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

I turn 47 today! And the only important question to ask is: How many hours of how many days in those 47 years have I lived as my deeply true, authentic self? What percentage of that time has been spent in blissful self-love and easy, joyful service to others? Every birthday is a birth of a new year of opportunities to bump up that percentage and rededicate myself to being glorious, full-on, flat-out ME.

In my birthday post one year ago today I wrote: “I’ve never understood why some people lie about their age, or even why anyone would want to be younger anyway. I love the age I am today and I fully expect to love it 30 birthdays from now and beyond. Every year that I live adds a year to who I am. Being in my 40′s is so much richer and fuller than being in my 30’s or my 20’s ever could have been, because all those years are part of me now. My 20’s and 30’s are not gone – they’re absorbed. All that anticipation and wonder and lust for adventure didn’t go away; it just settled in, more comfortably and peacefully than it could have before. My gathered years weave a tapestry that reveals the picture of who I am, coming into focus at last.”

I’m so giddy-grateful for the experiences of this past year and the extra clarity they brought to that tapestry. Happy birthday to me!

Thank you for that ironically authentic self-observation, Emily. You’re on the right track! First of all, I’m not telling you to be authentic because it will make you a better person, or you owe it to the world or anything. I’m telling you to be more authentic because authenticity and self-love are your keys to the kingdom. Without them, nothing else can bring you joy. With them, nothing can fail to bring you joy.

We all started out gloriously authentic, but our authenticity was beaten out of us. 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 mega-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 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? Our inauthentic tendencies are often woven so deeply into the fiber of our beings that we have no idea they’re even there. People-pleasing is an all-too-common and insidious addiction in our world, and I know I will forever be a recovering addict in that regard.

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 subconsciously judge that trait in yourself. 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 be insulted.

When you catch yourself “being fake,” celebrate it! Celebrate it because you caught yourself and that means – in that moment at least – you’re glimpsing your real self. Juicy Joy training is filled with powerful self-love motivators and every one of them starts with awareness. Becoming ever more aware of the masks you wear will have the marvelous effect of revealing to you – by way of contrast – who truly resides beneath those masks. That’s who you’re looking for. That’s who you love.

Thanks so much to all you Juicy Ones sending in thoughts and questions for me to blog about! Keep ‘em coming to Lisa@LisaMcCourt.com!

. . . asked JP today. My answer: You don’t. Negative thoughts rock! They’re totally full of valuable things you can learn about yourself! In Juicy Joy training, we grab onto our negative thoughts and emotions and suck all the insight we can from them. It confuses my LOA friends when I get excited about negativity, but it’s all part of the Juicy Joy magic. Look, you’re a human being and that means stuff is going to piss you off. You will have desires and things will get in the way of those desires. The natural spectrum of emotions that are available to human beings includes some sucky ones. It would be great if we could simply decide not to feel them, but for most of us that just doesn’t work.

Attempting to mentally override a natural emotion because you’re afraid it will draw bad things into your life causes that emotion to bury itself within your energetic body. You might successfully get it out of your conscious level of awareness, but the energy it takes to suppress it creates a vibration that is just as powerful as your conscious attention. From a Law of Attraction perspective, your vibrational frequency is what draws things to you. Your vibrational frequency is definitely affected by where you choose to place your deliberate attention, but unfortunately it is also affected by your un-deliberate attention.

There’s an iceberg model that’s often used in psychology to illustrate the ratio of conscious thoughts to unconscious ones. Picture an iceberg. The bit sticking out above the waterline represents your conscious thoughts. The big-ass chunk below the waterline represents the energy of the beliefs you’re storing that you aren’t even aware of. When you deny any emotion, you’re just shoving it down beneath the waterline. When an above-water belief conflicts with a below-water belief, you experience it as a vague, uncomfortable discord within you. It drains your energy and prevents you from beaming out clear vibrational signals to attract what you want.

So start thanking and embracing those negative thoughts! Every one of them is a treasure when you learn how to decode it and use it as a tool to learn about yourself. I hope to see you in the Juicy Joy Online course so I can teach you all the techniques for doing that. Till then, just love the hell out of ALL your glorious emotions!

I’m an author groupie. I can’t help it. I’m completely in love with the exciting web of self-dev rock stars I’ve been weaving for my Juicy Joy Online program. Guests on the live webinars include Arielle Ford (who is also writing the foreword for Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self), Robert Holden, Marci Shimoff, Colette Baron-Reid, Deborah King, Joan Borysenko, Steven Farmer, Peggy Rometo, Dan Caro, Denise Linn, Eldon Taylor, Christian Pankhurst, Rachael Jayne Groover, Ram Giri, and lots of other luminaries, including my new friend, Brian Vaszily.
Brian just released his magnum opus, The 9 Intense Experiences and you can get it by clicking here. Click here to visit IntenseExperiences.com. These are the nine most transformative experiences that people in all cultures throughout the world and throughout the rest of human history except for contemporary times actively, intentionally, and routinely engaged in. Virtually everyone today is dangerously neglecting all nine of these Intense Experiences. Research proves this is why so many adults today feel overwhelmed, stressed out, worried, depressed, and “stuck in a rut” in different areas of life.
Here’s the scuttlebutt:
The 9 Intense Experiences is beautiful, unique, and powerful! – Marci Shimoff
A masterwork that will change the lives of millions! – Janet Attwood
A unique and remarkable gift! – Hale Dwoskin
Some of the most important guidance you will ever receive! – Peggy McColl
The 9 Intense Experiences is an extraordinary masterpiece! – Manny Goldman
Grab some juicy joy with Brian’s 9 Intense Experiences!

A common metaphysical assertion goes like this: Whatever shows up in your outer world is simply a reflection of whatever you’re holding in your inner world. And there’s a corollary to it it that says that when you’re really ready to break through to a new level of consciousness, all the lingering bits inside you that are NOT aligned with that new level will start popping up in your outer world to be dealt with – a housecleaning of sorts. It’s like the Universe arranges a round of rapid-fire challenges for you, just to give you the opportunity to deal with them authentically and fully at last, so that their hold on you can be released.

I truly feel cherished and loved by the Universe, so I know that these painful events and difficult choices are always a gift; an opportunity for me to push through to a deeper place of self-acceptance and self-love. I’m in one of these phases right now and I’m committed to viewing it as a teacher. I must have been a ready student, for this teacher to appear.

And I’m hoping that this metaphysical phenomenon works the same way for everyone because some people I love are wounded and I want Rumi’s “light” to enter them. We can’t do that for other people – not really. They have to be ready themselves, and they have to want the light.

I’m so grateful that I had the foresight to plan some student-time for myself next month. I’ll spend a week early in November with Christian Pankhurst – an amazing coach and mentor that I recommend wholeheartedly.

Then, November 12-14, I’ll be at Hay House’s I Can Do It Conference in Tampa. This phenomenal weekend of inspiring teachers always leaves me expanded, excited, Juicy Joyful, and deeply, deeply grateful to be a part of my beloved personal-development industry.

Sign up for the I Can Do It Conference at this link (And look for me there to say “hello!”)
Check out Christian’s trainings here.