natural inclination. In the same way, for you to flow toward joy, you must become naturally inclined to feel happiness.

The first step is to make your mind more familiar with joy. This is a simple principle but a logical one as well. After all, when the mind becomes acquainted with the experience of joy, it simultaneously learns to notice it more easily. From there, the mind even begins to seek out joy and works to create the conditions under which it will occur.

Just about everybody has experienced a bad day at work. But did you know that you can turn such an experience around by employing a simple mental exercise?

Well, you can. Just by thinking thoughts of loving-kindness, you can transform your mood into one of great happiness. Here’s how: