I want you to remember how joyful life can be. And how it’s possible to live both a hard life and a joyful one at the very same time.

I’ve come to learn that joy is a practice.

It’s not an innate state of mind. Or a gift for the lucky few.

Rather, it’s the result of a steady daily practice to reclaim the energy sapped by the hard work of living.

Living has been hard these days, eh?

Pandemics, job changes, home schooling, inland hurricanes, humanitarian crises … whew!

And for many of us that’s just the background noise. I lost my dad in July and recently my brother was diagnosed with a tough cancer. My husband is changing jobs and my whole family is in some kind of flux.

Sound familiar?

It’s exhausting. And a constant challenge to stay positive, optimistic, and hopeful about our futures. To create our positive, optimistic, and hopeful futures.

Let’s Reclaim Joy together!

My free course will walk you through 22 days of lessons and practices. Click the button below to learn more.

Join Me

Wired for Crisis Mode and Fear of Change

See, our brains are genetically wired to focus on the disasters and worst-case-scenarios, and to fear change and uncertainty. This kept our remote ancestors alive.

So tenacious are our survival-oriented brains, we easily get stuck in crisis mode and resistance to change.

This makes us feel stuck.

When we’re stuck, we can’t access joy.

We need our joy back.

We Can Choose Joy

“Joy is always a surprise, and often a decision. Joy is portable. Joy is a habit, and these days, it can be a radical act.”

—Anne Lammott (beloved author and radical joy seeker)

In other words, joy is inside each one of us.

Joy is always there. It gets buried in the rubble created by our fatigue, suffering, distraction, and survival-oriented responses to life.

Our task is to go within and find it, to make it accessible to us, and to choose it through how we practice.

Let’s be radical, shall we?

Let’s Reclaim Joy together!

My free course will walk you through 22 days of lessons and practices. Click the button below to learn more.

Join Me

Finding Joy in the Darkness

Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, “Only in the darkness can we see the stars.”

The darker days, while often unsettling, lend themselves to venturing inside—into the quiet, intuitive interior spaces of ourselves. This is precisely where we find our wisdom—see the stars—to access joy.

Together, we’ll harness this wisdom energy of the autumn equinox to re-set, re-imagine, and re-claim our joy. To practice joy. To take joy with us through the quiet darkness of winter and beyond.

Mark Your Calendars

“If joy could talk, this is what She would say, it was Love who gave birth to me.”

—Rumi

We begin with love now. Mark the first day of your Reclaim Joy practice on your calendar and commit to showing up every day for 22 days. Your daily joy messages and micro-practices are all available here in this course. They’re my gift to you–to us–we need our joy back!

I want you to remember how joyful life can be. And how it’s possible to live both a hard life and a joyful one at the very same time.

Through this 22-day journey we’ll discover how joy is foundationally:

  • Accessible to all of us no matter how hard life is.
  • In our own hands—not derived from external sources.
  • Cultivated through simple short daily practices.

How cool will it be to have thousands of us re-discovering our joy as we do these simple practices together?

Will you join me?

All you need to do is sign up for my free course!
Click here to learn more.

Love,
Karyn

More on Empowering Your Healing Story:

Empower Your Healing Story Table of Contents

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    Let's claim our healing stories. Let’s begin this healing journey. To claim our power and our wisdom to know what’s best, to own our bodies.
  2. healing stories, healing beliefs, body-mind healing, heal How to Empower Your Healing Story (What are Stories?)

    If we didn't get stuck we'd all be healed, wouldn't we? Learn to recognize and let go of the disempowering stories that slam the brakes on your healing.
  3. healing stories, five healing stories, your healing story, write your healing story How to Empower Your Healing Story (By Reimagining These Five Stories)

    Why can't we heal? Why can't we get unstuck? Learn to reimagine the 5 common stories that get in our way. You'll learn to tell-and live-a healing story.
  4. write a new healing story, your healing story, love, heal How to Empower Your Healing Story (Lessons in Story Mining)

    Learn to rewrite the stories that get in the way of your healing. Learn the tools, perspective changers, and a self-guided roadmap to set you free.
  5. rewrite your failure story, failure is wisdom, failure is our teacher, failure heals, heal How to Empower Your Healing Story (Rewrite Your Failure Stories)

    Learn to deconstruct the tyranical and disabling stories we tell ourselves about failure. Your failure stories will become stories of healing and freedom.
  6. feelings are power, heal your emotions, emotional wisdom, heal How to Empower Your Healing Story (Claim Your Emotional Genius)

    We. Must. Feel. The stories we tell about our complicated emotions can block our healing. In this article, you'll learn to claim your emotional genius.
  7. heal, healing is in our hands, our lives are miracles, karyn shanks md Born to Heal: Our Call for a New Healing Paradigm

    We’ve got to write a new story of what the best healthcare is, what the best medicine is, and what it takes to live a healing life.
  8. write a new healing story, your healing story, love, heal How to Become the Expert on You: Write Your Story of Healing

    To become the expert on ourselves we must know who we are. This is our power. The first act of reclaiming this power is telling our story of becoming well.
  9. Body-Soul Resilience Body-Soul Resilience

    Every life challenge pushes us toward mastery over our circumstances.
  10. heal, healing is in our hands, karyn shanks md How to Claim Healing as Your Own

    Healing is ours. Our birthright. The primary urge of all nature. But we must claim it as our own. Our healing-our potential-rests squarely in our own hands.
  11. meditation, heal grief, karyn shanks, karyn shanks md How to Use Anxiety as the Empathic Wise Guide Within You

    Anxiety is my guide, my inner wisdom, my genius! Anxiety contains wisdom we can all share, and action steps we can take to relieve the burden of it.
  12. care, hope, heal, healing, love, heal yourself, heal ourselves, Unbroken

    We’re not broken. We're … Complicated. Messy. Mean as hell. Heartbroken. Scared. Gorgeous. Amazing. And Beautiful. All these things. All at once.
  13. Stay Curious

    Learn the art of staying curious as a strategy managing uncertainty. Curiosity is the mother of intelligence and creative solutions.
  14. heal, potential, born to heal, Karyn Shanks MD What Makes Healing So Hard?

    Reclaiming our agency and autonomy takes energy, paying attention, learning, action, and taking our power back from the experts we’ve asked to fix us.
  15. permission to fail, wisdom, heal Permission to Fail

    I give you my full permission right now to make all those beautiful mistakes that aren’t really mistakes but just road signs showing you Your True Path.
  16. soothe, settle, heal, be present, chop wood How to Survive Storms, Pandemics, and, Well, Everything.

    To heal, we have to see all the events of the past year as a call. Not a series of random calamities, not bad luck, not cruel misfortune.
  17. Reclaim Joy

    I want you to remember how joyful life can be. And how it’s possible to live both a hard life and a joyful one at the very same time.
  18. heal, story healing Everyone’s Got Stories to Get Out of Their Way

    Carrie healed by blasting through the tenacious energy of those old disempowering stories that kept her sick and suffering for five years.
Categories
Empower Your Healing Story

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