I’ve had to fight for my joy. I’ve also loved and laughed and created my way to it. But it’s fair to say that removing all of the obstacles, illusions, attacks, grief, and heavy trippin’ from my truth has been strenuous work.
I know growth is cyclical, I know that you never really arrive. I know grief can catch you off guard. I know nothing is certain. Now that I’m at the most joyful I’ve ever been, (there’s a difference between happiness and joy), I’m asking:
Will I have to fight for my joy again?
I think of the places that I made myself go to be intimate with love & usery, light & darkness, confusion & clarity. I got through those portals the scrappy, human way, the way householders discover their cosmicness…laughing really hard in my living room, crying on the kitchen floor. Begging psychics for answers, asking gurus in earnest, “Can you say more about that?” Natural childbirth. That mushroom trip in San Francisco. Divorce. Leaving it all on stage. Building a career, word by word. Daily praying for the light, to the light, with the light.
At this point in my life, I am the joy that I fought for.
REGARDING JOY, very personally speaking…
WORTH FIGHTING FOR. Now that I’m here I wonder, was all that “hard work” a really f-cked up way to go about finding illumination? Was there an easier way to get to the root of joy? Maybe. But Maya Angelou was right, “Wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.” Because once you crack the Code of the Luminous, you can’t care if you almost (fill in your blank: joined a cult, went mad, went bankrupt) figuring it out for yourself. You feel the light now and that’s what matters. Joy bends time.
DEVOTION.LIKE, REAL DEVOTION. You get to the joy-truth (same thing), because of crazed devotion. You’ll be very thorough. You’ll walk through fires, look like a fool. You’ll get bloody, and then you’ll get more powerful and then…JOYOUS. You’ll feel joy itself, and then you’ll feel the joy of stamina — because you kept believing joy was the truth.
My joy increases as my devotion to truth deepens. @DanielleLaPorte(Click to Tweet!)
Devotion means that you face your Soul — the real substance of your life. Why you’re here. What you’re capable of. The big picture. You commit to healing. And you know, a lot of us don’t really want to heal because there’s a payoff to staying unwell (we don’t have to change, we get attention, we get to be “right”…)
Your Soul will hold you accountable to change for the better — if you let it.
YOU WILL PROTECT YOUR JOY. These days, I’m more attracted to people who are attracted to the light. And it turns out that those people who are most committed to the Light have already battled a lot of darkness — initiated. Some people can be swimming in emotional sh-t and say, I’m getting back to the Joy, whatever it takes, however long it takes. And with those Friends, I will get in and shovel, weep, climb, incant, and row as long as it takes. But if you think there’s no bigger reason for things happening, that the possibilities are exhausted—oy. Doubt drowns solutions. I need to give my time to the joy fighters.
JOY BECOMES YOUR NORTH STAR. Life can be gruelling. The planet is suffocating, humans can be so cruel, there are unmet longings that we all carry. But if you can get to Joy just once today, and then once again tomorrow and the next day…you will start to create grooves to your Soul — a map to Joy. You’ll remember your way back to your natural state when you slip out of it — which you will. And you’ll do whatever it takes to stay in Joy as long as you can — even if you have to fight for it.
All Love,
Danielle LaPorte is the creator of The Desire Map: A Guide To Creating Goals With Soul — the book that turned into a day planner system, a top iTunes app, and an international workshop program. A Desire Map workshop happens every weekend somewhere in the world. Author of The Fire Starter Sessions and the wildly popular #Truthbomb series, Danielle is also the co-creator of Your Big Beautiful Book Plan and co-host of the Beautiful Writer’s Group podcast.
Entrepreneur Magazine calls her “equal parts poet and entrepreneurial badass…edgy, contrarian…loving and inspired.” A speaker, poet, former business strategist and Washington-DC think tank exec, she writes weekly at DanielleLaPorte.com, where over four million visitors have gone for her straight-up advice — a site that’s been deemed “the best place online for kick-ass spirituality,” and was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes. The Huffington Post named her Twitter feed as one of the “12 of Wisest Twitter Accounts Worth Following.” You can find her @daniellelaporte just about everywhere.
