Free Your Joy

An interview with Lisa McCourt

Hi Friends,

I’m really excited about today’s newsletter because I’m in conversation with my dear friend Lisa McCourt to talk about her new book, Free Your Joy, which is out today! Trust me: you’re going to want to get this book, and you’ll see why when you read the wisdom she shares below.

Lisa is a dear friend whom I still have yet to meet in person. She embodies the joy she writes, speaks and teaches about, and is one of those humans I feel relieved to know is out there doing the work she’s doing. She’s magical. You’re going to love her.

Tell us about your new book and about Joy School.

The basis of everything I’ve ever taught in my joy trainings – and therefore, also the basis of this new book – is that every one of us has an aspect of us that is peaceful, loving, compassionate toward self and others, and joyful. It’s an aspect that comes standard with the human package, but most of us, throughout our lives here in our human suit, accumulate obstructions that keep us from acknowledging or recognizing this very real aspect of who we are. You can call it your soul, your higher self, your inner wisdom; no one is here without one.

I’m passionate about this understanding because as it solidified for me, as I got better and better at recognizing and being able to align with this aspect at will, it changed everything in my life. From then on, my whole spiritual journey became about collecting tools and practices for making that aspect more accessible, bringing it more into the foreground, making it sustainably present. Because the extent to which you pull that off is the extent to which life truly is joy – no matter what’s unfolding in the crazy “Out There,” which is always shifting and changing and full of surprises for most of us. In a nutshell, that’s what the book is about and what my Joy School is about.

Rupert Spira says: “Before we have this understanding, we use the world in service of our happiness. After we have this understanding, we use our happiness in service of the world.” That’s exactly how it’s felt for me.

I love this perspective. So how do we do it?

Since this aspect of us is always present and available, it’s mostly a practice of breaking the habits we’ve accumulated that blind us to it. We all absorbed beliefs and definitions early in life about how it is here, and for most of us, these early-formed beliefs are not working in favor of our joy. They are the framework from which we’ve gone on to attract and create all of our life circumstances, and most of these we create unconsciously.

We need to burst the illusions of these long-carried beliefs so that the blinders fall away and we can see the bigger, truer perspective. We have many different protocols for that in Joy School, but they all start with recognizing that everything in your consciousness is a thing you’re in relationship with. We understand that we’re in relationships with all the different people in our lives, but we don’t think about how we’re in a relationship with our career, with our body, with our home, with our money. Everything you experience as a part of your existence, you’re in a relationship with that thing.

Anything you’re struggling with is simply an area of life where you have an unhealthy relationship. These detrimental relationships are the results of those early-formed, erroneous beliefs, and they’re just showing us where we’re holding energy that’s creating unwanted situations -- energy that’s in need of healing. So, we want to heal these relationships. Healing them brings them into truer alignment with our soul’s perspective.

What is our soul seeing that we’re failing to see?

Our soul sees the fullness of the situation, whereas our humany-self is prone to focusing on one painful slice of it. Whatever you deem your most “unwanted circumstance,” you basically want to do forgiveness work with this thing. We all know the magic of forgiveness, right? We’ve all heard it’s not about letting anyone off the hook. We do forgiveness work not for the person we’re forgiving, but for us. We’re the ones who benefit from letting go of that resentment, that anger, that blame. It’s the same with the relationships we have with these different aspects of our lives.

Especially when it comes to our relationship with abstract ideas, like our relationship with money, our relationship with romance. We have to consider that these relationships are really all on us. It’s not like your relationship with your brother where there are two people involved and all you can do is bring your half of the relationship to the table. These relationships we have with non-human things and mental constructs exist entirely within our own consciousness. Pretty handy! That means we only have to worry about us when we’re wanting to improve the quality of these relationships. We can’t say that about the relationships with the people in our life, right?

It’s just us and the energy we’ve stored around this thing. Innocently. When we get clear that we created this situation, unwittingly, via an unhealed frequency within us that we have the power to heal, that understanding provides the critical foundation for forgiveness – both of ourselves and the other party (situation) in the relationship.

Even if we were able, through effort and struggle, to get the unwanted situation behind us, if we don’t take that step of making peace with whatever it is we’re leaving behind, we’re going to create it again, or something similar. We have to heal the energy we create from, or we’ll carry the essence of that creative frequency right into whatever we create next.

So, healing these relationships allows us to create problem-free lives?

Problem-free, no. Problem-reduced, yes! And it allows us to approach the challenges we do encounter from an empowered, high-consciousness perspective that starts to feel a lot like joy.

Shifting our relationships with the people and circumstances of our life shows us that our joy is not dependent on anyone or anything “Out There” looking any certain way. We’re able to source our joy from within, recognizing it as the ever-present truth of our soul.

In Joy School we use the metaphor of pushing pieces around a game board. That’s all we’re ever doing. Every morning you wake up, your day is a game board. There are challenges there on the game board, and also some really cool and satisfying stuff. That’s why we play games. That's why we read novels and go to movies, or binge Netflix dramas -- because something in our humanness likes the mix of the challenges and the beauty. It's what all our art is about.

We want to learn to appreciate this mix in the gameboard of our life, too. We all have things we've created that we love, and other things we’ve created that we're finding challenging. This is how it's supposed to be! Our souls know this, but our human minds forget. Some problem shows up, some disappointment, and we're all indignant and shocked. We’re like: “Ack! Can you believe it? This problem has come up for me; what were the odds?

Well, the odds were really good. Because that's what we're here for. All of our precious little souls opted to come to this Earth school. We wanted to be here, and now it's just about how we manage the curriculum. Some of us, when we were choosing what to register for, selected a really hard curriculum.

Now it's just about how we manage it; how we move the pieces around the gameboard we wake up to each day. We’re moving them skillfully when we bring more fun and compassion to the game, more conscious lightness and ease, more ways to enjoy it by adjusting our relationships to the challenges and by directing our focus and attention and energy into the good parts (because they're always there, too). Basically, the more love you can bring to this day's gameboard, the better, easier, more in your favor tomorrow's gameboard will be. And next week’s, and next year’s, etc. Love is the way to win the game. Not how many points you score, not how fast you get to the end. There's no one else on your life gameboard. Figuring out how to lovingly enjoy the playing of the game is how you win it. 

And we accomplish this by practicing alignment with our soul?

That’s been my experience; yes. And the experience of my Joy Schoolers over several decades now.

Alignment with the soul and its wisdom allows us to recognize every relationship as a mirror, always showing us what we’re believing to be true about ourselves. That insight is always a gift when we understand that we can heal anything once it’s been liberated from the darkness of our mysterious unconscious and brought up into the light of our awareness. Even our worst challenges can (and very often do) become the just-right catalysts for the next level of our healing and growth.

Here’s a fun analogy: Did you know that ancient alchemists used fecal matter to turn lead into gold? You can use the shit in your life as an alchemizing agent!

When something feels like it’s going wrong – anything that seems to be robbing you of your joy – you want to pause, get clear, and ask, who is suffering right now? Where is the sufferer? And what becomes clear is that your limited, human self is suffering. And once you can see that, you’ve shifted into identification with your soul self. Soul-you is the observer of human-you. The soul self never suffers. Your true soul essence understands that challenges are part of this Earth experience, and always in service of our evolving somehow, even when we can’t see it. Once you’ve deliberately aligned yourself more fully with your soul, you can, from that vantage point, offer compassion to your human self in its suffering.

This compassion is the key. That’s where the healing takes place.

Think of a small child who just watched his ball of ice cream roll off the cone and splat onto the pavement. This feels like the end of the world to the child, and he wails in anguish and disbelief that this horrible, unanticipated thing has happened. Imagine you’re the loving parent who takes this child in your arms and comforts him. You want to acknowledge his suffering because you can see that it’s real, but at the same time you know that no real harm is coming of this situation. You know that there are many ice cream cones in this child’s future, and you know that this crying spell is temporary and soon he’ll be distracted and playing with his toys.

This is what all your big, horrible challenges look like to your observing soul. They look like a ball of ice cream going splat on the pavement. When you’ve practiced identification with your soul self, you can be that loving parent to your human self, no matter what challenge has come up. You can be the source of the compassion and healing that’s needed to realign to the bigger picture.

We all have access to this part of us; it’s just a matter of learning the skills and practicing that alignment. We build the habit until it becomes second nature. And then it’s not like we won’t ever have bad days again. It just shifts the whole bar so that our low days start feeling like what our good days used to feel like, and our good days are a whole new level of wonderful.

It’s how we shift the energy we’re embodying, to become conscious creators in a mostly unconscious world.

---

I wasn’t kidding: she’s incredible. I hope you enjoyed getting a taste of Lisa’s energy and work, and I encourage you order Free Your Joy and bathe in the beauty and wisdom of her words. Here’s the endorsement I wrote for the book:

Lisa McCourt practices what she preaches, and the fact that she preaches joy is a huge gift for us all. In Free Your Joy, Lisa guides us into the creation of sustainable happiness with insightful teachings, accessible practices, and endless compassion. This is a book you will return to again and again, and each time it will not only remind you of your power to manifest a more joyful life, but show you exactly how to go about doing it. This book is an absolute treasure and could only be written by one who embodies the very joy she encourages us all to set free. - Scott Stabile, author of Big Love and Enough as You Are

---

Lisa has extended an offer to all subscribers (paid and free) to this newsletter for a discount on membership to her Joy School. I’ve been a guest speaker at Joy School several times and it’s an absolutely wonderful community. Go HERE for information and if you feel the call, enter the code MATERATE to receive the discounted membership.

---

This is the second interview I’ve included in Bigger Love and have loved them both. Let me know what you think of these interviews, and also if there are any people out there whom you would love to have interviewed here.

Holding a prayer for all of us to free our joy, and to create expanded freedom in all areas of our lives by doing so.

Big and Bigger Love,

Scott

---

One last exciting and FREE event to share: My good buddy David Gandelman is teaming up with The Shift Network for this really cool, and free, event: Discover Third Eye Training to Awaken Your Intuitive Powers.

David is a brilliant teacher when it comes to awakening, and deepening, our intuitive gifts. From the event description…

In this illuminating hour-long online event, you’ll:

• Learn the 4 steps for awakening your third eye as you experience the thrill of perceiving energy and the wisdom that comes with it

• Uncover the potential within your energy to heal, overcome challenges, release pain, find clarity, and grow in radical self-trust

• Discover how to find authentic answers amid the clutter and distractions of modern life

• Find out how grounding your energy provides a safe and solid foundation for your journey into the energetic realm

• Explore your identity as a spiritual being — and tap into the power that comes with that recognition

Join David and discover how you can release pain, navigate stuckness and confusion, and find clear answers — while feeling grounded and trusting in your inner wisdom — by awakening to the energetic world that lies within and around you.

 You can RSVP for free HERE.