I'm Ada Limones and this is The Slowdown.

When I first started meditation, one of the concepts that I read about in Sharon Salisberg's

book, Loving Kindness, was called Sympathetic Joy.

It's known as Modita in the Polly language.

Salisberg describes it as the specific form of joy that comes from taking genuine delight

in the happiness of others.

In an article from Tri-Sical magazine, she writes, among Buddhism's four immeasurables

of Loving Kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimity, Sympathetic Joy can

be the most difficult to develop.

I was blown away by this concept at first.

After years in New York, after years in the arts, it was easy for me to think that life

was a competition that you competed for the part, for the publication, for the partner,

for the apartment, for the best dressed, for the best job.

It wasn't so much a choice as it was a given, hammered in.

How could I be happy for someone else if they got everything I wanted?

I'd see someone holding hands with their partner when I didn't have one and feel physically

ill sometimes.

I'd hear about someone's good news and I'd do my best to pretend I was happy, but deep

down, something felt a skew.

Then I learned about sympathetic joy and really worked with the idea that happiness was

not limited.

There was not a finite amount.

...