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

Ahhhhh, the wind-down day. The all-day-jammies-day of catching our breath . . . and lots and lots of clean-up. Isn’t it called Boxing Day in some parts of the world? (British friends – feel free to chime in!) Even more than New Year’s Day, Dec. 26th always feels like a new start to me. A clean slate of sorts. What could be more exciting than that? And for that matter, what stops us from realizing that every single day we wake up could be a clean-slate day if we made the conscious commitment to seeing it that way? If you’d like some inspiration along those lines, take just a moment – while you still have a few lingering drops of Christmas in you – to watch this amazing video that my friend, Clint Steele, put together. He’s captured something really wonderful here. Happy Clean-Slate to you! Click here to watch Clint’s video.

Every fall I reflect on this D.H. Lawrence quote. It’s a tiny bit unsettling . . . but mostly juicy joyful, I think. Liberating, even. The only thing we can count on not to change is the truth that things will always change! When we resist change, we block our creativity. Our lives are constantly in flux, we’re constantly evolving and growing, and all that newness, all that FRESHNESS, that’s what creativity feeds off of. We fear change because we believe the conditions in our lives determine our happiness. We form relationships with things, with people, with conditions, and then, when the dynamics of these relationships change, as they must, we blame the change for our unhappiness. But our experience of lost joy has never had anything to do with joy itself withdrawing or withholding its goodies from us. We fear change when we view the limitations of our present moment as being the extent of our possibilities. If you let JOY be defined by some pleasurable condition over which you have, at best, temporary command, FEAR of losing that joy will run you. You’ll feel constant pressure to work diligently to keep prevailing conditions in place. This, of course, means you’ll resist any movement that threatens your status quo. Creativity cannot exist without movement, and creativity is the key that unlocks Juicy Joy!

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell
(Our Juicy Joy!)