The Audacity of Joy

Hi friends,

It’s Roam week! The part of the month where we take the theme we’ve been exploring and live into it through practice.

Last week I wrote about nightmares as triggers for lucidity, how the surreal intensity of this global moment is waking people up into audacity - the audacity of bold action and creative ferocity. Joy is part of that audacity, too. And claiming it, here and now, is part of our emergence into wakefulness.

A few days ago, I had a half-lucid dream about giggling.

Knowing it was a dream, all I wanted to do was find a quiet corner to sit in that realization and giggle like a child, about nothing. But every time I did, I’d get interrupted. Someone would come asking for something, or wanting my attention, or being loud. And their urgency seemed more important than my silly giggling, so again and again I was pulled away, out of lucidity, into the anxious narratives the dream presented.

I woke up exasperated: “Why can’t everyone just leave me alone to my giggling!?!”

But then I realized, it wasn’t the dream characters who had pulled me out of the joy of presence, it was me. I was treating it as an either/or, believing that I couldn’t both rest in lucid ease and respond to the world. In that tension, I was treating joy as a thing that had to wait.

The dream was inviting me to do both at once: maintain the joy of wakefulness while also engaging with the million demands. And just like in waking life, I missed the point.

We often think joy requires perfect conditions, that it’s only allowed when the world’s demands have all gone silent. But the practice - of meditation, of creativity, of lucidity - is to find it everywhere.

Waking up to our lives means first noticing and then honoring the simple joy of being alive, right in the middle of the rollercoaster, in the middle of the nightmare. Life is wild and brutal and fast. And yet (!) childlike wonder at being alive at all is tugging at us, everywhere.

So this week: Can you allow moments of lucid peace and joy to peek out and claim space in the middle of everything? Not instead of your responsibilities, not in competition with the pressures of life, but as the awake quality that’s bubbling up in the middle of them.

Sit for 10-20 minutes. Whatever is arising - restlessness, heaviness, a busy mind, or actual quiet - find the simple wakeful mind that is noticing all of it.

That wakefulness isn't itself stressed or busy or caught up in any of it. It's just awake. To rest there, even briefly, is to rest in the basic hum of being. That’s the giggling for no reason.

Notice when joy or lightness surfaces unexpectedly and notice, too, when you push it back down. Maybe something else seems more urgent, more serious, more deserving of your attention. When you catch that happening, let it linger and bloom a little longer than feels responsible. This is your secret wakefulness, the joy of just being, surfacing in the midst of the absurdity.

Share what comes up in the comments: What does your secret-rebellious-giggling-in-the-corner-of-the-dream look like?

Then join me at next week’s Moonlit Sit, where we’ll practice together.

❤️ Lama Tasha

DATE: Tuesday, March 3, 2026
TIME: 8-9pm EST
LOCATION: Online (Zoom link emailed on registration)

TOPIC: Dreaming From the Fierce Heart

This month’s moonlit sit is a 3-part practice for our times. We start with what’s actually here – the joy, grief and weight of this moment – and give it room to be. Then we work with the dream-like quality of experience itself, loosening the grip of what feels solid and immutable. And from that lucid, wide-open ground, we dream. Actively, specifically, fiercely. All are welcome.

DANA: This session is open to all on a PWYC basis. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate during registration or become a paid subscriber on Substack.

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