No One Told Me Joy Was an Option
In 2006 I remember the first time I heard the song I Need to Wake Up by Melissa Etheridge. I was blown away. Now we all know she was talking about our treatment of our dear Mother Earth, climate change, and our need to wake up to how we are treating her and the damages that are being done. But when I heard her song I could not help but cry. I felt a stirring deep within me. I felt as if she were talking to my Soul, and my personal need to wake up to what I didn’t know. I would cry and sing the chorus over and over out loud.
I needed to wake up NOW!
It became something of a singing mantra for me, though at the time I did not even know what a mantra was. What I did know was, I was asleep at some level.
I needed to wake up — I wanted to be more. I needed to change — I wanted to be happy, truly happy, down to my core. I need a shake up — I wanted to be a better version of me.
I learned I was a broken shadow of what I was capable of. Drained, unsure, showing a false sense of myself. Overworked and disconnected while running a business and feeling the burden that came with it. I was asleep, in a rinse-and-repeat cycle.
Like Melissa sang I've been asleep, and I need to wake up now.
And thus my journey began.
The shift that occurred was really about finding more of me. Not more money, not more time, but more of who I truly was. More of what my priorities really were, what my purpose in life was, and what I wanted, and how to have a deeper connection and an inner joy.
I began questioning things I had never questioned before — about myself, about what I believed, and about what I thought was possible. I went through some wonderful and some extremely difficult challenges. I wanted the changes, I asked for the changes, but silly me thought I could control what they looked like — so I made a few of them a lot harder than they needed to be. But that's ok. I kept moving forward to a place and a life I could never have even dreamed of in my wildest dreams. And you can do that too. Not my life — but your best life, the one you have never even dared to dream yet.
And that is really the secret isn't it — I took the long road to learning but it all came down to this. We get to consciously choose. We get to choose to keep moving forward, choose to release the fears that hold us back, and choose to trust and to actively move ourselves into joy. And here is the thing — when we don't actively choose, that is a choice as well. Staying stuck, staying small, staying in the heavy — that is still a choice. So why not choose joy?
Because here is what I discovered along the way. The calling to "I need to wake up" was never really the destination. It was the alarm clock. What I was actually being called toward was joy. My joy. The things that lit me up from the inside out.
I began to notice that when I followed what genuinely excited me, what made me feel alive and expansive, something shifted. It was like I had been trying to navigate life with an old paper map, squinting at the roads, second guessing every turn, trapped in the fears of making a wrong choice from my Ego self. And suddenly I found something better. An inner GPS. One that didn't bark directions at me but instead used my feelings as its signal. When something lit me up, I was on my best route. When something dimmed my light or took me into fear, I had simply taken a wrong turn — but guess what, I could always recalculate.
Not every step was perfect but I was so much more alive. I find more joy every single day now, even in moments that might once have made me want to step back. Something keeps drawing me forward — toward creating, toward connecting, toward what I can only describe as my heaven on earth, living in joy.
Your GPS to joy is already inside you. It always has been. So I want to ask you something and I want you to really sit with it — when was the last time you felt truly lit up? When was the last time you did something just because it brought you joy, not because it was practical or responsible or expected? Because joy is not a reward waiting at the end of the road. It is the road. It is the signal. It is how your soul speaks to you. That feeling, that spark, that quiet pull toward something more — that is your GPS talking. And maybe the most important question you can ask yourself right now is simply this — am I following what lights me up, or am I following what I think I should? You don't have to have it all figured out. You just have to start listening — and trust that feeling enough to follow it, give your daily focus over to Joy, release the things that bring you to frustration and anger and recalculate your life into what brings you into JOY.
May your Joy overflow,
La’a Leela