In April 2015, Archbishop Desmond Tutu traveled to Dharamsala, India to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the Dalai Lama. Like the body of their work, these two Nobel Peace Prize winners wanted their celebration to touch the world. During their week’s time spent together, the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu produced a literary gift, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in Times of Change. The book’s purpose is to be a spiritual blueprint on how to navigate through collective worldly and personal challenges that all of humankind experiences and remain connected to the Joy of our being. Desmond Tutu states that individuals falsely believe that if their lives were filled with enough external pleasures, their dream job, relationships, financial status, home, and/or body, they would be free from suffering and live happily ever after. Both men agree that suffering is an inevitable part of the human experience and if embraced can be a doorway to growth and greater compassion, love and inner profound joy. This belief is proclaimed by two men who have survived more than fifty years of exile and soul-crushing violence of oppression.
In The Book of Joy, The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu describe their inner pathway to joy while they physically experienced decades of exile, violence and racism. In this literary masterpiece, these Spiritual Masters make the distinction between two types of happiness, explain the obstacles to joy, and call us to embody the eight pillars of joy. On July 8, 2018, I began a summer Sunday series on the teachings presented in The Book of Joy. If you have the desire to stop postponing joy until… you retire, move, the children get older etc… I invite you to call forth the joy of your being right where you are in life. Come join me in the videos below and move the needle on your daily joy meter as we embark together on the inner pathway to joy.
