Monthly Archives: July 2007

Strange as it may sound, I never thought all that much about joy until fairly recently. I grew up singing songs about it: “Joy To The World” . . . “Joy Unspeakable” . . . “Tidings of Comfort and Joy” (I know that’s not the title but the song applies) . . . Certainly I understood the concept and recognized it as a desirable experience.

Still, it’s only been since I really started asking questions about how to feel better that joy has come to occupy center stage, to be the main idea in most if not all the paragraphs of my life. Joy has become my thesis—and so more than ever, I wonder about it . . . I notice its presence—and its absence . . . I actively court it and of course, I ask about it.

So many teachers have spoken of it in one way or another as a beacon . . . a journey . . . a mechanism for moving toward our dreams . . . Surely someone somewhere in the world must be quoting Joseph Campbell every ten seconds or so when he said, “Follow your bliss”. Esther-as-Abraham-Hicks was the first I heard describe joy as the real point of our existence—as well as the means by which we come to experience our lives most fully.

So I asked The Shower Team about joy. What’s the big deal? Why am I suddenly so aware of it . . . and what part does it play in whatever “guidance system” I have that can dependably direct me toward my bliss?

The Emotional Guidance System or EGS, if you’re acronymically inclined, is flawlessly engineered and the real perfection of it lies in its simplicity. You know you’re heading in the right direction when you feel good. You know you’re not when you’re not. Joy is always the signal calling you forward, Joy—or “joydar” as you’ve aptly called it–is the beaming back to you of the perspective you have when you are being who You really are. Joy is how you feel when you and the You you really are, are seeing from the same point of view. Joy is the homing device that tracks all that you have asked for, all that is waiting to be received by you, all that you are becoming as you become who You really are . . .

Full-bodied as your languages may be, they are often limited in their capacity to convey the real depth and breadth of meaning behind a given term. You think of joy, sometimes, in smaller and more limited ways than it truly exists within you and around you. Or you minimize it by classifying it as only one of the many fine, upstanding emotions that your life experience can offer you.

What you often have difficulty seeing or believing is that joy, in the broadest, most expansive sense, is the real point of you—the real purpose behind your decision to come forth as you, to have the experience of you. From a broader, nonphysical perspective, joy is all there really is . . . and on the most deep down level you all know this—it’s why you get so pissed when things don’t go well. You also know that part of the joy of your physical experience is the experience of all the variety through which joy can emerge. You know from this broader perspective that there are no limits to the joy that is available to you or that you can create.

But as you begin to sort through all that variety, over time, and as you begin to observe more and more the things that you do not like or do not want or the things that do not produce a joyful response . . . your “joydar” often gets dulled . . . you start to give more and more of your attention to the sad or unhappy or scary or tragic stories that you hear others telling . . . You sometimes even begin to believe that joy is overrated. Or that it has become obsolete . . . that “joydar” is no longer a viable system for navigating such complicated and menacing terrain as your life experience.

The beauty of even this unfortunate scenario is. . . you can’t escape it for very long. You can shut yourself down and plug your ears and cover your eyes and run as fast as you can . . . you can eat or drink or drug or screw yourself into a stupor . . . you can argue until there’s no cheerleading optimist left standing . . . and joy will still find you. For a very few, you may even have to kick the bucket first . . . but then guess what’s waiting the minute you transition back to nonphysical . . . Oops there it is!

We would so much rather see you come to an appreciation of this perfect system that you are part of and that is part of you BEFORE you withdraw from your physical eperience. We would so much rather see you recognize and use the “joydar” that is your guidance . . . to simply pay attention to how you feel in any moment, at any juncture, relative to any question or topic . . . And then to see you move in the direction that joy is calling you toward. In other words, we really wish that you would let joy lead you.

Recognize the simplicity of it. Appreciate how perfectly easy it really can be. Joy is not hiding. Joy is not some buried treasure you need to dig up. Joy is not some puzzle you have to first find the pieces to or some riddle that you have to spend years contemplating . . . Joy is not a joke that’s on you . . . Joy is not seasonal or conditional . . . Joy is your gift. Your guidance. Your only real way of being able to tell when you are being who You really are. So you may as well get used to the idea because whether you like it or not, where joy’s concerned—in the long run–you’re pretty much stuck with it.

Okay, they had me at “joydar”. I always was a sucker for newly minted terms—and for simplicity, even though I tend to pride myself on my presumed complexities. Lately I’ve noticed that, among the ever-swirling mix of musings that occupy my mind, there is an increased desire for just more joy in general.

Curiously, I can’t remember spending much time in the past just wishing I was a happier person. But lately that feels like an increasingly important desire to satisfy . . . at least as much as any of the more specific wants that continue to populate my wish list. I find myself wondering what sort of life a happier me would be living? What would I still want if I was just more joyful—apart from any of the individual wishes my genie of a Universe brings to me?

It feels worth the wondering. It feels like “joydar” up and running . . . sending a stronger and stronger signal back to me . . . and that feels like steps in a happier direction, toward a me who is more Me and who is in that respect, for the moment, more complete.

This article is posted at The Law of Attraction Blog Carnival!

Not too long ago I narrowly averted a tailspin that started when a very promising business venture proved to be all hype and no help in padding my ever eager coffers. It had looked so good going in and I had been pretty jazzed about the venture and pretty invested in its potential to pay some sweet dividends.

When it pooped out, my mood hit the pooper. So much for feeling good regardless of the conditions I’m observing. As Esther Hicks has (half) jokingly said, “I don’t live this stuff, I just teach it.”

But before letting myself slide all the way into the crapper over those particular circumstances, I asked The Shower Team to talk to me about getting my hopes up like that and then crashing and burning when a hot prospect doesn’t pan out . . .

In your push for prosperity, as in other areas, you mimic what you see most others doing and what most others are saying you should do—and that is, you hang the receiving of your desire on the hook of your ingenuity and your persistent and specific effort to make what you want, happen. Moreover, you essentially decide ahead of time how your desire can be fulfilled—and how it cannot be—and you get exceedingly busy with the work of limiting the ways that the Universe can respond to your request.

In other words, you essentially say, “Well I guess in this vast Universe of theoretically unlimited abundance and unlimited ways in which abundance can flow, I’ve only one or maybe a couple of shots at this particular brass ring so I better really bust my ass making sure I go with the odds and give these very few available options my best try.”

You have a way of putting blinders on every single time you ask, immediately assuming that the Universe shares your limited perspective. So instead of seeing the unlimited resources at your disposal, instead of opening yourself to the unlimited number of ways for what you want to come, you quickly start your process of elimination, putting all your eggs in one or two baskets, so to speak, and then you are surprised or disappointed when this limiting approach yields such limited results.

This is why you hear us repeatedly urging you to focus less or not at all upon the ‘how” of your desire coming to be. This is, in fact, the real work for you in terms of manifesting anything that you desire, and that is to realize and to accept that this stage of the process of manifestation is not the time or the place for your limited, physical view of things. This is where your good intentions and hard work often just get in the way of your really receiving the fullness of what is available to you.

You remain convinced that you must ‘make’ happen the good things you are wanting. And we keep saying, better things than you have even imagined are yours for the asking, if you will just allow yourself to feel only or primarily the joy of receiving what you want. You tend to hear these words as a suggestion that you do nothing, that you sit back on your behind and almost dare the Universe to put the money where its mouth is. We do not advocate apathy or inertia or lack of action. Rather, we encourage you to feel as much in agreement with the having of what you want as possible. We encourage you to give more diligent, focused attention to imagination than to observation, and we encourage you to allow inspired actions to emerge from your place of alignment, so that you begin to move as a harmonious whole toward your desires.

Why give the Universe only one or two options for delivering your dreams to you? Would you say to a benevolent billionaire who wanted to send you a hundred million or so of his dollars, “Well okay, but only if it arrives in a silver truck and is handed to me by a man in a blue uniform.”

We would encourage you as you launch your desires to make your work the giving of your attention to any and every aspect of receiving that desire that delights you . . . and leave the details, the how-to’s to the inspiration that we promise will follow as you agree in a purer and more powerful way with the image of you having all that you dream of.

I had to go back and re-read the stuff that came after the billionaire sending me a few mil . . . Even channels can get distracted by the idea of a half dozen or more zeroes . . . Far be it from to go around limiting the Universe.

The message here seems to be not about mult-tasking but rather, about multi-allowing . . . multi-receiving . . . and about the ways I mess with the possibilities by narrowing them down. I’ve heard people say ‘the devil’s in the details” but never stopped to think how getting bogged down in the details could actually keep me down.

Putting my eggs in multiple baskets is food for thought. It leaves me chewing on the possibility of more possibilities, and that kind of thinking is both lighter and more filling—and leaves me, for the moment, lighter and more complete.