We’ve heard for years, meditation teachers saying “close your eyes and go to your happy place” but we don’t realize the huge significance of doing that. In creative visualization we talk about going within and remembering a place of feeling extreme love, of supreme happiness and replaying that emotion and that feeling over and over in your mind for as long as you can — hopefully for 5 maybe 10 minutes a day twice a day as a meditation practice. What this does is it changes how we perceive the world. How we perceive the world is how we experience the world.  In every day society, the news we watch does the work of exercising our emotional muscles to increase our capacity for psychological stress and pain. For some people, that’s hours every day. We become desensitized and often don’t notice the stress until there’s a blow up.  This meditation is a release valve for that stress. This meditation is an antidote for the violent, cruel actions we witness every day — on tv, online or in real life. This meditation does the work of exercising our emotional muscles to increase our capacity for joy. It practices stretching that space like you’d expand a balloon. Once it’s stretched, it has greater capacity. The emotions are like any muscle, they have memory and they can be strengthened and programmed with daily practice.  

To enhance your capacity for more joy, jump start it by making a list ahead of time of as many happy and joyful instances you can recall. If you have none in your personal life, make a list of any happy and joyful scenes you have experienced while watching others, or on tv and movies. You may choose any fantasy scenes that invoke strong positive emotion within you. You want to choose these touchstone scenes ahead of time so they are instantly ready when you do the meditation. (When I first began visualization, I could never think of a “happy place” and I’d spend the whole time searching my mind trying to think of one.)

Remember paying off a car loan?  Write it down.
Had a crush on someone?  Write it down.
Remember a time you felt lucky?
Remember getting a good deal on something?
Got a good grade, felt excited about a new job, new car?
Loved someone: a lover, a family member, a pet?

Had a good laugh at a favorite comedian. Is there a joke or movie scene that cracks you up every time? Write it all down on a list you can refer to later.

The more of these memories you bring to mind, the more you will begin to remember. You want to gather as many as you can to use during the meditation practice.  You will be using them as touchstones to trigger the FEELING of being in the moment of a past JOY. Every time you repeat an emotional feeling, that helps you develop more capacity for that feeling. That is how this exercise enhances your capacity for joy.

I find it helpful to repeat particular phrases over and over, until they become embedded in my mind and begin to take on a life of their own. Here are some I might use, just reminding me of what I know to be true.  You’ll come up with even better ones.

I’ve known happiness and joy before. I can increase my capacity for happiness by noticing things around me to be happy about. There’s always something, no matter where I am.  It’s simply a matter of training myself to see in a new way. I am open to being shown a new perspective, I want to increase my capacity for joy.  I can remember how good it felt that day I could feel the love flowing in and out of my heart like a rushing river. (Recall details to increase the feeling.) I’d like to remember this feeling and attract more experiences that give me this feeling, this free flow of energy from my heart, the ease of everything falling into place, of being in the right place at the right time, of feeling powerful enough to do anything. I want to be guided to experiences that surprise and delight me, I want to see with new eyes and see the joy in life, in whatever scene appears before me.  

Then bring to mind your happy scenes and run them over in your mind until you evoke the FEELING within your chest space of the love energy free-flowing through it, as you felt it during the times of JOY you are recalling. Take as long as it takes, melting into that fantasy and reliving the goodness of it, until you have evoked the feeling of it. Hold that feeling for as long as you can, a minute is fine, more is good.

Bask in that feeling and send it all through your body, radiating through your torso and up and down your arms and legs. Breathe it in and out of your heart for awhile, feeling it expanding as you do so. Expand it even further and send that feeling out all around you, envisioning your home, your office, your neighborhood, your city, your state, the globe.  Stretch that space like you’d expand a balloon. Once it’s stretched, it has greater capacity. The emotions are like any muscle, they have memory and they can be strengthened and programmed with daily practice.

You want to spend time every day using your images and phrases to practice recalling and feeling happy times. Once you get in the habit of it, you will feel energized and refueled every time you practice this meditation.

Then, when you’ve got several happy touchstone scenes in place, that gives you a new choice of “replacement thoughts” for when you – say — turn on the nightly news and see something troubling that you can’t get out of your mind. You can choose in any moment to halt one line of thought and pivot your attention to replace it with a better feeling thought.  You do this in order to change your point of attraction.

How is it possible for human beings to maintain an impoverished view which causes them pain despite evidence of a multi-valued, rich and complex world? The difficulty is not that they are making the wrong choice, but that they do not have enough choices – because they don’t have a wide and richly focused image of the world. This exercise will reinforce for you a more wide and richly focused world.  Each time you practice good-feeling thoughts, you are developing a wider and more focused image of what your world can be like.  Daydream the best case scenario what-ifs! How does that feel?  Within days of doing this meditation daily, you will begin to perceive happy and synchronistic events. Take note of them when they happen. They are your markers.

Sure, someone is always going to flash some image before us for violent shock value, but we can choose to quickly pivot to a better feeling thought. This meditation is an antidote for the violent, cruel actions we are involuntary witness to every day. This meditation will exercise your emotional muscle memory for happy and joyful experiences. This meditation will enhance your capacity for joy.