Ep130: What You Can Learn from Ants About Actively Practicing Joy Everyday with host Paula Jenkins

This week on the show, I’m excited to share a solocast all about why joy matters. I recently had a series of aha moments around the interviews with Fred Leblanc and Julia Samuels, along with the work I’ve been doing in Tiffany Han’s Inner Circle - that led me to a realization that joy isn’t just a choice, but it’s a necessity and it’s something we need to make room for everyday, in some way.

This big aha moment has roots in four places:

1. Living a joyful life, and being dedicated to joy means going beyond choosing joy. This first part comes from the Henri Nouwen quote, “Joy is a choice and we must keep choosing it.”
2. It means actively practicing joy and spending time with joy. Joy is energy, and we can choose to engage with this energy. (Fred Leblanc from Episode 125)
3. We can carve out time for joy, making it something we add to our days, purposefully. Life will continue to throw difficult things at us. (Julia Samuel, Episode 127)
4. This ties in with the Law of Attraction, and setting aside time to “play” with joy, you are “Practicing the Vibration of Joy.”

In this episode, I talk about:

• How we decide to focus our energy, and how emotions are tied with energy
• The impact that my discussion with Fred LeBlanc had on me, around making choices of how we spend our energy
• How in grief work, those who are grieving are encouraged to spend pockets of time feeling something besides grief (along with other practices)
• That we need to make room for, and carve out time to interact with joy every day, before we get to the place of feeling detached or distracted
• That we can develop a practice of joy, and build it into our days
• How scout ants set out to find things, daily, and the purpose is exploration (just as you should set out to discover joy). They don’t always find food, but they keep going.
• Once you’ve discovered joy, accessing it and growing on it may feel more in flow.
• Being careful not to judge yourself about how you practice joy, what it looks like, or if finding joy is a worthy practice. Put negative self talk aside, and keep going.

Resources

Fred LeBlanc on Jump Start Your Joy (Episode 125) http://jumpstartyourjoy.com/2018/03/fredleblanc/

Julia Samuel on Jump Start Your Joy (Episode 127)http://jumpstartyourjoy.com/2018/03/julia-samuel/

Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, on Amazon https://amzn.to/2H1GYEx

 

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