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

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.

. . . 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 believe most of us are not experiencing the full-out joy, abundance, and love that we are here to experience. And I believe each of us is solely responsible for our own Juicy Joy. I have a few theories about the origin of our miserly tendencies to stifle our joy, and one of these theories was formed about six years ago, on vacation with my kids.

We had been waiting for almost a year for our turn to stay at the brand new Animal Kingdom Lodge that had just opened at Disney World. My son, who was seven years old at the time, was just a tremendous animal lover. He had jungle scenes painted all over his room, stuffed animal monkey collections, the works. My daughter, Katy, who was two years old, had naturally caught the contagious excitement, and she knew something really spectacular was waiting for us on this vacation.

We checked in kind of late and went out on our balcony, and I think we saw a deer off in the distance, but nothing really amazing that first night. The hotel was set up in a U-shape, with a Disney-esque African savannah in the middle where the animals would make appearances. Trees were beyond the savannah, for the times when they didn’t feel like socializing. We’d been told the best time to see the animals was morning, so we went to sleep.

Being two years old, my daughter was the first one awake the next morning. I picked her up and I didn’t want her to wake up my son, so I decided to take her out on the balcony for a while since it was still pretty early.

I pulled back the curtain and I saw the most spectacular display of animals. There was a watering hole where they’d come to drink – giraffes, zebras, all kinds of antlered creatures . . . I stepped out onto the balcony with Katy, and she lifted up her sleepy head.

It took her a moment to process everything. Then she just went crazy with excitement. She started shouting, “AMINALS!! AMINALS!!!” And as soon as she did, every single animal jumped and ran off into the trees. Disappeared.

I heard this broad, collective “AWWWWW,” and for the first time I noticed that everyone who was staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge had come out on their balconies to witness this silent, reverent morning gathering of the whole menagerie.

I said to my daughter, “Katy, honey, you scared them away . . .”

Her sweet face just crumbled. Huge tears started streaming down her face. And then I started to cry, too, as I realized that it was my embarrassment about all the people on their balconies that caused me to react to her that way. All she was doing was expressing her natural joy and excitement over something that was so wonderful to her.

And I thought about how I do that to my kids – how we all do it – even in our mundane, day-to-day activities. When my son was young, he would express his joy at the beach by running, full-out, as fast as he could down the shoreline. I stifled his joy by stopping him and calling him back.

My daughter used to express the joy she got from her spaghetti by standing up in her chair in the restaurant to sing and dance about it. And of course, I stifled her pasta enthusiasm when I made her get down. Just think about how many times in an average day we ask children to REIGN IN the natural joy and enthusiasm they’re feeling!

It is inevitable, under these conditions, that a child would form the subconscious belief, “feeling and expressing my joy full-out is wrong, wrong, wrong.” It is inevitable that a child would start to subconsciously equate his unbridled enthusiasm with feelings of unease, so that whenever a situation felt too good, too joyous, he would subconsciously feel a need to cap that happiness before it made anyone upset.

My point today is not about whether or not parents should rein in the expression of emotions, but about acknowledging that this IS one of the ways we indoctrinate our offspring into our culture. This is how every one of US grew up, whether we had fantastic parents or awful parents. For some of us, the message was more barbed than it was for others, but the way our society is structured, it’s unlikely any of us escaped messages about limiting or censoring joy, or escaped forming the limiting beliefs these stifling messages generated.

As with practically every Juicy Joy practice, the first step to rewiring these limiting beliefs is AWARENESS. Pay attention to your subconscious tendencies to limit the amount of abundance, love, and joy you allow yourself to experience and express. When you notice that feeling of unease when things seem “too good to be true,” make a conscious decision to enthusiastically push past it – to deliberately bump up your threshold for joy. It may take many baby steps, but with every small step you’ll be inching toward an ever-juicier and more joyful existence!

“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field . . . I’ll meet you there.” This Rumi quote has started calling to me more than ever. If I find that field, and book a date for a party on it, who wants to come?

“It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are without any self-deception or illusion that a light will develop out of which the path to success will be recognized.” I like these wise words from the I Ching very much. But today they feel challenging to me. Do we ever truly reach the point when we can be utterly positive that we are free of self-deception and illusion?