#5 Joy in the World 2020 Presence

The Month for Joyful Presence
June 10 – July 19, 2020

Attend to the skin
As a subtle boundary
Containing vastness.
Enter that pulsing immensity
Discover that you are not separate
From anything there.
There is no inside,
There is no outside,
There is no other—
No object to meditate upon that is not you.
–Yukti 25 from The Radiance Sutras by Lorin Roche, PhD
(A yukti is a meditation/teaching/instruction)

These forty days bring us into the height of summer’s passion and beauty.

They come with a luscious invitation:

Practice instilling joy as a stimulating, bubbling, tumultuous presence in your skin itself, and inside your skin, along with all the glorious immensity that lives within that “subtle boundary.”

So we are assured by the divine players in the Radiance Sutras.

Imagine that joyful presence as also divine. Imagine that energy luxuriating first in every inch of your skin.

Then as it permeates deeper, sense this passionately alive joy being welcomed with cries of happiness and open arms into the inner vastness. Watch it with inner eyes as this joy curls its way through all that our bodies hold, all the flesh, all the organs, all the fluids, all the glands, all the substance that is this human body, making its buoyant self at home inside us. And suffusing all that vastness with divine joy – all the multitudes and universes we contain.

Endow that joyful presence with color, with scent, with music, remembering that joy is one of the beautiful aspects of the holy.

The elements also are suffused with the presence of joy. As we travel through the month, we feel divine joy’s presence in the earth’s aliveness, the water’s dance, the fire’s passion, the air’s gift of breath.

Joy soaks us with its presence, surrounds us palpably so elegantly and totally that we cannot help opening to its embrace.

It is here. Even today, no matter what else is happening in the world, Joy is. Experience its activating presence inside the skin;
hear its songs.

Joy alive in the world.
And in me.
Praise. Praise. Praise.