Creating Exercises for the Ground Of Joy

Jenny and I have entered the next phase of our virtue practice: creating exercises to till our "ground." This is something we always enjoy. These exercises will relate to one or more of the grounds of joy, not necessarily directly to joy itself. It is best if the exercises are playful, doable, a little out of the ordinary – small moments that are intriguing to our deep self and disrupt, to some degree, our habitual patterns.

For example, one of our grounds of joy is flow – when there is physical, emotional, and creative flow, we find it easier to be joyful. Anything that might get some flow going outside of our daily routine would probably work here. How about:

1) dancing hard to a Motown song within a minute of waking up?
2) talking animatedly for three full minutes, using not just our minds but our hands and whole bodies?
3) creating a painting together, using the method of throwing globs of paint on the canvas?
4) heavy breathing?
5) each of us gets two full minutes of applause from the other?
6) developing a cheer for the universe and performing a cheerleading routine to go with it?
7) slow dancing while doing the dishes?
8) doing tai chi together in the swimming pool?

Alternatively, we might play with flow by restricting it. For example, we could:

1) make the bed without bending our knees or elbows
2) have a conversation in which we count to three between each word
3) do the dishes with our hands tied together

The idea here is not that the exercises do or don't bring us joy. Rather, we are playing with the ground so that on a level outside of our awareness we can bring some fresh air into the issue of how, on a moment to moment basis, we keep ourselves from being joyful.

We aren't asking ourselves why, we aren't analyzing, we aren't trying to do anything about it, we are only playing with an aspect of it in order to shake things up a little bit. After a week or two or three of exercises like this, one after the other, we have been finding that what is shaken up begins to settle down into a new place, and, as if by magic, we have more access to our virtue.