Your Happiness Is My Happiness

The quality of sympathetic joy or joy in the happiness of others is known as mudita in the Pali language. Sympathetic joy is what happens when we actually feel happy for the happiness of others. Rather than witnessing someone's success or good fortune and falling sway to the voice that so often arises within us, which says, "Ooh, I wish you didn't have so much going for you right now. You don't have to lose everything, but I'd be rather pleased if the light could just dim a bit," we actually can be happy when someone else is happy. We don't need to feel that their happiness is taking something away from us. We can recognize that their happiness is our happiness and feel at one with them in that way.