Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BEING JOYFUL
Think of something that makes you smile.
When we are little children, there is joy in everything. The amazing things of life continuously present reasons for us to be joyful. Joy is dancing in the air within the sunbeams coming through the window. You can see all sorts of marvelous things in those little gleaming lights. It is as if the smiling sun welcomes you into this fantastic human playground. There is joy in being hugged, touched, and loved as you reach out to experience the world. You can smell the sweetness of mom when she enters your room, and feel joy when you hear the coo of her voice as she reaches out for you. Then there is the pleasure of eating, and that particular pleasure of taste that continues to be a real delight for almost all of us.
Oodles of Joy
I married at 18; my first child was born within a year. Vividly, I remember one evening several years later when my brother, his wife, and their son came over for dinner. I made spaghetti and put the kids at a small table in my daughter's room just off the kitchen. The adults sat in the dining area, out of the children's sight, but not out of earshot. We talked, enjoying our meal, and listened to the kids giggle.
I thought I should go in to see what all the fun was about and, to my surprise, when I walked into the room, there was spaghetti everywhere. Those cute little hands had used sauce and noodles to finger paint the walls and the table. There was spaghetti on the little chairs they were delightfully wiggling on. But the cutest sight was the overturned bowls of noodles hanging upside down on their little heads. They were in such joy. Neither of the kids noticed us, but when they did, the laughter and giggles stopped.
There was stillness and silence as the kids awaited their fate, breathing on hold, mouths dropped. The oh no looks on their little faces absolutely stopped me in my tracks. What did the children think would happen? My brother had stepped in behind me. The kids' eyes were as wide as saucers. Just a few moments passed, and my brother and I laughed so hard, we cried. When the kids saw our reaction, after they started to breathe again, they laughed along with us. I have never seen and felt such unbridled joy!
To activate joy is such a simple effort and one worth doing as often as you think about it. Think of something that makes you smile and gives you a warm feeling all over, perhaps a memory that brings you into a happy place for a time, that paves the way for future moments of alignment. We are born aligned and activated to joy. Now, it is just a short reach of allowing to give it a place in our lives once again.
Inspired By the Blooms
Joy is experienced in all of our senses. Another way I can activate joy is by remembering the smell of freshly mown grass, or walking along a path and smelling flowers. I loved to pick flowers as a child. In my mind there were no boundaries, no limitations, and no fences worth paying any attention to that could keep me from the flowers. Flowers spoke to me; they were kissed by the sunbeams I remembered streaming through the window onto my wall. And have I told you how much I love the rain? If Mom didn't watch me closely, I would wander out the kitchen door when it rained, just to stand in awe of what was falling from the sky. Where did those things come from? If I stuck my tongue out, the drops tickled me, and felt good on my face. I had no fear of thunder or lightning, and in Vestal, New York, the thunder really crackled and roared. There is sheer joy in my heart as I recall the awesomeness of it all.
Flowers so inspired me, especially tulips, because they looked like little cups for my tea parties. It never mattered to me where they were, I just wanted to pick them. My neighbors knew that when I was walking, my mission was to bring my mom a bouquet of flowers. Sometimes Marion up the street would poke her head out of the door and say, "Sandra, don't pull up the roots now, pick them gently. Take just a few today; we need to leave some for the fairies to dance around tonight." As I think back on those warm spring days from my childhood, I am grateful for the blessing of our lovely neighbors. I often wondered if Marion could also hear the sunbeams calling to her. Somehow all the ladies around us found joy in seeing a little girl who loved their tulips so much, knowing the flowers would grace my mom's table that afternoon.
Reawaken Joy
Take a moment and recall the active joy in your childhood. Even if your childhood had stretches of challenges or trauma, as mine did, you can always reach deep and find a positive experience to reflect on because joy follows you wherever you go — you just can't help it. Allow these feelings of well-being and celebration to wash over you. Know that as you allow these or any other good feelings to emerge, you are deliberately aligning yourself with joy. As you reawaken this most natural part of you, let yourself bask in the freedom of that young mind. Relive the joy of running. That was something, wasn't it? Running, swinging, riding that Big Wheel, feeling the breeze on your face and in your hair. Oops, falling! Well, that was part of running. We always fell.
The tumble was followed by the sound of Mom or Dad rushing over to see if we were hurt. I always cried harder when I saw them coming because I just loved the fuss they made over me. Joy echoed in my heart at the sound of their concern, the softness of their voices, even the quiet chiding about running, and falling down — all blending into the sound of love.
We can reach back into our happy memories to reawaken and activate the innocent joy we once knew. It's interesting to realize that once these pictures begin to bubble to the surface, there are more to come. Joy begets joy.
I remember one Christmas morning after all the packages were opened, Mom and Dad upstairs having a rest, I — Grandma — just putting the cinnamon rolls in the oven for breakfast later. It was just too quiet so I tiptoed into my bedroom area to see where my granddaughters were. Basking in the joy of the morning's festivities, I stood for a long time outside my closed door listening to my darling little ones' soft giggles and gentle talking. I opened the door and peeked inside. They were sitting on the floor, licking the huge lollypops I had given them on top of their presents, sticky red stuff all over their faces. They looked up and smiled, inviting me into their vortex of joy. As I joined them and relished in the happiness of children's delight, I was transported back into the spaghetti scene from years ago. While sitting there I made a conscious, deliberate choice to activate joy anytime, for no reason at all, just the way children do all the time.
This book is here to serve you, to remind you of what you once knew, and to bring you to a new level of conscious awareness and deliberate choice. Come with me and we will explore ideas, my personal journey, and the places we get stuck, and I will give you tools to help you activate joy so that you may become as you intended: a deliberate creator of joy in this extraordinary world.
CHAPTER 2
Finding Your Joy
If joy were a point on the compass, it would point the way to happiness and fulfillment.
When something excites you and you feel good about it, follow it as far as you can to see where it leads. Excitement breeds the energy of passion. As these good feelings continue to be a part of your process, thoughts form around the feelings, creating a belief pattern. The full-blown pattern, the combination of the tone of your feelings, your mood, and your beliefs, resonates and becomes your point of attraction. Your natural creative spirit has already replaced patterns that are worn out and no longer work for you with new, fresh ideas. All you have to do is allow an attitude of joy to flow into your life.
Align With What You Want
When or if we align with the positive feelings associated with joy, we move toward finding our joy. Aligning is important. By first aligning with what you want, you will get where you want to go much faster. Most of us have spent a lifetime pouring energy into healing old hurts and traumas. I believe those were necessary steps in truly knowing what we do not want in our lives. From those healings, many of us, myself included, emerged with a more refined consciousness and became more aware and deliberate in the choices we are making today. Seeing those old hurts and traumas in a new light has certainly helped in realizing our true worthiness. This book is deliberately focused on fearlessly moving into levels beyond our present understanding to find and help us live with joy activated in every area of our life. This fearless focus is something that I am extraordinarily diligent about every day.
I have been given many new techniques and processes that my students and I use to activate joy. These teachings include learning to tame those voices of fear and uncertainties (I call them your Yabbits — "yeah-buts"), the Basking Process, the Art of Blessing, the Goodness Process, and being debt-free. Together my students and I have been on a journey to replace worn beliefs with the knowledge that we are the essence of pure goodness, that we don't owe anything to anyone, and we deliberately and consciously choose to value ourselves. You will learn these ways to live your life beyond limitations and align with joy.
When Beliefs Battle The Body
"My health was very poor at the time I decided to attend the Inner Focus School. Feeling happy was not at all easy. I would have settled for one day of feeling good. At that time, I had lost 20 percent of my body weight and I was in a physical and emotional crisis. I didn't understand what was happening to me. I tried so many things to find relief and I was tired of trying. I felt like I wanted to die. I simply didn't know what to do. I was scared."
Andra had been to many practitioners, but none could give her relief. The thought that no one could help her was overwhelming. She also had digestive issues. Her muscles were taut all the time, she was visibly clenched up, afraid of the world and everything in it. She had left the corporate world, believing her health issues were related to job stress. When she came to an Inner Focus class (my school in Las Vegas) for the first time, she didn't know if she could make it through the day. She was weak and needed to eat and sleep every few hours. Working together for a short time, she realized that her mind would obsess about things, especially negative experiences or worries about her health. Strongly embedded negative patterns held her tight. She truly believed that there was something wrong with her, that she was unlovable, that her life had no value, and that she was small and insignificant. These beliefs were visibly reflected on her body.
As her healing progressed, she learned to discern the voices inside her of the perfectionist, the critic, and the commentator. These "Yabbits" were her point of attraction, running her life, and keeping her trapped in fear. Each new awareness lifted Andra out of the deep despair that had become her life and she showed greater and greater strides in allowing the true light of her higher self into the forefront of her life. Later she told me, "I didn't know that I was missing something. My life lacked so much ... beauty, love, peace, mystery, adventure, joy ..." She wrote me a note that is close to my heart. "The tools that I have learned from you, AlixSandra, have been invaluable. They support me in increasing my awareness of who I am. They also give me the confidence that I can know anything about myself and change whenever I desire. As a result of my determination to live, I have been able to free myself pretty much from limitations. And I am so much happier!"
As I watch others move beyond very challenging obstacles, I know that finding joy is possible, even in the most extreme circumstances. For myself, I now fully accept the parts of the activate joy puzzle I had been missing.
I absolutely now know and accept that:
* I am an eternal being having a physical experience.
* I am okay and there is nothing I need to prove to anyone, because my worthiness is a given truth.
* Everything is within me. Free choice allows me to choose my expression, no matter in which direction I want to go.
* Everyone else is okay just the way they are.
* Limiting or painful experiences that have already manifested in my life are irrelevant to who I am right now.
* Joy is the essence of my life purpose, and following my joy is my only purpose.
Whenever I read that list, I feel a thousand pounds lighter. I now realize the extent of the debt I incurred by denying the greater part of me all these years. That is what had been missing. When I feel these words come alive within me, I am in a hot air balloon, and each statement is a weight that drops away, allowing me to align with my True Self, that part of me that loves me unconditionally. Eyes of appreciation watch me unfold as I rise to the occasion of my enlightenment again and again. Softly, joy enters my heart each time I see the world from a higher perspective than ever before. I can see more clearly now through the eyes of my greater self.
What Do You Do With Uncomfortable Feelings?
I had a revelation just a few months ago during the graduation week of the Inner Focus School. During the years of creating the Inner Focus community, I had become so attached to the name "Inner Focus" that I lost sight of myself ...My dearest friend was appreciating the Inner Focus program, and all she had learned and discovered about herself through the teachings. After hearing her go on and on, I started to feel uncomfortable. Even though we were close friends, my name was not mentioned once. Old teachings might suggest my feelings were just an ego rush, and I should tuck them away, ignore them, or keep them somewhere out of sight. After all, I had become a master at that.
Now I know differently. Those uncomfortable feelings were pointing me toward a new acceptance. Once I realized this, I knew it was a major turning point for me because I could accept and easily go with the flow. When my turn came to speak in the circle, I stood up and stated, "I Am AlixSandra, Divine Master. Inner Focus is what I do, it is not who I am."
Dive into uncharted waters and be willing to look honestly at your true feelings. You might see that if you falsely think another is deliberately doing something to hurt you, you could be stuck in a whirlpool of self-doubt. On the other hand, by taking responsibility for your own feelings, you rise up and speak for what you truly want.
Joy emerged from within my uncomfortable feelings about what was being said, that my own particular contribution was not mentioned. Without judgment, as I allowed my inner worthiness a voice, I freed myself from years of bondage I had inflicted upon myself. The acceptance rose when I valued myself enough to claim a higher truth.
The reason this book is now in print is because another close friend told me I had to write about me. Until that moment when he showed me that truth, I had writer's block. I had thought that I needed to write something different, more in the direction of the Inner Focus School. I had to value the fact that first there was me and my experiences, and then came Inner Focus. Subtle difference, isn't it? However, that awareness was life-changing.
Joy Is The Answer
I have been a pastor, teacher, and mentor for more than 25 years. I have met with people all over the world, listening to their needs and desires, helping them find answers, and watching the transformations that took place. In all this, I have learned that life can be distilled into three short phrases:
Find your joy.
Live in joy.
Give others the same opportunity.
Being in joy is so simple, isn't it? So why aren't we doing it? Why is unfettered success eluding us? Why is there still suffering? Why are we so disconnected from one another?
Joy is what we are all seeking. Most of us have no idea the secret is that simple because life has caused us to create self-limiting boundaries, and to adhere to the rules and man-made laws of the day. This deactivates our joy, replacing it with hard work, determination, comparison, sadness, and depression. Those feelings have consequences such as disease, misalignment, unhappiness, and often despair. Have you also noticed that when your focus is targeted on something unpleasant, it tends to grow larger and larger in your life experience?
Now, when we focus on something that feels like passion, it also gains momentum. The Law of Attraction, which we will also explore, does not discriminate. Excitement and passion are like doors opening to greater awareness. When one door is opened, that leads to more doors and to shiny rooms that are filled with exciting new ideas and rays of inspiration. The operative word here is excitement. Our emotions clearly indicate which side of the fence we are standing on. Excitement and passion tell a story that must be acknowledged. If joy were a point on the compass, it would point the way to happiness and fulfillment. As I continue to build a consciousness, which whole- heartedly believes in my own worthiness and trusts that the universe I choose to be a part of will give me everything and anything I want, I am ready to receive more happiness. I want more love. I want more unconditional joy. I imagine that you share these same feelings with me.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Activate Joy"
by .
Copyright © 2012 AlixSandra Parness.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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