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

I wasn’t pleased with Hurricane Isaac when he caused the cancellation of my Juicy Joy gig for 500+ joy-seekers in Naples today. I was totally psyched for a weekend on the other coast and it killed me to think of those 500+ people going another second without the benefit of my sage Juicy Joyful tutelage! Time to do some joyifying on me.

Of course, I started by recognizing that in the grand scheme of unwanted circumstances caused by hurricanes, my complaint was utterly picayune. Downright itty bitty. Besides, the change of plans meant I could spend the weekend with my two favorite people in the universe – the ones I happened to have given birth to. And to be honest, we’ve always totally loved hurricanes. I say this with the utmost compassion for anyone who’s been less fortunate, but for us, hurricane memories are nothing but fun.

We snuggled up at the window with warm bagels to watch nature have her way with our backyard. We’re off to the right of Isaac’s direct path, which basically means just lots of heavy rain and dramatic, exciting wind. When my kids were young, we had a rainy-day habit of throwing on bathing suits and running out to dance wildly in the elements – especially on warm days and especially when it was a real soaker. Tuck and Kate are 14 and 10 now, so it’s been quite a few years since we’ve indulged that tradition.

Kate was the first to say it. “Mom, can we rain-dance?”

Within seconds we were spinning, giggling, howling, and crazy-leaping through raindrops so dense they kinda hurt and wind that actually made it impossible to stand up straight. It was freakin’ amazing. Goosebump-inducing! Free, free, free! How indescribably juicy to wholly surrender . . . to playfully merge with such a wild, exhilarating, rare expression of nature’s power!

After a while Tuck noticed that Isaac had transformed our pool into a wave-pool worthy of water-park status. Irresistible! We splashed and surfed until the regrettable first boom of thunder coaxed us back inside to our toasty-warm huddle by the window.

I was looking forward to my Juicy Joy workshop in Naples today. But I wouldn’t have traded these rain-soaked, memory-making hours for anything. The workshop will be rescheduled. And those lucky joy-seekers will now get an even more practiced re-framer and a more genuinely joy-fortified me.

Once again, dear Universe — thank you, thank you for my “unwanted circumstance.”

I’m liking 2012. I’m the new featured article today on Hay House’s awesome website, HealYourLife.com. I rang in the New Year with lots of laughter, love and cherished family. From right here, right now, 2012 looms like a shiny, radiant bucket of promise and wonder and juicy, juicy possibilities. I’m wishing you every good thing this year. You have all you need to create whatever your heart is most longing for. You are meant to love your life and your self, and you are powerful beyond your imagining. Make 2012 the year that you claim your freedom, your passion, your YOU. I’d love to be part of your journey. 

Read my New Year’s Day article at the link above!

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!

Find out, for free, by playing with me in my new blogging sandbox! Yesterday I posted this invitation on Facebook: “Juicy Joy is the art of feeling blissfully comfortable in your own skin; being so crazy-in-love with your own delicious self that the ups and downs of real life can’t shake your baseline joy. So send me your thoughts/questions, or whatever you feel is keeping you from your own Juicy Joy, and I will respond through the filter of Juicy Joy wisdom.” Buckets of thanks to those who responded, both privately and publicly!

I’m going to kick things off today with Mike – the first, brave, public responder. Here’s his challenge, in his words: “Letting go of the fear that was instilled in me as a child through physical abuse as I was told that I would never amount to anything . . . I have found moderate to great success in my life but have always felt limited by the belief that I didn’t deserve it, that I somehow ‘lucked into it,’ and I move on to something else instead of fully exploring and enjoying success. To date, I have been a plumber, teacher (K-12 and college), sous chef, CIO, and run several small companies. I keep reinventing myself because I never feel successful enough in my own right. Next up, writer and artist.”

Mike, first of all, you rock. Your situation and background are egregiously common, but you are a huge step ahead of the pack with that impressive degree of self-awareness. Cheers, my friend! You are closer to your Juicy Joy than you know! Gaining clear awareness of what’s running you (usually obtained through detailed Juicy Joy processes) is the first critical step in any Juicy Joy journey. Each of us has many, many factors contributing to our own unique perspective on the world and our place in it, as well as many reasons for our subconscious tendencies to limit our own enjoyment of our successes and blessings. But it’s safe to assume that the one you’ve identified (childhood abuse) is a major culprit in your undeserving feelings.

I’m sensing what you need first is a touch of inner-child/re-parenting work to re-wire that early programming. Much more could be accomplished in Juicy Joy training, of course, but for now, try going on this little imaginative trip with me: Let your mind wander to a time in your childhood when you felt judged by a parent. What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind to represent their judgment of you? Maybe it’s “stupid,” or “incompetent,” or “unlovable,” or maybe it’s the whole idea that you’d, “never amount to anything.” Take a few moments to figure out what one word or phrase might sum up your unworthiness best. It sounds like for you it most likely came from your parents, but for some it might have come from a sibling, teacher, or friend. You know you’ve found it when it triggers an inward cringe – an instinct to push it away. Call it forth instead.

How does this word feel to you right now? Chances are you’ve spent much of your life trying to prove yourself to be the opposite of this word. But there’s also a good chance that you secretly, or perhaps subconsciously, fear that you do possess this trait. Look to see if that might be true for you, even if your first instinct is to deny it. If you feel any energy around this word – if it triggers discomfort – it’s active for you.

As vividly as you can, imagine the whole scene from your childhood, as it played out in one particular instance. Who leveled this insult? How old were you? If you don’t remember a specific incident, make one up. Whatever you imagine right now will be fine for purposes of this exercise. When you have the scene pretty vivid in your imagination, pretend it’s a scene in a movie and you’re sitting in the audience, watching. How do you feel as you imagine watching this scene unfold? Does the audience buy into the insult at all, or is the audience feeling love and compassion for the child in this situation? Isn’t it clear to the audience that this accusation says much more about the accuser than it does about the child? There’s no truth to the accusation, is there?

Now imagine a new character strides into the scene. It’s Present-Day You, dressed exactly as you are dressed right now. Present-Day You is the child’s ally. Yay! The audience is relieved! Present-Day You tells the insulter to never call Child You that again, and the insulter stomps off screen in a huff. Then Present-Day You gets down to eye-level with Child You and the camera zooms in for a big, warm hug. In your own words, let Present-Day You comfort Child You and assure Child You that the insult has no bearing in reality. Sing Child You’s praises, and promise that you’ll be there from now on to protect Child You and make sure Child You knows how intrinsically wonderful and special he is. Soak up all that loving energy oozing around the movie theater now.

Do you feel any loosening of the resistance around your trigger word from doing just that one super-simple process? You may need to repeat it several times to get to the deep feeling place where this wound can be unwound.

If you still believe that the trigger word accurately applies to you in any way, it probably means that you’ve created some evidence in your life to support it. If that’s the case, I want you to consider this crazyass truth: the belief you had about yourself – whether conscious or unconscious – is what led you to create the evidence. The evidence is only there because of the belief. Allowing the belief to remain will only cause you to create more similar evidence. Working now to unwind the belief will lead you to create the opposite kind of evidence from this point forward.

I hope this tiny smidgen of Juicy Joy helps you, Mike. I’d love to get my hands on you in the upcoming online course! Message me privately if you’d like a discount coupon for it.

Ahhh, it feels so good to be blogging again! I’m enjoying this new format, so keep the questions coming, my juicy ones. Message me through Facebook or Lisa@LisaMcCourt.com so we can get juicy together!