Practising with Joy: Lightness and Humour on the Buddhist Path
David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded April 19, 2026
The evening opens with gratitude for a precious human life and closes with a longer empathetic joy practice in which we rejoice in good fortune, a loved one's happiness and even people you find difficult. David draws on the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu to show how humility frees us from self-preoccupation, and how joyful effort, reframing, humour and gratitude counter the mind's negativity bias. He shares his own depression and homelessness as reframed hardship.
An evening talk on joy: joy in practice, and the place of play, humour and lightness on the path. David makes the case that these are not a pleasant extra but can run all the way through, at the beginning, the middle and the end, giving practice its energy while also cutting through preoccupation with ourselves and with our own negativity. One distinction does a lot of work here. Enthusiasm can come from gladness, from the sense of being fortunate to have found teachings that help and to have the chance to practise them, or it can come from pressure and a quiet self-contempt. The tradition calls the first joyful effort, or enthusiastic perseverance, and counts it among the six perfections. The difference is not in how hard you work. Then the barriers, and what people like the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu appear to have that the rest of us have less of. David works through changing perspective on a difficulty without pretending it is not one, laughing with full abandonment as something good for you, humour as an antidote to pompousness and to taking yourself too seriously, and gratitude as a direct counterweight to a mind that goes looking for the worst thing to attend to.
Anxiety and fear Depression and low mood Enthusiastic effort (virya) Gratitude and appreciation The four thoughts that turn the mind Empathetic joy (mudita)