Lisa McCourt has taught effective tools for living more joyfully for over two decades.
She is the host of the “Do Joy!” podcast, founder of Joy School, and author of books about joy and love that have sold over nine million copies. She offers up her vast menu of tried-and-true vibration elevation practices in her newest book release, “Free Your Joy: The 12 Keys to Sustainable Happiness.” Meet Lisa Online: lisamccourt.com.
Lisa is pure joy. She has an infectious smile, is giggly and sweet, and in her presence, she activates lots of feel-good feelings.
We’ve known each other for a couple of decades, and she has evolved so beautifully as a dedicated student of creating her best life. Lisa’s concepts are progressive, yet based on ancient wisdom and contemporary scientific findings. The language she uses may not be familiar to you, so I will introduce you to a couple of terms before we begin this joy journey into a higher level of living, thinking and feeling.
Lisa uses a reference that she learned from Eckhart Tolle, one of her teachers and author of the book, “The Power of Now.”
The Horizontal Self: Is the part of us that we identify as the body including our name, gender, roles, family placement, affiliations, opinions, beliefs, ideology etc.
The Vertical Self: Soul, Spirit, Source and Energy. It’s the essence within us. Any time we are observing our thoughts and our tendencies and conditioned patterning, we’ll find ourselves in alignment with our Soul Self. When we are aligned with the Vertical Self, it helps us address what’s needed in every situation.
Lisa: “Our horizontal thinking voice and our thoughts and beliefs originated when we were very young. That’s when we were trying to make sense of this big wacky world and sensory world. Generally speaking, we formed definitions that are like bucket files that our little human minds have evolved to understand. Concepts like love and money and power, men and women, and what our place is here in the world, are all definitions that have been categorized throughout our lives. We go around looking to shore up whatever these definitions are, whatever we’ve been told and whatever we have been conditioned to believe.”
Lisa referred to Joe Dispenza, a scientist, teacher, lecturer and author. He says, “In every given second we have 400,000 billion bits of information available to us to process but our little tiny human brains have only evolved to make sense of, and bring in, 50 bits of information at a time.”
Lisa: “We end up discerning these bits based on the early buckets that have been set up to gather information. If you have a critical voice that says you’re screwing up or you haven’t done what you’re supposed to do, that’s the conditioned or critical voice of your horizontal self. Your soul, or vertical self, doesn’t think you suck, so that is not your soul voice.”
Becoming aware is the first step.
Lisa: “We’re seeing the world through a keyhole, and we are all seeing the world through our own little keyholes of reality. Through that filter, we are taking in information and we’re creating reality through that muddy, muddy filter of limiting beliefs. Most of us had messaging in our early, formative years that was not conducive to a joyful life. Messaging about being wrong, flawed and not enough were repeated over and over again.
I believe our parents did the best they could given their own conditioning, but a lot of people are going around with hidden shame and unworthiness that hasn’t been acknowledged consciously and that’s what creates the reality we experience.
“Each of us walking the planet is Soul before being human. We are joy and bliss and self-love and compassion at our core. It is our natural essence.”
On average, we have 80,000 thoughts a day and 70,000 of them are the same as yesterday. Approximately 90 percent of these thoughts are negative.
I asked Lisa to talk about how pain can impinge on feeling aligned with our vertical self, because when I am in pain, it inhibits my sense of joy. She replied by saying, “We are physical creatures. Buddhists and other Vedic traditions have a philosophy that everything that presents itself as a challenge is a gift in strange wrapping paper. If we have challenges, when we come to the other side of it, we can see there were gifts in it. In my Joy School,” Lisa reflected, “I’ve had cancer patients, and someone who had lupus, and all of them were able to learn through their challenges.”
“This day is the future I created yesterday. My present moment is forming the experience of tomorrow, next week and next month.” – Louise Hay
“Gratitude is the key to receivership.” – Joe Dispenza
“We can experience joy through vibration elevation,” Lisa says. “We are vibrational beings in a vibrational world. Energy affects energy. Einstein spoke about this and in our current day, scientists such as Bruce Lipton, Gregg Braden, Lynne McTaggart and Candace Pert discuss energy and vibration further.
“Our thoughts are the primary determinant of our vibration. We get conditioned very early on about how much joy and happiness we deserve, so we each have a Joy Set Point, and that’s the level that feels comfortable and familiar. We can say we want mountains of joy, but we’re always going to level off at the same place, just like a thermostat that selfregulates, we’re going to keep coming back to set point as a subconscious default pattern. Once we do the work to begin observing ourselves and question those old beliefs, we can install new ones and bump up our set point.
“The majority of our joy comes from our relationships,” Lisa concludes. “We have a relationship with our body, our home, our car, with everything actually, so start looking more and focusing on things you like and love. This is how your vibration will elevate. The more selfcompassion and love you feel, the keyhole you’re looking through will allow you to have more joy in your life.”
Couldn’t help myself… here’s Three Dog Night’s refrain from “Joy to the World.”
Feel free to sing it out loud – maybe it’ll elevate your joy set point as it did mine!
Joy to the world All the boys and girls now Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea Joy to you and me.
Happy Joyful September, Liz
www.AskLiz.com
Liz Sterling is a writer, coach, teacher, broadcaster, advice columnist and inspirational public speaker. Meet her at: AskLiz.com