The practice of sympathetic joy is rooted in inner development. It’s not a matter of learning techniques to “make friends and influence people.” Instead, we build the foundations of our own happiness. When our own cup is full, we more easily share it with others.

Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else’s success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others.

The more we identify and acknowledge moments when we’re unable to share in someone else’s pleasure and ask ourselves whether another person’s happiness truly jeopardizes our own, the more we pave the way for experiencing sympathetic joy

The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness.

These are times when sympathetic joy comes naturally, but in a complex relationship the heart may not leap up so easily.

Sympathetic joy is a practice. It takes time and effort to free ourselves of the scarcity story that most of us have learned along the way, the idea that happiness is a competition, and that someone else is grabbing all the joy.

By experimenting with sympathetic joy, we break from the constricted world of individual struggle and see that joy exists in more places than we have yet imagined.

To celebrate someone else’s life, we need to find a way to look at it straight on, not from above with judgment or from below with envy.