Living from Joy

The biggest struggles I and many of my clients have had are around setting and navigating boundaries in business. The client that asks for extras–and you feel queasy inside as you say “Ok…I guess that wouldn’t be that big of a deal”. The person who wants to trade with you [...]

Sometimes I find I just can’t go full speed with the socializing, online or otherwise.
Part of why I created my own business was so I could spend long stretches of time doing my own thing. Alone. No contact with people, not even email contact. Not even Twitter. Perhaps especially not Twitter.
I really prefer a few [...]

A marketing formula is a way of reaching your target market that consistently works and you can rely on to create a steady stream of new clients.
Your marketing formula works hand in hand with your clearly defined niche to create a flourishing business.
Your marketing formula is unique to you and your business.
The problem with a [...]

When you have made mistakes, or are in a desperate place, it’s easy to fall into the habit of criticizing yourself or beating yourself up.
There is often a voice that says something like, “I need to beat myself up to keep myself on track. If I don’t, I might become lazy or worse and then [...]

“Prosperity consciousness” is usually associated with material abundance. But there is a subtle poverty that is deeper than the scarcity people feel around money (although they are related). And no “abundance” strategy will heal it if it isn’t dealt with first.
We often live with daily emotional and spiritual scarcity. We don’t feel like enough.
We don’t feel [...]

It’s a lazy post-gorging tryptophan-sleepy kind of day. And I want to say something about “The Holidays”. Which is that you have a choice about how you do them.
I know a lot of people don’t like “The Holidays”. They get depressed, or overwhelmed, or burned out, or just hate the whole thing.
I get it. I [...]

All emotional suffering and stuckness is caused by closing down and contracting around pain. Pain happens, and change happens – this is the nature of life. However, suffering is an add-on that we create through our reaction to that pain and change.
Healing is the process of grieving and accepting this pain and change, and [...]

This is a common story: a skilled artist or creative decides to become a designer because there is more job security. Or a lawyer. They never really develop their creative talent and feel unfulfilled.
Or the other side: a skilled artist decides to work at a cafe to have free time/brain-space to pursue art. They never [...]

Completing a major project (or job, or other major part of your life) and letting yourself move on involves:

recognizing that you are “done”
giving yourself permission to be “done”
actually completing the thing

When and why is it hard to recognize and accept when you are done?

If you think you ought to not be done yet.
If you thought [...]

It always surprises me when I realize I’ve forgotten something rather basic and have to relearn it. Over and over and over again.
Feel your feelings.
All of them.
All of them, feel them, as much of the time as you can.
But, don’t identify with them.
Don’t loop around in thoughts that make them worse.
They are messages, they are [...]

This is how I define God: a felt sense of the interconnectedness of everything to everything else, and the subtle harmony that runs through it all. And the “felt” part is what I want to talk about here.
Things are interconnected whether you feel it or not. And that field of interconnectivity is there whether you [...]

This is a comment on Charlie’s post Do Epic Shit.
(Note: I’m not disagreeing with the post, I’m just adding another voice. Different people need different messages.)
I write periodically about the machine we call the education system and how it breaks many of us in one way or another such that we need to work hard [...]

Each year the coming of winter tends to hit me like a wall of bricks. Suddenly it’s dark so early. Suddenly it’s raining all the time. Suddenly I feel sluggish, unmotivated, depressed. My blogs go silent, my mind goes fuzzy, I just want to sleeeeep.
And you know what? That’s OK.
Winter is supposed to be slow.
Taoism [...]

I think I’m finally getting this blogging thing.
How to make blogging suck:

Think you need to sound like you know “what you are talking about” and then don’t write because you can’t think of anything really profound to say.
Hide out in your posts. Don’t write what is really going on for you or what you are [...]

I was musing with a friend and colleague recently about our different styles – we decided she was like water and I was like lava – a combination of fire and earth. Fire is transformative, explosive, quick-moving, but can burn out quickly without the right nourishment. Earth is grounded, practical, always there. Lava is a [...]

There’s this idea that our purpose in life is this defined, concrete thing, and that if we find it our lives will “click” and if we don’t we’ll forever be wandering and lost and not really “living up to our potential”.
I’m beginning to think that maybe that’s all BS.
We all definitely have needs for self-awareness [...]

Hope can be a wonderful thing, but for many of us it has been a coping skill, not a living skill.
Hope is a feeling that a desire will be fulfilled someday. Hope can be good if you are just coming out of despair. Hope can be that motivating factor where you realize you really can have a beautiful, [...]

I was browsing in the library today and a book on the Kabbalah jumped out at me. Now I thought Kabbalah was this arcane thing with strange symbols and a lot of numerology. So not! This book totally clicked something into place for me around why life is difficult.
So the whole idea of “we have [...]

Whenever we are engaged in an activity that we don’t want to do, we are acting in opposition to ourselves.
Part of our energy is going towards doing the activity.
And part of our energy is going towards resisting doing the activity.
This energy shows up in procrastination, inner disharmony, suppression activities (watching TV, drinking, addiction), anger, and [...]

Sometimes working so hard at a thing, you become used to struggle.
Abundance is flow, it’s the thing happening at the right time, better than you expected, glorious and full.
And when it happens, you have to let it in. You have to let it become your new reality. Let go of the pain of the struggle. [...]

Happiness is not a secret. It’s a goal.
The reason I am happy, as a person, is that I just can’t stand to be unhappy. It irks me, and whenever I’m not happy, I work continually until I figure out how to wrestle my life (or relax my life) back into that peaceful state of flow.
There [...]

I’ve been growing and expanding my business and life in all kinds of ways in the past month, so I was puzzled this morning that I was not feeling happy. Instead I felt like I had a loooong to-do list and I felt tired and grumpy.
So I took a long walk, stared at some ducks, [...]

Darren over at ProBlogger speaks about The Secret of Sustainable Blogging being making sure that your blog not just serves your readers but you as well, or else you will burn out and get bored of it.
This applies to any business I think, and it’s a beef I have with books like The Four Hour [...]

We’re all addicts.
Tim’s book The Four Hour Work Week has an entire section devoted to “Elimination”: getting rid of distractions that keep you from being effective. The biggest offenders are “work fidgets” – things we do that we don’t really need to do but they fill time. Like checking email 20 times a day.
Recognizing myself [...]

Sometimes I get lost in focusing on money and business and lose sight of my playful side. I start feeling grumpy and sluggish and think “Why am I so obsessed with money?” But the truth is I’m not: money is this great game to me, as long as I’m connected to my sense of play with [...]

Today I was feeling grumpy and blue so I decided to take a walk. I didn’t have much of a plan, but I knew I wanted to visit the toy store. I ended up buying a stuffed horse.
Why?
Because she has a purple and pink mane, a purple leopard spot stripe down her nose, and scrunchy lime green stirrups.
Our inner child needs [...]