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

To kick off Mother’s Day, my 11-year-old Katy and I got up early and paddled our kayaks out into the middle of our lake. We’ve found it to be the best spot for talking to my mom, who passed away last November. With a gorgeous sunrise reflected in the water and love-filled Mother’s Day wishes pouring from our hearts, we listened. We both felt my mom directing us to go down a particular finger of the lake, so we silently paddled that way. As soon as we cleared the corner, we spotted a familiar shape on the water — a duck Katy had previously befriended and named “Flipper.” We paddled closer, and simultaneously realized that Flipper was being followed by a brood of fluffy, brand-new, unbearably sweet baby ducklings. There were at least 20 of them — I had no idea they came in sets so large! Flipper swam in sweeping, serpentine loops to show us her joy, and the whole batch of babies followed in sync with her every move. It was breathtaking to watch. (Thank you, and Happy Mother’s Day, Mama.)

So, how is your soul-scrub going? From the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all of you who have been sharing your soul-scrub stories with me! Nothing makes me happier than hearing how these steps are serving you. I, too, have experienced a few happy miracles since we’ve started this process. One of those happy miracles has me feeling especially juicy-joyful and tingly today!

For this third and final week of your soulful spring-cleaning, we’re going to look at the beliefs you have about the world around you. If you followed last week’s suggestions, you’re already well on your way to shifting any stagnant old beliefs about yourself that needed spring-cleaning, so now it’s time to look outward a bit.

One of the most useful rules-of-thumb we subscribe to in Juicy Joy Training is this: Adding is always easier than subtracting. (In math class, and in life, too – lol!) A spring-cleaning program implies a purge, and most of us feel the sense of freedom in that concept. But the truth is, nature abhors a vacuum. You can’t successfully delete anything from your life unless you simultaneously replace it with some new, better thing. It ties into the whole “energy can neither be created nor destroyed” logic. But energy can change form. That’s why, in the JuicyFeel process you did last week, instead of focusing on banishing your unloving thoughts about yourself, you instead focused on solidifying some better thoughts to replace them.

Here’s a parallel: I’ve found that when I want to drop a few pounds, the best way to accomplish that is NOT to plan deletions from my diet — (I don’t do well with restriction of any kind!) — but instead to deliberately add in more healthy, nourishing, alive foods. When I do that, the less nourishing, more calorie-dense foods naturally fall away.

The same is true with our spiritual spring-cleaning. We could approach our soul-scrub as an attempt to banish our destructive thoughts and feelings, but that sounds a bit like “resistance,” no? And we all know what happens when we resist . . . (In case you’re just dropping into this community for the first time: What we resist, persists.)

So a far better approach is to add in the thoughts and beliefs we do want, so that everything not in alignment with those energies can naturally fall away. It’s all about breaking habits. Are habits easy to break? Hell, no. Can they be broken? Absolutely.

I’m sure there are things you like about your world, and things you don’t like about it. And I’m sure you know that focusing on the things you don’t like will bring you more, and more, and more of the same. The following JuicyFeel meditation audio will scrub your soul by filling your soul with Divine Love . . . until anything not like love will have no space left to hang out in.

Meditation for Filling with Divine Love

Some spirituality practices would stop right there. If the purest, best, most incredible flavor of love is always readily available to every one of us, why would we care about any other flavor?

Because it’s fun. Because it’s juicy. Because we chose to be here in this human form and every one of us has — right up there at the top of the checklist on our soul’s plan — “Love one another.” So as yummy as Divine Love is, we want to fill up with World Love, too. World Love includes the kinds of love you feel for your red-hot soul mate, your best friend, your cockatoo, fresh raspberries, a half-price shoe sale, and the reflection of moonlight on a glassy lake. It feels different from Divine Love. Divine Love feels soft, safe, and protective. World Love feels exotic, unpredictable, thrilling, earthy, wondrous, dazzling, splendid, dangerous, miraculous, reckless, but good, good, good. World Love’s got an edge to it. That’s what makes it so exciting.

So take a moment now to make a quick list of things you appreciate. Do it haphazardly, off the top of your head. Who are the people you care about? What brings a smile to your face? What’s your favorite food? Favorite hang-out spot? What makes you laugh?

Appreciation is love. You love these things — probably in vastly different ways and to varying extents. Since you’re reading this in your human form, the love you express is World Love. Here’s another little process you can do in your head whenever you feel like you need a mini soul-scrub going forward:

Allow yourself to fill up with Divine Love, as described in the above audio. Really saturate your consciousness with the abundance of this phenomenal love, until it feels like it needs to burst right out of you through your heart center. Then call to mind the things you just wrote on that list. With your imagination, observe the different kinds of love flowing from you to all of these things. You filled up with Divine Love, but the love you send out is World Love. World Love has as its basis, Divine Love. World Love is just Divine Love tinged with humanness.

Let your love for all these things take on different characteristics in your imagination — different colors, textures, degrees of chunkiness. Let’s say you love your family, your home, your community, nature, animals, your romantic partner. Imagine that the pure white Divine Love takes on a different color when it becomes your love for each of these things. Maybe your crazy-sexy, passionate love for your partner is red; maybe your love of nature is green, or your love of your favorite hobby is blue, and your love for a child is pink. Don’t let yourself get caught up in specific labeling; just let that idea guide your imagining so that you feel a rich, vibrant rainbow of swirly, tie-dyed, textured World Love flowing from your heart. Doesn’t it feel glorious to love so much? See if you can crank up the flow to a passionate gush.

Once you can vividly imagine that feeling, see if you can imagine World Love not only pouring from your heart, but pouring into it as well. Observe a steady flow of World Love pouring into your wide-open heart from all the beings and things you’re now allowing to love you. Allow nature to love you. Allow the billions of people you’ve never met to love you. Think of the question that Einstein claimed was the most important question of all: “Is it a friendly universe?” This JuicyFeel will leave no doubt in your consciousness about the answer, as you blissfully receive all that yummy World Love rushing into your open heart.

If you missed the first two parts of this 3-part series, they’re in the two prior posts. And if you’re still in the process of purging your physical surroundings (I still have a bit of that going on, too!) my beautiful and awesomely talented friend Karen Drucker has offered the following song as a gift from her to inspire you in that process. (She’s doing a spring-cleaning now, too.) All of Karen’s music is soul-scrubbing in itself, filling you with her pure, gorgeous energy. You’ll love this.

Free download: One Small Step, from the CD Hold Onto Love

And if you missed the call I did a few days ago with my brilliant friend and mentor Eldon Taylor, about the nature of beliefs and how to effectively work with them, you can click here to listen. He’s a masterful soul-scrubber, too.

I hope this spring-cleaning program has brought you your own flavor of happy miracles. (I’m off now, to enjoy mine!) As always, I’d love to hear from you.

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.

You have to meet my visionary friend, Michael Eisen. Nothing creates more powerful shifts toward your Juicy Joy than finally healing destructive family dynamics, and Michael and his dad are releasing a kickass book today dedicated to that end! Michael and Jeffrey’s story is a powerful example of the magic that can be achieved when both parent and child work together to create a new relationship paradigm.

Many will recognize the power struggles, manipulation attempts, and reactionary patterns so authentically revealed here. But this father-son reconciliation journey is not only inspirational — it’s solidly educational, too. You get a boatload of tools and practices for bringing troubled relationships into happy, healthy, mutually respectful partnerships. I’ve already started recommending Empowered YOUth to my joy-training clients, and Michael and I have some extra-juicy partnership plans in the works, so be on the lookout for that!

Louise Hay wrote the forward for Empowered YOUth, and says: “I believe this book will have a big positive impact and create many profound changes in the lives of parents, families, children, and teachers….I love this book and I am sure you will enjoy it too!” You really want to check these guys out.

Here’s a great video about Empowered YOUth.

Here’s where you can buy the book.

Don’t miss Michael on Juicy Joy Radio on October 10 at 6pmET!

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.”

We’re having us some fun at the free Juicy Joy Community. Here’s an example of the sage wisdom I’m sharing (hee-hee). A beloved and bedraggled member posted the question, “Why do we need Juicy Joy? We’re so busy just trying to get through each day…jobs, family, community obligations…we hardly have time to sleep….?”

My answer: “I feel you, G! You are so speaking to me right now (she says with the sleepless slur of a manic pre-conference week). But all that busy-ness just makes us need Juicy Joy even more. Know why zombies are so hot right now? Let me tell you my theories: Society embraces what it’s subconsciously relating to. Vampires were all the rage for a while because so many of us were walking around DENYING our wants, RESISTING our natural thirst for life, and PRETENDING to be satisfied with far less than actually satisfies us. Now, it seems as a culture we’ve moved onto zombie mania, which to me just means we’ve collectively given up. We’re tired of thirsting after a life that always seems just outside of our grasp, so we’re learning to numb ourselves. We walk around in an implicitly-agreed upon fog of apathy, not even noticing that our faces are falling away and our limp limbs are dangling by a vein — (analogy gone amuck? okay, but you get the point, right?) WE NEED JUICY JOY TO PREVENT THE INEVITABLE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE THAT’S UPON US!

Join the free Juicy Joy Community and you, too, can participate in such lofty banter. C’mon. You know you want to. www.juicyjoy.ning.com.