Joining me now to talk more about finding your joy is Lisa McCourt, founder of JOY School and author of "Free Your Joy: The Twelve Keys to Sustainable Happiness."

Lisa, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Arlene.

It's a pleasure.

Is this really work for you?

I love the concept of this.

Oh my gosh, yes.

Yes, absolutely.

You love what you do.

I love what I do.

Once that veil has been pulled back and you see these principles and tools that hardly anyone is aware of, it just becomes such a passion.

I can't imagine doing anything else remotely meaningful with my life, other than just joining the team of helping to spread word about these ideas and practices.

I love it.

I love it.

Speaking of awakening, we just heard from Sonya, who is one of your students.

Tell us about her.

Yeah, oh my gosh.

And your experience with her.

Sonya's so lovely.

She's been in JOY School for a very long time.

She was part of a in-person group that we used to have.

It's all online now, and she's a valued member of the online community, but just growing together.

And that's what we do.

We're such a supportive, loving community.

I know Rob talked about the importance of that, and there are people in the group who say, "I have golf buddies, I have bridge partners, I have family, but I need to come here to feel truly seen and attuned to and gotten."

And that's what it provides for one another.

And so, it just becomes a really beautiful place to counterbalance a lot of what goes on outside of JOY School.

And these are probably all different cases, all different types of people.

How do you approach sort of teaching joy to any person that may come across?

Yeah, that's a really great question.

And it's true that in our external presentation, we are a pretty diverse group.

We've got older people, younger people, a lot of different cross-section of what appears to separate us externally.

But we're really so focused in JOY School on that underlying peace, that soul, if you're comfortable with that terminology, that inner essence that all of us possess where we are all far more alike than different.

And the vulnerabilities are the same, the challenges are often the same.

So the external kind of fades away.

Well, people might say, "Lisa, you couldn't have always been this joyful and this happy."

Were you always a joyful person?

No, no.

They would be right.

They would be very, very right about that.

And it's all relative because I think a lot of things are only clear in hindsight.

Before I learned the principles and tools that I teach in JOY School, I was a completely different person.

And I was very, very good at inauthentic happiness.

I knew how to wear the smile and make sure everything looked pretty on the surface because part of my early indoctrination is that I need to be pleasing to those around me.

It felt like a matter of survival for me to be pleasing.

And that meant, "Put on a happy face, and play the role that you're prescribed, and don't complain about anything, and don't stand up for yourself or ask for your needs to be met."

And that was very strong conditioning that I had to overcome much, much later in life.

So I think I didn't know that I wasn't happy because it becomes the water you swim in, right?

We don't know until we know.

So I really didn't discover what joy was until I learned to drop all those masks.

Wow.

And is there a difference between joy and happiness?

[Lisa] Yes.

Yes?

Yes, there's a difference.

In JOY School, we define joy as a freedom feeling, and it's a rightness in your own skin.

It's a rightness to feel the whole spectrum of natural, beautiful human emotions that we're here to experience, right?

'Cause we've been conditioned that we have these emotions that we want to feel that are good and desirable, and we have this whole pile of other emotions that are undesirable.

We wanna try to avoid them, they're unattractive, so we spend so much effort and energy trying to stay over here and not be here.

And really, when you're okay with the full spectrum of human emotion, there is an undercurrent of joy in all of them.

You could feel sadness or grief and recognize that there's a poignancy, and a depth, and compassion that you couldn't have reached any other way than through that grief or sadness.

You can feel anger and feel a rightness, and a strengthening of your boundaries, and a strengthening in your ability to defend those around you through anger.

So once we get okay with all of our emotions, we can feel joy all the time.

Whereas happiness, like everybody wants some, nothing wrong with happiness, but we wouldn't even really recognize happiness unless we had the contrast that we use to define it.

So joy is a much more all-encompassing emotion.

A lot of us seek outward approval or things on the outside, "Oh, this Valentine's Day, I wanna date," or, "Oh, if I just get pregnant this one time," or, "Oh, if I find my soulmate," or, "Oh, I gotta finish my master's or PhD, I'm gonna be happy."

But there is this whole idea that that is actually not the case, that it comes from within that you talk about.

Yeah, very much so.

That's one of the top programs that nearly all of us have been programmed with, this idea that our happiness can be sourced outside of us.

And we have this checklist, and I can be happy within myself once I get A, B, C, D, and E checked off out here, and it's a completely backward equation.

We are always in every moment creating our external circumstances based on what's going on inside of us.

It's an inside-out progression.

So cultivating the skills of contentment and inner peace and joy will just change out how you show up in the world, how you talk, how you make your decisions, how you change... Everything in your life changes externally once you've changed what's going on internally.

What was the moment where, "I wanna learn more about joy and happiness," or like you said, sometimes you don't even realize you're not as happy as you probably could be or joyful as you probably could be.

What was that moment for you?

A lot of my teachers and gurus have that pivotal, that moment.

And I think for a lot of us, it comes more in crumbs.

For me, it was definitely a bit-by-bit progression.

A lot of it came through books, which is why I'm passionate about writing books on this topic.

A lot of it came through teachers and trainings, which is what made me inspired to join that team by starting JOY School.

So I think that it was a spiritual understanding for me, and it was pretty gradual.

Wow.

That is incredible.

Over time.

And you've given your gift through books, like you said, and this is the most recent, you have 36.

Quite a few, yeah.

And this is "Free Your Joy: The Twelve Keys to Sustainable Happiness."

Congratulations on this.

Thank you.

And if we go through the pages, what are we gonna learn and read about?

"Free Your Joy" is structured to take you through a full year of tools that you can go apply.

So everybody who's read it has told me, "I read it cover to cover, and now I'm going back and putting in the practices," which is totally fine, that's a beautiful way to do it.

But it's meant to be you read about a skill, a practice, and then you bring it into your life for a week, and then you come back and you get the next one, and then you go bring it into your life for a week.

Because I learned in my journey, I used to think that, "Oh, if I can just distill the most powerful nuggets and wrap it all up in this pretty course package and give it to somebody, they're gonna change their life like that."

And it's really about integration and application.

And that's where the JOY School comes in as well because seeing how other people are applying the principles, seeing the examples that they come with, sometimes that can help our understanding even more than trying to put it into place in our own life.

So the book is structured to be done over a year.

Okay.

So just give it some time, little by little.

I love that.

And there is an exercise that you call Escape the Maya, or maybe it's not what you call, but it's a practice and an exercise you teach.

Yeah, so Maya is a term that one of my friends and a frequent JOY School guest teacher, Miguel Ruiz Jr., talks about a lot.

And it's just this idea that we've all bought into, that happiness is out there.

And anyone who's ever gotten what they wanted knows that that lasts how long, a hot minute, and then you want something else.

It's always gonna be morphing and changing because the only reason we want these things is that we believe that they will bring us happiness.

[Arlene] Absolutely.

And until we've learned the skill of happiness, nothing is really gonna be able to do that.

So this is the Maya that Miguel talks about.

And yeah, there are so many practices, but one of the most simple quick ones that we could do for your- [Arlene] I'm ready for another one.

For your viewers.

Are you ready?

[Arlene] Yeah, let's do this.

Okay.

This is cool, let's do this together.

So you wanna raise your hand.

Back, outside your field of vision.

So you can't see your hand.

This is an Eckhart Tolle tool that- I'm not flexible For like 20 years.

No, you're good, that's fine.

Just so you can't see it.

No, I can't see it.

Yeah.

So without looking at your hand.

[Arlene] Okay.

Without moving your hand.

[Arlene] Okay.

Can you know that your hand is there?

[Arlene] Yes.

[Lisa] How?

'Cause I'm raising it.

[Lisa] Can you feel anything inside your hand?

I don't know the answer to this question.

Yeah, no, no, it's okay.

If you're directing all of your attention there, and normally we wouldn't be on TV doing it.

It'd be like in a very quiet, introspective place.

And just by directing your attention into the experience of your right hand, you'll feel like a little tingling, almost like a mild version of when someone says like a body part falls asleep, right?

It's almost like that.

So that's going on all the time.

And you can put your hand down now, but once you've tuned into it, like, maybe you can feel it in your thighs or your feet.

[Arlene] Yeah, it's there.

The top of your scalp.

Right?

[Arlene] Yeah.

So this is always going on.

Very interesting.

We don't recognize it typically, but this is what's been called prana, chi.

It's your life force.

It's called soul in some traditions.

I love that.

And just putting all our attention there, it requires some concentration.

And that, for that moment, pulls you out of the Maya.

It's similar to the exercise that my beautiful friend Rob expressed with the micro meditations.

Anything that gives you that moment of pure mindfulness where you're pulled out of that ticker tape, right?

We all have that ticker tape of thoughts scrolling past our minds.

Oh, absolutely.

All the time, and we tend to identify with that and think that that's who we are and our thoughts are not who we are.

So most of the JOY's goal exercises are some form of becoming the observer, the observer of ourselves, particularly the observer of our thoughts and feelings because we are not our thoughts and feelings.

We're something so much bigger.

And Eckhart Tolle, who...

This is a tool from Eckhart Tolle, he says that just doing that practice of tuning into your life force, it's beautiful to do as you're going to sleep at night.

The more you do that, you're actually elevating your consciousness just with that alone.

So that's just a...

Very simple.

We're so much stronger than we think.

Spiritually and in so many ways.

Oh yeah.

So wonderful what you do for folks out there.

Oh, my gosh, Lisa, so nice to meet you.

Oh, it's a pleasure to meet you, Arlene.

All right, well, for more ways to find your joy, follow us on Facebook @yoursouthfl.

I'm Arlene Borenstein, thanks for watching.