Hi everyone. Today I want to talk to you about something that I call joy extinguishers. These are the usually unconscious ways that we kill positivity in our lives, right as it's coming up more beautifully, more strongly, and more impactfully than ever before. When we begin to see a new horizon, that's often when we feel most compelled to also start shutting down a little bit. When we are killing the positivity in our lives, we are also killing our forward
momentum. We're killing our connection to desire, which is very much what gives us the roadmap and the blueprint to what we want to create next. It unbalances us, and we often don't even realize it's happening because we are an constant hot pursuit of joy. Non-stop, so much so that we often never pause to think that maybe there is actually something more comfortable, more soothing, and more familiar about being stuck. And this is when
we start to use joy extinguishers. So first I want to talk to you about what a joy extinguisher technically is, which is an upper limit. And an upper limit is gay Hendrix term for the
amount of positive feeling you are comfortable with having in your life. Now if you are on a journey, especially of growth, of personal development, of creativity, of mastering your craft, of wanting to see and accept and embrace more love in your life, basically if you are just anywhere in the realm of desiring change, you need to get really, really aware of your upper limit. Because your upper limit, you will be hitting it throughout your life
if you continue to have a life of growth. You will constantly be needing to expand your container to be comfortable with more and more positivity because if you are not, if you don't do that, you will unknowingly self sabotage your way back into a comfortable and familiar unhappiness. Gay Hendrix talks about this in his book The Big Leap, which I reference in my book The Mountain is You. So first and foremost, let's start with this.
The biggest way you are extinguishing your joy is by not realizing you have an upper limit, by just not realizing that you have a limited tolerance for feeling good. And because you have a limited tolerance for feeling good, when really positive things want to come into your life or are coming into your life, you're going to do all of these sneaky psychological gymnastics to try to downplay them and diminish them. Wait for the other shoe to drop, find
the negativity in it all. You're going to be your own rain cloud in life because the rain cloud feels safer and you mistakenly think that by over analyzing all of these details, you're somehow priming yourself for some kind of inevitable reality. When what you're actually doing is moving your energy and attention to that reality so much so that you make it more real than it would be. But again, all of this comes back down to your inherent
comfort or ability with positivity, abundance, success and love. And none of us go around our lives thinking, oh, I have a limited tolerance for all the things I say I want, but we do. Because anything new until it is also familiar is uncomfortable. And what we have to start to understand is that to our brains and to our comfort zones, it doesn't matter what
the thing is. All that matters is whether or not we are familiar with it. So we will unconsciously create and recreate patterns from the past, the circumstances, relationships, situations that feel familiar to us and feel like home and feel like love and feel like truth. When in fact, they're just kind of neuropath ways that we're familiar with. Oh,
we know this one. We know how to get through this one. And so the first way we extinguish our joy is really just by not realizing that we have a desire to extinguish it in the first place, that we would have a motive to extinguish it in the first place. Because it's confusing. It's confusing and it's counterintuitive. To want to appreciate all of the positive and beautiful things in your life, all the people you love, you know, everything
you're grateful for and to find yourself cutting that off. It's really counterintuitive. To want to step into, you know, the next level of your experience and find yourself at the exact same time, somewhat shutting down and closing yourself off. But when you understand
that to your lizard brain, comfort is goodness. You will then understand that your job is actually to reorient and rebuild your comfort zone around the things you actually want to become defaulted to you, the things that you actually want to become familiar and consistent. Because when you don't realize you have an upper limit, then you spend your life operating beneath it at all times, which brings me to point to of how we extinguish our joy, which
is high reactivity. I really believe that the least reactive person in the room is the most powerful person in the room, because that is the person who is not at the whim of their emotions. That is the person who is not getting stuck, replaying patterns over and over and over again. When you have a high reactivity, well, first of all, that's how you stay beneath your upper limit by reacting to the upper limit. So every time you feel
a discomfort, sadness, grief, fear, you react to it rather than responding. And when you react, you just reach your grab for something that basically numbs it out. You don't have enough time to even think through why you feel uncomfortable or how you should react, or what the benefit of just kind of braving the uncertainty, allowing yourself to feel uncomfy for a minute, and then allowing your body and mind to re-regulate to a new normal.
So the way that I think high reactivity is best dealt with is by doing something I call practicing the pause. The pause is the space of time between when you have an emotion, and especially a heightened emotional state, but even more specifically a heightened negative emotional state. The gap of time between when that emotion starts to influx in you and you start to react to it. So the next time you feel fear, recognize that's coming
up in your body, and then the next thing you want to think to yourself is pause. Hit the pause button. What you are trying to do is widen the amount of time between what you feel and then what you do about it. And at first, it might feel like widening the gap, you know, you could only do it for one second or five seconds. But the goal really is to get to a point where you can go like an hour or an afternoon or a day or a week.
So you can get back to a place where your nervous system is totally back down to neutral, and then you can really clearly decide what you want to do about the situation or whatever
it came up. And when you when you aren't reactive to discomfort, you also let yourself move through it, and that's what allows you to expand your container, because when you're not reactive to it, when you're not just reaching for something to numb it out, and you're sitting with it and you're allowing it, what you're actually doing is familiarizing yourself with a thing that's making you uncomfortable. So that really and truly is the process
of rebuilding the comfort zone. Our reactivity is how we run away from life. And our responsiveness is how we alchemize life. It's how we problem solve. It's how our higher selves learn to deal with our most base instincts. And by base instincts, I mean the ones that are the most unconscious, the ones of fear, the ones of a desire for familiarity and safety, the ones that really hold us back more than anything, but hold us back out of a sense
of almost self preservation. So the third way we extinguish our joy is really related to this. I guess it's all interrelated, isn't it? But specifically to reactivity versus responsiveness is that we try to make our hearts feel something that they don't. We try
to talk ourselves into lives we don't really want. Something that I really like to live by is if you have to think about it, the answer is already no. Because if you have to think about it, your brain is working overtime to try to convince your heart to feel something that it does not feel. Your heart knows the answer. And if you don't want to think of your heart, think of your gut, think of your core, think of your body, your mind is not
your brain. It's your whole entire being. And what I mean by that is you have access to the, you know, however, 10% of conscious thought that's at the forefront of your brain. All of the rest of it is very often speaking to you through bodily sensation, quite subtle, contractions and expansions. And then sometimes it's not subtle though. So you will notice is there a specific way you feel every single time you see someone is something really draining
you to something kind of make your stomach hurt in an uncomfortable way. That's actually all your body mind speaking to you. And when the body mind speaks to you and is trying to tell you the truth about something and your brain starts overthinking and trying to convince it to feel otherwise. At the end of the day, you're really just making yourself take the next exit point on the highway when you've really not reached your final destination.
And then you're lost, you're off-roading, you're stuck, you're unhappy and you're wondering how did I get here again. And it's because you're not listening to yourself. You will know something is a yes because it is a quiet, intuitive certainty. You will know something is a true no because it will feel almost like an exhale. Really think about
something that you absolutely know is not right for you. I know, for a fact, a career as a rocket scientist is nowhere in my path, is nowhere in my desire, is nowhere in my interest. When I think of a career path like that, I don't have a high reactivity to saying no to it. I just say, oh, no, there's a calmness. There's an exhale. Oh, no, almost like you're releasing kind of brushing it away from you. Think of the things that you know for
sure I know. You don't even really have to entertain it. You just go, no, I'm not, that's it. But when something is a no that's actually a yes, deep down, you're going to have a high reactivity to it. And you're going to have to do a ton of mental gymnastics to convince yourself of something you don't really feel. So your brain is going, no, no, no, no, I'm scared of this, but your heart is saying, yes, this is what I want. And at the end of
the day, your brain is just really trying to protect your heart. But what you need to remind yourself is that there really is no such thing as protecting our hearts because the more we shield our hearts, true desires from the world, the emptier and emptier and emptier we become. And we begin to run the greatest risk of all, which is getting to the end of our years and realizing that we are not proud of the way we spent them. We
did not do what we came here to do. We looked back, filled with this regret. I didn't love the person I really loved. I didn't do the thing I knew I was really meant for. I didn't live in the place I really wanted. And when you're really in your head about it, the way you're evaluating it is that the things you really want, you make them seem more impossible
than the things you already have. But the truth is that when you're choosing something you don't really want, that's the hardest of all because you don't naturally have like the energy to deal with the inevitable challenges that come up either way. It's hard to get what you want, but it's also hard to keep choosing what you don't because you're never
going to fight for a life you don't really want. And when you're really going after something you actually care about in life, you find that the struggle that is required to get there feels so much more bearable almost to the point that it doesn't even feel like a struggle at all anymore. It just feels really, really worth it. Another way we extinguish our joy is by comparing ourselves into lack. And so I think the technical
term in sociology is a downward comparison. But what I really mean by it is that it is the false belief that the presence of something in someone else's life indicates the absence of it in yours. So someone else is successful, meaning you are not. Someone else is attractive, meaning you are not. Someone else is happy, meaning you are not. Someone else has the relationship they want, meaning you do not. And we do this very often and it's definitely a function
of high reactivity. But what we don't realize in that moment is that our ability to recognize something in someone else means that it is already present, even if it's dormant, it's present somewhere within us. We couldn't see it if we didn't have it inside. So actually, your ability to see someone else's success means either that that is a form of success that other people look at you and think you have or you really do legitimately have,
you just aren't completely aware of it. It's the same thing for happiness and love and all the other things that we recognize and other people. If we see it in someone else, it's because it is somewhere already existing in ourselves. You know, I like to think of all of our lives as one big, huge inkblot test. You know, an inkblot test. We look at
a piece of paper and it just has, you know, random ink kind of like spattered about. And it's not about what's on the page, but what's within the image that we think we see that is so incredibly revealing of our subconscious minds. That's happening, but the inkblot is other people and situations and life is a whole. And so, you know, there's a very
famous quote which is that we don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. And I think you will come to find over time that your perspective of even the exact same situation, place, person experience, will shift dramatically as your relationship to yourself and yourself concept changes as well. And that the singular way you think you see something like everything
else in life is actually quite nuanced. And there's always an opportunity and a potential to see things from a new perspective, but to see from a new perspective, we have to be at a new level. That's how we see things differently by becoming different first. And so in this case, it's about not extinguishing the joy of what we already have because someone else
might have something equivalent or nicer or whatever else. An understanding that the idea that life is a pie that we all have to cut up the pieces and fight for the scraps is completely an illusion. We are all in the kitchen. Okay. Making dessert for ourselves. The presence of someone else having love does not mean you will not have love. Your ability to witness, see and understand the depth and beauty of that person's love and
relationship means you do have it or you will have it. Because if you can recognize it, it is in you. And if it is in you, you can create it. And you will create it when the opportunity presents itself. I really actually don't believe that when it comes to our personal lives, there's any such thing as competition. I really don't. I really, really don't. I really believe that the things that are meant for each of us are unique and perfect
to each of us. And we don't ever have to fight with anyone for what is already inherently and innately ours. Because what we have in life is often a product of what we create and what we create is a product of who we are. And nobody's bigness and boldness and sparkling, whatever they've got going on can ever take away what you have inside. You're both just shining in your own ways coexisting concurrently. Another way we extinguish
our joy is by feeling guilt for what isn't our burden to bear. All of us need to begin to understand that even in this hour, even in this day, today is the best day of someone's life. This is the worst day of someone else's life. In this exact moment, someone is meeting their final moments alive. Someone else is meeting the future love of their life.
Not only is there nothing that you can do about any of this, but it will also be the case that something negative will be happening somewhere to someone at all times, at varying degrees of intensity. And being an empathetic, compassionate, kind, even killed, well-informed, self-aware, open-minded human being does not mean you have to grieve for every imagined loss fathomable. It means that when you get your moment in the sun, you cherish that moment.
You are allowed to have that. Because you know what? Your day will come, and your days have come, like they do for all of us. The days when it is your turn to grieve, the loss of someone you love. The day it is your turn to deal with failure and pain. In this great wheel of life, whether in this lifetime or the next, we all experience everything one
way or another. And when we extinguish whatever little bit of joy comes to us out of the fear that it would make us a bad person for feeling it, because there's someone else out there who doesn't have it right now, is being unkind and unfair to ourselves. Because if you think that way, there is never going to come a moment in your entire life where
you will ever let yourself be happy. Really and truly. And being happy and appreciating and savoring what you have doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that you ever forget or deny or neglect the reality of what it is to be alive, which is sometimes very painful and incredibly unfair and terribly harsh. But when your moment comes that you do find peace and you do have something beautiful and you find something to be grateful
for, you are allowed to hold onto that. And you are allowed to celebrate that. And you're about, you're allowed to live in that. You really are. Give yourself permission. Because you feeling guilt for what is not your burden. Not only is it not alleviating anybody else's burden. But it's taking you away from the true power, purpose and impact you could have with your own life. There are moments to grieve. There are moments to rejoice. There are moments
to hold on. There are moments to let go. There are things you have that are special to you. There are things you lack that other people were given. This happens with so much nuance across all of time and all of humanity. And if we can all accept this, we can create some space and give ourselves some grace to understand that the world will be made no better by us denying, resisting or killing off any love or positivity within us. Because
we think we don't deserve to feel it. It's not true and it's not helpful. Another way we extinguish our joy is by misplacing our power into the future. And so when we do this, we get into a mindset of, I will do it later. I will do it when. When we are looking for the door of opportunity, we project it outward. One day, I could meet this person. I could go to this place. I could do this thing. What you're forgetting is that your power is
latent in the present moment. Your power is only ever right here and right now. You constantly have the power to choose and you are always one choice away, not only from a completely different life, but a completely different day. You are not bound to the past, nor your patterns. You're not even bound to what you thought the plan was this morning. When inspiration and insight comes to meet you at the door, you open it and you let it in and you let
it guide you. We often forget that our lives have a really incredible way of changing quite suddenly. We look back and we kind of reflect over the years and see what's shifted and what hasn't. What we forget is that those actual turning point moments, they very often don't look like breakthroughs. They look like microchifts. The breakthroughs often come
to us in ways that are so subtle. We don't even notice that they're happening. We can spend years of our lives dreaming about doing something, maybe moving somewhere beautiful that you've always loved. It's definitely an experience I've definitely had. You can think about it and you can worry about it and you can tally up all the reasons why it
could never happen and would never happen. It's not realistic. Then you can move into a place of more empowerment where you start believing in your vision and thinking, okay, maybe we could do this. How could this happen? Your breakthrough moment is seriously as simple as opening your phone and just searching for apartment or housing rentals. It's something you do every day. It's just googling something. Seriously, that's it. That's the
breakthrough moment. That's when things really change. Today could be the day. You open your calendar and you mark a date as you're moving day. Seriously, like three months from now and say, this is the day I'm leaving. That's it. Then this would have been the day, the hour that changed your life forever. It was that simple and it was always right here. The doorway to what you desire is always right in front of you. When you're placing your
power into the future, you keep walking right by it. You keep walking right by it. Going back to the way that our minds talk our hearts out of what they really feel. If you're sitting here thinking, I want change, but I don't know what to do. You've just been thinking about it way too much. Take some time to clear your mind and come back to center. Come back to consistent desire. Because time will show you the difference between what's an illusion
and what's truth. It will show you because of what remains, what is consistent and what strengthens. What is the dream you have always had? What if you always loved? What if you always wanted to do? Trust that. That's your heart speaking. That's your heart trying to give you guidance into a life experience bigger and more beautiful than you could ever fathom. As I had said earlier, we often think that the lives we want are going to be more
challenging than the lives we have. Remember that the life you have at one point in time also seemed like an impossible feat. There were times in the past that you didn't know how you would get through that day or you didn't know how you'd get to here. You don't know how you'd make it work or make it happen. That's because stability and success and all of that, it's not in the circumstances. It's in you and it's how you work with the
circumstances. It's how you respond to the circumstances. It's how creative you are. Coming up with solutions, new solutions, it's how much you think out of the box. Then for time you do that again and again and you find that what was once completely unknown terrain is now your home base. The things that used to scare you, doing them now empowers
you. Again, this is because you just familiarized yourself with them. That's it. In a lot of mentorships that I've had, a really common practice that I have been asked to do is somatic experiencing. If you don't know what that is, it is essentially many different ways of test driving your dream car before you buy it. Even if you can't buy it right now, just so you get the feeling of what it's like to be behind the wheel. It's kind of like that,
but with a lot of things. It's the practice of writing yourself a check for the amount you want to make and from whom. It's the process of affirming the person you want to be and kind of crafting your identity around that desire rather than constantly pinning yourself to being limited and defined by your mistakes or your past. It's I am statements. I am this here and now. In somatic experiencing, we're actually familiarizing ourselves with a new
reality, so much so that it starts to become automated within our subconscious minds. What we don't realize we will do over time is that we will consistently choose things that support, reflect, and affirm what we've kind of already let ourselves to believe. If you tell yourself a hundred times, I'm going to buy that car one day. I don't know whatever it is for you. You're going to do it almost unconsciously, really and truly, because
you're going to make it such a set plan within yourself. You're going to do it because it feels most comfortable to you. You're going to do it because you've been mentally preparing for it and expanding your container for a very long time. The power to start choosing is always in the now. The solution is always in the now. The doorway is always in the now. Our job is to not project a perfect path forward, but find a way to anchor our
hearts true desire into the now to take one tiny step today. To realize that what we desire is something that's within us. It's a seed we need to plant, but the seeds are already in our hand right now, and we start planting now. Not waiting because if we wait, we're waiting forever because it's never the right time, really and truly. It's never the right time to do something that is not super comfortable or familiar to you. It's
never going to feel like the right time to be vulnerable and make a big change. And so instead of shocking your system and potentially tripping your upper limit switch, you start conditioning yourself in the now. You start expanding yourself in the now. You start bringing the dream into the now. And the last thing I want to talk about the last way we extinguish our joy, well, certainly not the last way, but when I think that I really
want to discuss is the act of engaging with what we don't want. What we engage with we empower. What we engage with we energize. And so the way out of anything we don't want to be involved in anymore, whether it's a thought pattern or relationship, whatever, is to disengage. And the reason it is tough to disengage is because when we're waiting through it, it feels like we're resolving it. It feels like we're searching for an answer
or finding a way. We're trying to fix it. But the truth is that if we are stuck in the mindset and the perspective and the energy of the problem, we aren't finding an answer until we introduce the energy of the solution into the equation. Otherwise, we're just circling the drain. So you can spend your whole life focusing on complaining about and feeling
down about what you don't like and what you don't want. And you're only going to have more and more and more of it because you're engaging with it and you're empowering it. And the way out is by asking yourself what would be the opposite of that thing and then engaging yourself fully into the solution. You see the problem, you recognize the problem,
you acknowledge the problem and you validate the pain of having that problem. You don't brush it over because if you brush it over, you also can't find the solution because you don't know the answer to a question you never asked. So you can start the energy of the problem. But just know that you're never going to see the other side of it until you start engaging with the energy of the solution. There's a stoic saying, I believe, that we don't
let go by standing in the ruins, but by building the new city. And it is in the act of building the new that we kind of just naturally let go of the old. We can't stand in the ruins and expect to think about anything other than the ruins. You know, in the same ways that we have to feed our bodies, we also someone have to feed our minds. Our minds need something to do. Our minds need a job. That's another really powerful tool that I've utilized over
the years, which is giving my oftentimes overactive brain a job. So my heart and my core in my center tells me what it tells me what I want. My brain tells me how not the opposite way around. I'm going to repeat that. My heart tells me what my brain tells me how. My heart tells me this is what I want. Okay, now the heart doesn't need to try to figure out how exactly it's going to come to pass. Just in the same way that my brain isn't supposed
to try to figure out what I want and not supposed to overanalyze my way into it. My heart tells me what I want. My brain gives me the how. My brain gives me the steps. My brain focuses on the solutions on the way forward. We get out of thinking, could I do this and
we get into thinking how, how could I do this? And when you are fully engaged in how thinking, almost all of the time, you would be floored genuinely, like really and truly genuinely shocked by how much power and possibility you do not even know you have, because you have been unconsciously operating beneath your upper limit this whole entire time. The fear of the unknown of what is not yet comfortable has kept you choosing the exact same things
that you feel are keeping you the most stuck. And so as human beings, we have a really, really unique, really interesting journey to go on, which is that we kind of have two parts of
our brains working with and against each other at all times. Like the front parts, the prefrontal cortex, imagining all that we could create, conceptualizing our potential, conceptualizing of the people we could be, and the brain stem, the lower part, whose only function is to keep us safe and in the known, safe and in the known and also socially accepted, because
that also registers as safety to the brain. But what I am saying is that to make our nervous systems feel safe enough to energize us and give us the momentum we need, the clarity, the problem solving, the strategization that we will require to move forward. We first have to build a comfort zone around what is desired. And we do that little by little.
We do that little by little. We expand our container little by little. And we do it every time we know we're moving in the direction of something we really desire, we feel scared, we brave the uncertainty, we sit with it long enough that we start to re-regulate to our new normal. We start to find our comfort in the things that move us forward, not the things that hold us back. You have to stay constantly aware of your upper limit because
it expands as you do. Look for the ways you might be unknowingly sabotaging to stay in the old comfortable and start spending much more time figuring out how to get yourself acclimated to what you really do want. Because when what you really do want also seems like the most comfortable, natural thing, it's yours. It's already yours.