Free Your Joy

Book excerpt: Millions-selling author and creator of Joy School Lisa McCourt outlines her unique formula for sustainable happiness, offering a year's worth of activities, prompts, and techniques that raise your “joy setpoint” so you can cultivate authentic, lasting peace and fulfillment in your daily life. Unprecedented global events have left many of us feeling depleted, depressed, isolated, and disconnected from many of the things that made us happy. Lisa McCourt, host of the Do Joy! podcast and founder of Joy School, helps people raise their joy setpoints regardless of what is happening around them. Learning about joy is one thing, but it’s the doing that actually shifts your energy. McCourt offers a unique approach to joy and emotional wellness, outlining a year-long adventure in happiness that can be started on any day of the year. Joy is not an elusive fantasy to be chased; it is simply a skill to be learned, practiced, and mastered. McCourt takes readers, month by month, through the life-altering principles of vibration elevation that she has taught for 20 years through her Joy School. Each of the 12 “keys” to experiencing sustainable, authentic joy builds sequentially upon the previous one to create a progressive shifting of the reader's inner landscape to one of joy and ease. As the inner landscape transforms, transformation of the external reality inevitably follows. McCourt offers weekly “homeplay” for the reader to take into their daily experience which, when followed, upgrade their thought patterns and default reactions into beneficial new habits of thought and behavior. Upon completion of the final key, the reader is invited along the “spiral,” cycling through the keys again from their newly elevated joy setpoint. Our journey toward ever greater realms of joy and personal freedom is never concluded; we can spiral through the steps, year after year, always recalibrating our lives to ever more fulfilling levels.