Selected Excerpts from Live Your Joy by Bonnie St. John
Joy: From the Inside Out Joy, you see, isn’t a destination. I don’t ever feel like I get to a place where I can say, “I’m the joy expert. Every day I have joy all day long.” It isn’t like that. It’s an ongoing dance for me. I have to work at it. Joy, you see, builds gradually over time, and the process never stops. I can honestly say that I am more joyful this year than I was last year, and I hope I will learn how to be even more joyful next year. When I try to define joy, my sense is that it’s very different from something like happiness or pleasure. Pleasure is immediate, like feeling the wind rushing through my hair when I’m skiing, or watching a glorious sunset glisten on the horizon. Happiness, to me, is more about whether my overall life is going the way I want: I like my job, my daughter’s health is good, I am in love and feel loved, so I feel happy. Those sensations come from the outside in.
Joy, on the other hand, comes from the inside out. It feels like a flowing grace that pours out from me into the world. It is a feeling of goodness, a sense of well- being through thick and thin. It is hope, confidence, friendship, positivity, and faith all wrapped into one. When I truly feel joy, it intensifies my pleasure and happiness. A woman in one of my workshops described it as “a silent smile.” Don’t you love that? It is something that happens deep inside you and truly belongs to you. Joy, or the lack of it, permeates every aspect of your life. When you’re joyful, the grass is greener. Colors are brighter. Food tastes better. That building on the corner has an amazing detail around the doorway that you never noticed before. People seem friendlier, challenges are less daunting, and life just plain feels better.
Confidence: Joy’s Main Muscle How is it that it can feel so good to do something so difficult? It was actually exhilarating for me to test myself in this way. I wouldn’t want to do it every day, but I realized that it felt like I was exercising a muscle — a confidence muscle. It was a familiar feeling because I had to do it as a child.
In elementary school, my leg was made of wood with round metal hinges on either side of the knee. When it bent, a big piece of wood stuck out in the middle. I looked like Pinocchio. Everywhere I went people stared. Kids teased me on the playground. I had only two choices: (1) cringe and hide, or (2) learn to meet their insults and gazes without backing down. I knew they didn’t understand anything about me or my leg. There were times when I even tried to make other people comfortable by explaining my infirmity and demonstrating how adroit I was at getting around. Other times, I just stayed out of sight. But I eventually learned that the best way to survive was to be myself, be confident, and behave like it was no big deal. My confidence seemed to bleed over onto them. If I wasn’t embarrassed, it usually helped other people feel at ease.
To me, utilizing the confidence muscle is crucial for living joy from the inside out. Just as I could choose at the aquarium whether to live according to other people’s hostile reality or my own self- esteem, I choose in every moment of my life whether to become consumed by the negative experiences I’m inevitably confronted with or, instead, to reach beyond the superficial and allow my inner joy to bubble to the surface.
There are singular moments in life where you have to choose whether to stand strong or follow the crowd. Imagine that you were a senior executive at Enron during all the malfeasance at that beleaguered company. Would you have stood up to temptation and said no to millions of dollars? That would be pretty hard to do without confidence. Having a strong confidence muscle gives you a platform of strength from which to live your values from the inside out and not get caught up in “what everyone else is doing.” If you have confidence in yourself, what everyone else is doing has much less meaning. You can create your own joy irrespective of the forces around you.
Hope: Learn the Lessons I spent more than an hour at the Shriners hospital talking with kids who had been burned, had amputations, suffered from debilitating diseases, and more. I talked about what it was like to learn to walk all over again after my amputation. I told them the story of seeing the picture of an amputee skier for the first time and then getting invited to try skiing by a friend in high school who believed in my ability to do it more than I believed in myself. I answered their questions, listened to their problems, and gave them hope.
Toward the end of my time there, a mother who was seated in the back of the large room put her arm around her thirteen-year-old son, who was badly burned on his face and his arms. She leaned forward and said earnestly, haltingly, because English was not her first language, “Do you think . . . do you think my son will ever lead a normal life?”
I paused for a moment. Every fiber of my being resisted the idea of simply saying, “Yes.” At first I didn’t know why. Of course, that’s what this poor, struggling mother wanted to hear. She needed to hear the Olympic athlete tell her, and her son, it was all going to be okay. That he was still “normal” — not hopelessly damaged and therefore relegated to living an inferior life. Then, it just came out of my mouth: “I hope not,” I blurted out. “He should aim higher!” I paused as the nervous laughter in the room subsided.
“I wish someone had told me that sooner. I wasted so much time wishing I could be normal. I wasted so much energy trying to cover up my leg and pretend it wasn’t there. Normal is way overrated. Be interesting. Be exciting. Be yourself.” Hoping for a better life didn’t mean that I suddenly got to have two legs, find out I had rich parents, or miraculously become a person who was never abused as a child. It didn’t mean a fantasy about a world where I had no problems and I blended into the crowd. Hope means stretching yourself, trying new things, and finding out what a better life looks like for you, now, in this world.
No matter what your circumstance, dare to hope. Dare to hope for ridiculous things. Dare to Aim Higher.
Friendship: Connect With People In economics, we study a phenomenon called “the point of diminishing returns.” This is the point at which more work actually adds up to less output. You see, more work is not necessarily better work. As a matter of fact, it almost never is. If you work 24- 7 all the time, you don’t leave yourself any room for the things that make you happy. If you close yourself off from the things that make you happy, you can’t possibly be living your joy. If you’re not living your joy, your work will eventually begin to suffer. And mine did. I managed to eke out the master’s degree in four years, but it was not my best work by any measure. Under so much stress, with so little academic support, I actually felt myself becoming more stupefied day by day.
Even though I shut down emotionally and withdrew into my work, my girlfriends, Susan, Terri, and Lisa, didn’t let me get away so easily. They continued to include me in our tradition of Wednesday lunch. They continually dragged me out, sometimes kicking and screaming, to watch the performances of Colored Girls (even though they weren’t able to convince me to perform), the American- style gospel choir they helped to create, and a whole host of other extracurricular activities I had dismissed as folly. Thank God.
We went through everything together, from boyfriend troubles to academic crises. I will never forget Terri feverishly scratching the bottoms of her feet one late night in her room at St. Hilda’s College when she got into a panic about her exams, and all of us surrounding her for support. Or how Susan mobilized a whole team of Rhodes scholars to retype Lisa’s thesis overnight from her rough handwritten draft, after the typist she hired damaged the computer file and lost all her work. When I got engaged, Terri threw my bachelorette party: a getaway to the coast for the four of us.
I thought that what got me through my degree program was shutting out life and working myself to the bone. But I was way too emotionally handicapped to realize what was really going on. Looking back all these years later, I see that I could never have survived that academic environment, colder than the bone- chilling dampness of the British climate, nor those professors, more foreboding than the hideous gargoyles hovering over every medieval Oxford building, without the emotional strength, support, and perspective of these extraordinary women. My girl gang. I will never forget what they did for me.
Resilience: Fall Down? Get Up! There is joy in the process of picking myself up after being spiritually or emotionally knocked down. It requires tenderness. Tenderness from me, for me. I had come full circle from beginning to write Live Your Joy. At the beginning I had the “spa environment” joy of writing out in the woods while feeling rested, eating healthy, and breathing in the fresh, pine- scented air. Then I had the “hectic working mom” joy of being in New York City, taking care of my daughter, and planning the How Strong Women Pray book tour. That morphed into the “maximum- speed book tour” joy of being able to intensely connect with millions of people, pray with them, and play full- out. Finally I came around to the joy of recuperating. What I learned was that my joy isn’t just one speed. It isn’t a lifestyle I can optimize or maintain. It is a set of seasons, cycles, and rhythms. Joy isn’t just about getting over the hump. There is joy even at the bottom of the hump.
Faith: Rely on the Rock During the first few years that I began to really pray on a daily basis, I would spend most of the time listening. I would close my eyes and focus on being thankful to God. I basked in the benediction of being in the divine presence and felt grateful for the time to shut out everything else. Once I felt calmness and connection, I asked, “God, what do I need to know today?”
On the majority of days the response was love. I would feel a loving presence rain down on me, surround me, and fill me with a joy beyond anything I knew. Looking back, I am convinced that God needed to teach me what it felt like to love myself every day. I just didn’t know. I didn’t have the experience of being loved and treasured as a little child. Being taught to love and value oneself is the most fundamental building block for joy. How can you make joy a priority if you don’t love yourself?
Joy never demands our attention like troubles and woes do. We must choose joy and make time and space for it, or lose it. Jesus felt that having more wine to enjoy a wedding feast was so very important that he performed a miracle to accomplish this feat. We must love ourselves enough to know that we deserve a miracle.
That faith journey — living life with more faith, more prayer, and more love — really changed everything for me. Throughout this book I have shared stories about experiences that were the building blocks I used to pull myself back into finding joy in my life. The final building block I want to share with you is this: everything works better with faith.
Live Your Joy By Bonnie St. John
Available April 28, 2009 U.S. $19.99, hardcover, 224 pages, 6” x 9” ISBN-10: 0-446-57925-4, ISBN-13: 978-0-446-57925-4 BISAC category: Self-Help/Motivational & Inspirational Available in eBook
Review copies, reprint permission and interviews are available. Contact Pamela McClure, McClure Muntsinger Public Relations, 615-595-8321 or pamela@mmpublicrelations.com
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