“Child of light/joy/creativity, you know not that the light/joy/creativity is in you.  Yet you will find it through its witnesses, for having given light to them they will return it.  Each one you see in light brings your light closer to your awareness….. Love always leads to love.” Course In Miracles.

We all carry the spark of creativity within us.  When I don’t fret over my physical form, my ego demands and materialism and just focus on my creativity, my connections with others and my inner state … life is a beautiful place.

To share joy is to keep it alive, to allow it to grow, to help spark it in others. When we are joyful we pull others into our joyful orbit.

So the first step in being more joyful is to share what we have.  This can be a smile, a kind word, a communication of thanks.  Anything we can share to help others.  When I am tired or not feeling well I want to withdraw.  It is hard to share joy, creativity and light when we disconnect or isolate from others.

That is why darkness dwells in isolation.  There are times when time alone in creative thought or mindful contemplation is empowering.  This is a conscious tuning in to state.  This is not the same as an unconscious or conscious disconnect from what is.

“The ego analyzes, higher consciousness accepts.”  When we accept what is, then we feel connected. When we feel connected we are at peace.

So the second step to a joyful state is to accept.  Acceptance does not mean to give up or to be passive.  It means to pour our energy into what we can change; like our state and not what we can not change like the loss we have experienced.  If the car is wrecked, the house is foreclosed upon, the relationship over, the job lost….  those are things we cannot go back in time and undo.  We can accept that which IS and move our focus to sparking our creative energy to live in solutions that will move us forward.   When we relive these events and overanalyze ‘what they mean’ over and over, then we stay stuck.  We cut ourselves off from creative solution.

“…..to analyze means to break down or to separate out.  The attempt to understand totality by breaking it down is clearly the characteristically contradictory approach of the ego to everything.  The ego believes that power, understanding and truth lie in separation, and to establish this belief it must attack.  Unaware that the belief cannot be established, and obsessed with the conviction that separation is salvation, the ego attacks everything it perceives by breaking it into small, disconnected parts, without meaningful relationships and therefore without meaning.  The ego will always substitute chaos for meaning, for if separation is salvation, harmony is threat.”

Third we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable.  When we close ourself off and believe that we are alone and will do it alone, then we suffer.  We must learn to ask for help, to share what we have, to accept what is and to let others share what they have with us.  Cutting others off is a form of arrogance.  When we think “I got this or I can handle this” we may be headed for suffering.

“Arrogance is the denial of love, because love shares and arrogance withholds.”