Juicy Joy – A Personal Development Book of Authenticity and Self-Love

Crazy, right? Everyone says gratitude’s the shZizzle! But in working with my Joy-Training clients, I’ve found that very often there’s a smidge of a belief — way underneath there — that if we’re really grateful, it means we don’t deserve the thing we’re grateful for. Like: “Oh, thank you; I’m so grateful to you; I don’t deserve this . . .” In a super-subtle way, it puts you in a slightly lower position to the thing you’re grateful for. And if you don’t fully believe – on every level – that you deserve a thing, you are most definitely subconsciously blocking yourself from receiving it.

Know what word I like better? “Appreciation.” You can appreciate a gorgeous work of art, for example, without any of that subtext. When you’re appreciating something, you’re merging with the wonderfulness of it. It’s like you share its energy; you’re feeling joy from this thing, period. You’re not feeling indebted to it, the way “gratitude” almost, sort-of implies.

The most insidious side-effect of all this focus on the importance of gratitude is this: It causes a lot of people to look at their lives and say, “Wow, I should be thankful for this.” But what if that feeling isn’t authentic for you? Then you add the “should be thankful” judgement to that laundry-list of judgements you carry around about yourself. And compounding that list does nothing for your self-love. So if you’re feeling like your life sucks right now, I want you stop trying to be grateful for it. It’s too hard. I’m going to show you how to “appreciate” it instead.

Let’s say, for instance, you feel a financial lack right now. You’d like to have more money.

Well, you have some money, right? If I said to you now, “I want you to be grateful for your money,” you could probably stretch and do it, but you’d most likely feel a little resistance when I suggest that. Like: “Ha! Money is the source of all my stress. How can I feel grateful? Sure I have some money, but it’s hard to feel grateful when it’s not nearly as much as I need/want, blah, blah, blah . . .”

But what if I said, “Can you appreciate the money you have?” It’s easier, right? You do have some money, and you did have breakfast, and I presume no one reading this is sleeping under a bridge tonight. So . . . that’s something to appreciate, right?

Maybe it’s not money for you. Maybe there’s something else in your life you feel you’re lacking. What one thing, if it were to materialize tomorrow, would make you feel complete, joyful, like you’d arrived at peace? See if you can identify it as a concept word like money, fitness, success, love . . . .

Now whatever it is, I want you to acknowledge that there is some of this thing in your life. If you want to be thinner, or more fit, or more healthy, you can probably acknowledge that you possess some degree of health in this moment, right? There are people who have less health than you have. If love is what you’re lacking, I want to congratulate you for loving yourself enough to read this post. You do have some love in your life.

Point is: I guarantee you that there are multiple people in this universe walking around right now with half of whatever you have in this area of lack that you identified. Half your money, half your health, half your love.

So you can see that there’s something you can appreciate about this specific area of your life. Not necessarily be thankful about it – not if it hurts – but you can appreciate it, right?

Well, guess what. Appreciation has a causative effect on growth. What you appreciate grows. Even in the financial world, this is the word they use! In the bank, if your money is “appreciating,” what is it doing? It’s growing. You’re getting more of it.

It’s okay to want more of this thing. But only, only, only from the space of appreciation. If you didn’t appreciate it, you wouldn’t want it to begin with! Why do you even want more money? Because you have some money, and you appreciate what you’re able to do with it! If you lived on Krypton and you’d never heard of money, you wouldn’t want it. I want you to internalize this right now. This is an opportunity to make an energetic shift that can have freakin’ miraculous repercussions for you!

If you want from a space of lack, you’ll never manifest jack. Wanting needs to be exciting! Fun! That’s where the creative energy is. In Juicy Joy Training, we wiggle our hips when we say the word “want.” We have a gleam in our eyes.

Wanting a thing = loving it. You can’t know you love it unless you have — or have had — some degree of it. Ergo: Wanting = Having and Loving! Wanting = Having and Loving!

When you get really immersed in the appreciation of having the thing you want, you’ll be dialed into the right frequency to allow more of that thing to flow toward you. That’s the zone of effortless creativity. Appreciation is a form of love, so whatever it is you want more of, the secret to getting it is to deliberately focus your attention on your genuine love for this thing!

There’s a Kafka quote I adore: “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” So desires are good! Necessary! They just have to come from love, not lack.

I wish you happy fulfillment of all of your desires. I’m appreciating you this holiday season.

It’s my birthday, and this is what my calendar screams at me each Sept 2: “Hey, Dummy! Your precious, beautiful life is happening! What the frig are you doing with it?” In recent years, I’ve always had a saucy, self-lovin’ retort ready. After all, joy, authenticity, and self-love are my gig. I’ve got to walk my talk. Model my wares.

But today I find myself at a loss to respond. It’s been so much limbo. I’d planned for this year to bring enormous shifts – professionally and personally – and it’s turned out to be something quite different. A year of dipping my toe into stream after stream, never jumping in. A rudderless year of perpetual anticipation.

It’s like I’m on an island, and all my end-goals are on another island. I start building a bridge to take me over there, and then that bridge doesn’t feel exactly right. So I abandon it and start building another one. But then I get the idea for a third bridge, so I start building that one instead. What do I have to show for this year? A kickass collection of half-built bridges. And I still haven’t touched that destination island. (Thanks, Gia, for inspiring the bridge metaphor.)

But has it been a bad year? Not in the least. I’m beyond blessed to have the phenomenal friends, family, and opportunities I have. I wake up profoundly, through-the-roof grateful every single day. And maybe that’s all I need to do right now – just keep being full-force grateful for the mountains of love I’m in the position to give and receive, even as I struggle with career crossroads, a dying mom, and all the personal mini-escapades that cause my life to feel like someone’s pushed the cosmic pause-button on it.

I trust that Universe is behind all of this. I trust that the pause-button has its divinely perfect purpose in the grand scheme of what I’m here to do. I know that if I just keep waking up each day sincerely asking Source how I can most passionately and effectively deliver the gifts I’m here to give, that eventually the play-button will get pushed again. And from that inevitable future perspective, I’ll look back and see, with chuckle-inducing clarity, how everything – including all my half-built bridges – has been a necessary stepping-stone toward that exquisitely sweet moment.

In some ways then, the cycle will probably start all over again. As it should. But in answer to my calendar’s impertinent question about what I’m doing with my precious, beautiful life . . . this time I have to respond, “I’m being it. That’s all.”

Listen to Juicy & Jaded on CBS New Sky Radio Wednesdays 6:00 p.m. EST!

The people we enjoy the most are usually the ones we say we can “be ourselves with.” I spent my whole life searching for those seemingly mythical creatures. Only in recent years have I finally come to understand what a ridiculous turn of phrase that is. No one ever actually prohibited me from being myself.  Not being myself was my own choice, and my own doing, all along . . .   Read more of this article at the site of fabulous Daylle Deanna Schwartz!

I’m off to Tampa for another spectacular Hay House conference. How cool is my life? (Universe, have I told you lately that I love you?) Tune into Hay House Radio this Wednesday at noon EST to hear me and my juicy soul-sister Karen McCrocklin dish about authenticity and the best ways we’ve found to deal, feel, and be real. (Click here on Wednesday to listen and call in.) We’re all born gloriously authentic but our socialization ensures our authenticity is beaten out of us. Here’s what I had to say about that in the Juicy Joy book:

Over and over throughout our lives we’ve absorbed the message, implicitly and explicitly, that “image is everything,” and “you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” My friend who works in sales for a large publishing company likes to quip, “Anybody who says you can’t judge a book by its cover never tried to sell one.” The cover is all we judge by! And all of us want us our covers to be the shiniest, most impressive covers we can manage to project. But where does that really leave us in terms of self-love and genuine connection with our fellow humans?

At the root of all people-pleasing tendencies, and most inauthentic tendencies in general, is a fear of being judged. Many of us grew up with some degree of a fear of abandonment from being found unlovable if we were judged and came up short. And we all judge ourselves to varying extents. If you think you don’t judge yourself, it probably just means you have a judgment about judging yourself.

If you’re sensitive to the criticism of others, consider this: The extent to which you feel hurt by anyone’s judgment of you is directly proportional to the degree to which you judge that trait in yourself, either consciously or subconsciously. If I called you a jerk you might feel insulted, because most of us have a fear, deep down, that we have the capacity to be jerks. But if I called you a rhinoceros you’d probably just think I was nuts and shrug it off. You know you’re not a rhinoceros, so there’s no way I can insult you with that—unless you have a big nose or a big butt that you’re sensitive about, in which case your own self-judgment would cause you to feel insulted.

Juicy Joy training transmutes your self-judgments into self-love, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have incentive to make further changes in yourself toward ever-greater degrees of Juicy Joy. Of course you will continue to grow and evolve, but you will do it much more speedily and effectively. Genuine change can only happen when you are first accepting and loving every part of you.

If you try to change anything from a position of “I hate this aspect of me,” you’ll gain nothing from the change. If you hate your nose, and get a nose-job so you have a perfect nose, it will only be a matter of time before you hate something else about yourself. Your nose wasn’t the problem; hating yourself was. Conversely, when you accept and love all of who you are, making changes is juicy fun! You can be as creative and daring as you please. You know that you are fantastic now and you will continue to be fantastic, and that makes it exciting to change and grow. from Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self

I love Halloween. It’s a brief opportunity to replace our day-to-day masks with more outrageous ones. The metaphorical masks we wear the other 364 days of the year are all designed to somehow make us appear more appealing to the world at large, which often works to get us more of the things we want. It’s just so freakin’ exhausting to keep walking around in them.

We all started out mask-less and gloriously authentic, but our authenticity quickly got buried under the masks we started accumulating. Over and over, we got the message, implicitly and explicitly, that “image is everything,” and “you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” My friend who works in sales for a large publishing company likes to quip, “Anybody who says you can’t judge a book by its cover never tried to sell one.” The cover is all we judge by! And all of us want us our covers to be the shiniest, most impressive covers we can manage to project.

But for just this one day, we can play around with our covers and try on a new mask. Sure, we might still be guided by the desire to impress and be noticed – it’s pretty much hardwired into our programming. But we’ve got some temporary wiggle-room to let those denied bits of us peek through.

Outlaws. Pirates. Vampires. What makes these caricatures so attractive is their raw lustiness for life and their powerful determination to satisfy their instincts – such a stark contrast to the restriction-laden existence we all contend with as payment for inclusion in our society. It’s no wonder children and teens are generally more enchanted by pirate stories and vampire chick-lit than adults are. They haven’t had as long to become anesthetized to their deepest instincts to live fully and freely, sucking the marrow from life and blissfully operating from their authentic core beings.

Imagine a bird in a cage in the springtime. All of the bird’s biological needs are comfortably met. He is well cared for by owners who love him and keep his cage clean and practice all of the very best pet-care policies. But the bird feels a stirring in him that he doesn’t understand. It seems he should be doing something. He doesn’t know what it is because he’s never built a nest, found a mate, migrated, or searched for worms in his whole life, yet there’s some longing in him to work and create and follow his instincts – a longing he’s unable to satisfy or even explore.

The bird’s anguish is our anguish. All the masks we’ve accumulated over the years have built our cages. We can’t connect with our natural human instincts and intuition because they’re buried, along with our true core selves, beneath these layers. But with awareness and conscious effort, we can peel away the masks. We can strain to hear our faint, stifled inner voices. Unlike the imprisoned bird, we can choose to open the cage and liberate ourselves to fulfill our instinctual destinies.

In honor of Halloween, I hereby give you permission to unearth your outlaw nature. Invite up those scurrilous, denied bits of you. Exalt them. Embrace them. Once you’ve brought these secret aspects of you out into the light of your consciousness, you can choose to own them and balance them with all the other fabulously authentic parts of you that comprise a full, vital human being.