The Anusara Sadhana: Awakening Joy

Awakening Joy 

Embracing the 3 A’s of Anusara: Attitude, Alignment, Action

Written by Rachel Dewan

During breast cancer treatment in 2017, I was unable to do my usual physical practices—asana, running, and rock climbing—so I turned inward. Writing, pranayama, and meditation became my anchors. 

Around that time, I also joined an Intensive for mothers led by an integrative health coach. In one session, while I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and self-pitying, she offered a simple but radical idea: it is possible to do everything—life’s tasks, motherhood, intuitive and spiritual work—with more joy. With pleasure.

I remember staring at her, stunned. The thought had never occurred to me. Once it did, everything shifted.

I realized I had been approaching life as something to survive, not just during my cancer treatment (which would have been understandable), but as a habitual pattern. What Brené Brown calls “foreboding joy” described me perfectly: I was afraid to fully feel joy because I feared losing it. Joy felt like a setup for impending tragedy. Sometimes hardship did come—but worrying in advance didn’t change the outcome. It only robbed me of the present moment and the chance to build resilience. I was a committed pre-worrier.

So I began practicing joy—intentionally. I slowed down. I allowed myself to feel. I treated myself with more kindness and forgiveness. I also took a hard look at my yoga practice. In my effort to “master” yoga and be a “good yogi,” I had absorbed the idea that seriousness and quiet reverence were required. That expectation clashed with my naturally expressive personality, leaving parts of me feeling muted and inauthentic.

Turning toward joy changed that. I stopped doing practices that didn’t inspire me simply because I thought I should. My practice became infused with gratitude and wonder, and I felt closer to Source than I ever had when I was forcing myself into a role that wasn’t true to who I am.

This tension—spirituality versus joy—is not uncommon. I see it in religious spaces and throughout the yoga world. However, both the Yoga Sutras and Tantra teach the opposite! 

Yoga Sutra 1.33 tells us that cultivating friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity lead to clarity of mind. Tantra embraces sensory pleasure as a pathway to the divine, not a distraction. We don’t have to reject or eschew pleasure to live a spiritual life..

In the words of Brene Brown 

“Joy is a sudden, unexpected, short-lasting, and high-intensity...characterized by a connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. An intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation. The good mood of the soul.”

This is different from happiness: the state of happiness is dependent upon our immediate environment or current circumstances being a certain way. Happiness usually comes from our needs being met or desire fulfilled, whether that is an ice cream cone, a new dress, or the weather cooperating. When our needs are not met, we don’t feel happy. Yet even in those moments, we can have moments of joy. This is a powerful understanding, since life is most certainly not always going to meet our needs or give us what we long for.

Nine years after that mother’s circle, I no longer have “foreboding joy”. By learning to meet difficulty without trying to control it—what my son in the Army calls “embracing the suck”—I’ve come to see discomfort as a gateway to resilience and faith. Although I don’t look forward to the contracted times, I don’t fear them anymore. And as fear softens, joy becomes more accessible. And joy, in turn, builds courage and strength.

As Anusara yogis we are householders, following the pravritti path of Tantra: one that invites us to turn towards the world rather than retreating from it. And the world holds it all – the joy and the sorrow, the expansion and the contraction, the peaks and the troughs.But wherever you find yourself on that spectrum,  this I know for sure: whatever it is you are doing, you can do it all with more joy.

Rachel shares with us an Anusara Class where she introduces and presents Radical Joy as the theme:

How to reconnect yourself with playfulness and awakening joy