Welcome to Season 5 of Jump Start Your Joy. I’m really excited about this new season and have come back from my “break” rejuvenated and ready to roll with the new theme “You are always in choice.” The relationship between joy and choice has always been at the heart of the show; truly from the very beginning when I found myself moved and motivated by this quote by Henri Nouwen: “Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.”
Over the summer, I found myself thinking about the inspiration, intention, and action involved with bringing joy to your every day (which was the focus of Season 4) and found myself wanting to talk about the deeper, more grounding side of joy. I wanted to answer questions about how you grow a relationship with joy, how you invite it in, how you make it more central to your life?
To bring joy into your life, you have to choose it. You choose the path, you choose to do things that support joy in your life, and you choose to take action on those things that bring you joy (or feel like your life’s purpose.)
It’s not easy. It takes effort, and a lot of mindfulness. It’s not simple, and joy is not a silly thing that just happens to us.
In other words, without choice, there would only be momentary realizations that we are experiencing joy. Without making the choice, I believe that you’d experience a whole lot less joy in your life.
The ideas of making joy a choice and acting upon that choice reminds me of a conversation my husband and I had very early in our relationship, around going to Hawaii for vacation. He told me he had always wanted to go, but he’d never been able to make it happen. He has done all of the research, look on sites like https://www.kaikanani.com/ to find all the attractions, and knows exactly what he wants to do while there.
My response to him was simple: We needed to save to buy the plane tickets and then purchase them. In other words, we needed to make the choice to go, and we needed a plan to get there.
Joy is really no different. You need to make the choice to have it in your life, and then you need to make the plan that allows you to take the few steps each day to get there, or experience it.
In this episode, you’ll hear how I arrived at the theme for this season, which is all about being in choice. Over the summer I had an Akashic Reading, and in the process, found that I was looking at the role of choice in our lives in a new light.
The truth is that you are always in choice – no matter your circumstances or situation, we always have some level of choice: from your reaction, your thoughts, and your interpretation of a situation.
For Season 5, you’ll hear a lot more about choice, about the “gap moments” where you have the opportunity to stop and make a choice, and how your choices impact your joy. I hope that you’ll join me.
In this episode I talk about:
– Joy being a choice
– Akashic Records
– The releasing practice that I followed over the summer
– Being a “Full Stop Change Agent”
– Realizing the large role that choice plays in my life every day
– Choosing to let go of alcohol
– Choosing to address trauma in my life
– How my husband and I chose to let go of the Story that “the other shoe was about to drop at any time”
– How my husband and I have chosen to try on new ways of communicating with each other, by working through Oren Jay Sofer’s book together
– The role of curiosity and care in our communication
– My increase in clients that are a perfect match since I went through the practice of releasing what was no longer serving me
– The increase in joy in my life
Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Non-Violent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer
The Akashic Records
She Podcasts Live 2019