10 Secrets to Choosing Joy

                    Taken from her book, Choosing Joy in the Midst of Crisis

 They are available to you at anytime.

Just choose. 
 Preview Book

1. MAKE A JOY LIST.   This gives you scheduled time to focus on joy. This is so incredibly simple that most of you reading this will think it’s too silly to do.  But it is one of those life-changing things that is incredibly effective.
2. BEGIN APPRECIATING ANYTHING.    This little thread will become a lifeline to joy. When you decide you’ve had enough of an undesirable feeling, you can begin to shift immediately by changing your focus to appreciating anything. Appreciate one thing, anything, then more things, until you all you feel is the vibration of appreciation.
3. LOVE A THING ‘TO DEATH’.   When you are hurting and finally decide you’ve had enough you can love the pain to death.  Once you make the determination to be done with the pain you can use any method possible to shift your awareness into one of love.  It may be music, poetry, spiritual books, walking in nature, meditation, or journaling.  By shifting your focus, you allow yourself to move into an altered state, altered from the downward spiral you were in.  You literally step into a clear space in which you choose your next feeling.
4. GIVE AWAY WHAT YOU NEED.  When you’re hurting and in pain find someone else to whom you can give what you need.  When we give away what we need, physically or emotionally, we have recognized at a deep internal level that we already have it within ourselves, or we wouldn’t be able to give it away. 
5. SHIFT YOUR FOCUS.   Whatever you focus on you get more of.  This is the Law of Attraction.  Attract what you’d prefer. Surround yourself with humor. 
6. CREATE A WELLNESS PLAN.   Plan for your health on all four levels of your being: Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual.
7. CREATE A PERFECT DAY.  Choose a day that becomes Christmas like in its expectation of joy and perfection.
8. REMOVE THE LABEL.   Whatever you call the energy, anger, guilt, fear or something else, tear off the label you have given it.  Beneath it is pure raw energy.  Use it to feel good, heal yourself or get energized.
9. BECOME A SCREEN TO EMOTION.  Allowing them to pass thru you. When you feel a wave of emotion coming toward you, you can choose not to clamp down, not to hold your breath. Just let yourself bend like a tree in the wind.  Open to the experience and imagine yourself, your whole body and being, becoming like a screen door.  Let the emotions sweep through you without attaching to them and getting stuck in them.
10. CHOOSE JOY.  It is always available as an option.  Choose it by first remembering times of joy in your life.  Then BE it. Become joy.  Feel it.  Exult in the feeling.