Choosing Joy: Why and How

Choosing Joy: Why and How

Are you at home in joy, or is joy just a place you visit from time to time when the stars align and conditions are somehow just right? For far too many of us, joy is less like home base, and more like an infrequently visited vacation place, which we think of wistfully and longingly during the emotionally turbulent trials and tribulations of Earth life. But according to the way you are designed, you are intended to live in joy. Joy is to be your emotional “default setting”—the emotional state you naturally come back to whenever the highs and lows level out. Actually, the highs and lows aren’t a part of the state in which you were designed to live—they are unique to the current tumultuous reality state in which we currently dwell here on Earth. In the reality state in which we were designed to thrive, there are no lows—just degrees of joy.

So what is joy, anyway? Joy is your emotional response to higher frequency. It is catalyzed by being within the frequency range of your Spirit, the highest-frequency aspect of you. Joy is the feeling you experience when you are aligned with the Divine Design for Harmony and Wholeness, and is a sign that you are on the right track—a beacon you can use to navigate upward in frequency back to your true Home in the Divine Design. This “Home” to which I am referring is the blissful reality referred to in sacred texts as “The Garden of Eden.” It is the highest frequency at which you can manifest as a human being. When you are within range of it, you experience joy. When you drop in frequency below the vibrational range of Home, you experience “less-than-joy”—sometimes much less than joy!

If joy is our natural state, why would we stay out of joy for even a minute? Heaven knows, joy is certainly more pleasurable than less-than-joy! Until now, most of us didn’t understand that we had a choice to be in or out of joy; didn’t understand the “mechanics” of being in joy. We were victims of our emotions—but we don’t have to be. In a nutshell, here’s how you came to primarily reside outside the realm of joy. This is the selfsame story as the “Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden,” and can be summed up like this: “Adam and Eve were in the Garden and all was blissful until they disregarded what God told them in favor of what the serpent was telling them, and suddenly, they found themselves in a world of hurt.” That’s essentially why you are absent from the realm of joy, too.

In the story of the Fall, God represents your all-wise, perfectly aligned Spirit, whose motives are Wholeness and Harmony, and whose milieu is the Unified Field of Oneness—the realm of joy. The serpent represents your reptilian brain, the primitive brain structure whose motives are fear and separation, and whose milieu is duality—the realm of misery. The reptilian brain’s first lieutenant is your ego. Your ego dances to the reptilian brain’s dissonant tune, advancing its notions that you are a stand-alone entity, that there’s never enough, and that the world is out to get you. Not very joyful stuff! (And all lies, by the way.) The truth is that you are one with all Creation, you have access to unlimited resources, and the Divine Design is set up to support you completely. Definitely joyful!

Fortunately, the same free will that gets us expelled from the realm of joy can be used to get us back there. By doing the reverse of what Eve and Adam did in the story of the Fall, we can reclaim our tenure in the realm of joy. We can choose to stop allowing our egos to deceive us—stop allowing them to depress our frequency, and thus, our emotional experience. We can tune our frequency to our Spirits’ messages of Love, Oneness, and Harmony instead of remaining under the influence of our egos’ messages of fear and separation. We can choose joy! We can deliberately create the conditions that facilitate joy, and after we are practiced at doing this, we will find that our default setting is higher. The more time you spend in joy, the higher your emotional set point will naturally be. And the higher your set point, the more joy-enhancing the conditions that manifest in your life will be, and the easier it will be to stay in joy! Prime Principle, the law of attraction, makes this so.

About now, you may be asking “How? How do I choose joy?” First, understand that your Spirit is always radiating Love to you, always seeking to align you, always ready to restore you to harmony, always ready to pull you close, back up to the frequency level of bliss. Know that the Divine Design for Wholeness and Harmony is always in operation, ready for you to take your place in it. Since joy is your natural state, you don’t have to make joy happen, you simply need to allow it. Like a helium balloon that rises heavenward when you release it, all you need do is let go of trying to control your experience at the human, ego-dominated level, and rise up to take your place at higher frequency! Release your life and your affairs to the stewardship of God In You, listen to and obey your Spirit above all, and trust that with your Spirit in charge, you are always guided to greater and greater harmony.

The external confirmation of your increased tenure in the joy space will soon become evident, but at first, your outer experience may be anything but inspiring of joy. In order to turn things around, you have to refuse to be hooked into the ego’s evidence-based approach to sizing up the situation and dictating emotional response based on what it finds to confirm its fears. Instead, focus on that which is beautiful, that which confirms the integrity of the Divine Design, and connects you consciously with harmony and wholeness. Purposefully create conditions that support you in raising your frequency and experiencing joy. Do what you know from experience helps you access happy feelings—that supports a closeness with your Spirit and helps you feel more connected to the Whole. Put on some uplifting music. Meditate. Go out in nature. Play with your dog. Dance. Sing. Take a walk. Watch the sun set. Do something egoless for someone purely out of Love. Do all of the above! Whatever you love to do, whatever lightens and lifts you, do it—do it with the intention of rising to joy.

And be thankful. Gratitude is communion with your Spirit, and is a powerful tool for raising frequency. Whenever you feel even a hint of joy, go immediately into gratitude to your Spirit. Use gratitude like you’d use bellows to transform a spark into a flame. When you feel your frequency rising, use your breath and your gratitude to go higher. Say “Thank you, thank you, thank you” to your Spirit and feel your frequency soar! When ego threatens to pull you down out of joy and back into duality with its lower frequency messages of fear, judgment, doubt, or general disgruntlement, don’t struggle against it—let that be your cue to relax back into the loving, healing embrace of your Spirit and the Divine Design for Wholeness and Harmony.

By using this simple, but powerful approach, you will learn to consciously rise in frequency, raise your emotional set point, and spend a lot more time in your true home—joy. This is not just a blessing for you, it’s a blessing to all whose lives you touch—and, indeed, to all Creation, as when your frequency is raised, the frequency of the Whole is raised, and we are all that much closer to Home.

Julia Rogers Hamrick has been a spiritual-growth facilitator since the mid-1980s, and is the author of Choosing Easy World and Recreating Eden. Julia teaches about the relationship between vibrational frequency and experience.