Download - Yang-Sheng

you get happiness, when you achieve the big, beautiful
house, then you will be depressed because . . .
what’s next? Which cloud are you going to pursue
now?
You see, joy is not achieved; joy has to be
discovered. Joy is what you already have—you are
born with it—it’s deeply woven into your body,
mind and spirit. You have to nourish this concept
because joy is yours. It’s within, just like your inborn
healing ability. But because of the culture or
our upbringing or personal environments we become
distracted and unaware of what is really ours, and
then we confuse happiness with true joy. Yet no
matter what, joy is like a blue sky: it is there all the
time underneath everything else. You just have to
understand, you just have to realize, it’s with you all
the time. Discovering joy requires a change in consciousness.
Qigong is a path that can connect you to
the Universal—and to this deeper aspect of yourself.
If we look at joy using the meditation concept,
which is also Qigong practice, it has no action;
happiness has action. To experience true joy, you
don’t have to do anything. Joy does not rely on action.
Joy does not depend on external circumstances
or events. It’s something that comes internally.
When you are happy, you always want to continue
doing something, to extend the happiness with more
action. Happiness is more on the superficial level,
the physical level: you can see it, think about it, you
can feel it—it’s outside, it’s external.
Joy has great depth; it is an invisible aspect
of this reality. Happiness manifests itself in the visible;
it has no real depth. In a way, they reflect Yin
September—October 2012 Yang-Sheng (Nurturing Life) 49