What is so wonderful about a vacation to the Caribbean? What is appealing about walking along a white sandy beach at sunset?  Why do we so often long for the next vacation, or live for the weekend?  To put it simply, we long for the feeling.

If you’ve ever had a wonderful experience on vacation, or a revitalizing weekend after a long week of work, you have experienced a beautiful inner feeling that keeps you coming back for more.  Many addictions begin just this way.  There is an experience of a feeling that you enjoy to such an extent that you want to feel it again and again.  What are you actually enjoying?

Your mind will tell you, “I love the margarita,” or, “I love laying on the beach in the sun with nothing to do and a good book to read.”  The mind confuses the state of joy with the outer experience it perceives while in that state.  But it is not the form of the experience that keeps you coming back for more.  It is the state of joy.  The joy of being.  I call it a “state” because it is not the same as an emotion that passes through your consciousness and then dissipates.  Joy is an inherent natural state of the being that you are.  Joy is discovered when layers of form, emotions, and thoughts are uncovered.  Joy is revealed, not created.

That longing for a vacation, or the weekend, is a longing to be back in that state of pure joy, your true state of being.  Once you have realized that what is so enjoyable about a good time is not the experience, but the state of joy itself, you open yourself up to being able to experience that which you desire regardless of circumstance.  Joy is your natural state, it is always present.  It merely gets covered up by thoughts and the “cares of the world.”  How did you feel on your last vacation?  How did you feel Friday after work was over?  Relax and allow that sensation to well up from within you, imagine you are on that beautiful sandy beach with clear waves rolling over your toes.  Joy can be uncovered at any moment in any situation; it doesn’t have to be Friday.

The following video on manifesting abundance operates under this very same principle.  Abundance, like joy, comes from within.  The experience of abundance in outer form is only its surface layer.  The state of abundance originates within you: