Ep 38: Calling In More Joy: 3 Steps to Create a Life You Love
Hey y’all!
I’m coming to you from a little sound booth inside the airport lounge — because when the energy’s right, you just gotta roll with it!
I’m on my way back to Lisbon after a month in the US, and I’m feeling surprisingly joyful. So, in this episode, I’m diving into what it really takes to call more joy into your life.
I’m sharing three simple — but powerful — steps I’ve been using to create more space for joy, connect with what truly lights me up, and release the things that no longer align.
Whether you’re feeling stuck, craving a shift, or just wondering how to bring more fun and fulfillment into your daily life, this one’s for you.
Plus, I’m sharing some personal stories, from my salsa dancing days to the lessons my ancestors have passed down about living in freedom and joy.
Trust me, you deserve to experience a life that feels good. Let’s talk about how to make that happen.
Join my email list for the Joy Activation Challenge: ashawilkerson.com/email
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today! If this episode inspired you, don’t forget to rate, follow, and review Because I’ve Healed. And be sure to share it with someone who’s ready to call more joy into their life. See you next week — love y’all!
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Asha (00:01.26)
Hey y'all, welcome back to another episode of Because I've Healed. I am excited to be filming this podcast episode from one of the little sound booths, let me show you, inside of the airport lounge. And I was thinking like, wait until I get back to Lisbon, but then I thought, no, I'm feeling good, the energy's great, let me go ahead and do this right now. I am making my way back to Lisbon after spending a month in the US.
And I am just surprised and thrilled with the amount of joy I feel. And So I want to talk to you today about calling in more joy in your life and the three things that you need to do to set yourself up to experience more joy. So after you listen to the intro, we'll come right back.
All right, so the first thing that you need to do in my experience of experiencing more joy is to actually start to spot the things in your life that are bringing you joy and happiness. And...
Asha (01:14.572)
Now you know by now that I moved to Lisbon about eight months ago and I left my full-time tenured track teaching position at a community college. I had lived in Oakland, California for almost 20 years or California for almost 20 years. I knew exactly where to go and what to do and life was pretty good. I had acquired three rental properties and like for all intents and purposes, I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. But at some point along the way, it didn't...
feel good and I had to stop asking myself, is it good or is it bad? Because good and bad are just binaries. You only get a yes or a no, a do or a don't. You only get two options when you think about life or think about things that you're experiencing in terms of good and bad. So I had to shift my language or I decided to shift my language to talking about things as being in alignment or out of alignment. And I knew that at the period of time that I was thinking about this,
There had been a period of time about four year or three years probably prior where I was so happy. And I was thinking, what was I doing? Cause I was busy. I was super busy. I think I was in business school. I was relatively new to teaching, but I was traveling a lot and I was dancing and I started thinking about all of the things that I was doing that brought me joy. And so the first step that you need to do is to remember
and to connect with the things that bring you joy. So it could be from when you were a child, it can be from right now when you're an adult. For me, Cuban salsa dancing brings me so much joy. It took me a while to get good, but now I feel like I can really express myself through the music and just have fun. I love going out to meet people and just to share a good dance. I love traveling. At the time, I think it was 2018, I was traveling so much. Little weekend trips here and there.
Or I would arrange my work schedule that maybe I could take four or five days and traveling for me lights me up. For other people, it's stressful, but for me, being in a different location just is so inspiring and lights something up inside of me. I was working out about five days a week. It was my goal to work out about five days a week. And I had told myself that if I was going to play hard, I also needed to take care of myself hard. So I was working a lot. I was commuting from Oakland
Asha (03:40.644)
to Sacramento to work, which is about 90 miles, like an hour and 15 minutes during the times I would commute. I believe I was still in business school, maybe I had just finished business school. I was traveling and I knew that in order to do that and to do it well and to show up well, I needed to support my body. And so I was going to the gym on a regular basis, feeling good, feeling strong, feeling really fit in my body. And so when, a little after the pandemic, when I was feeling like, my gosh, I just don't
like this, I don't want this anymore. I had to go back and think about what, when did I feel joy and what was I doing? So I made my list and I made my list of what I wanted to see in my future. That's step one. Remember or make a list of the things that brought you joy or the things that you think will bring you joy so you can start calling them into your life. Step number two
is to actually create the space for yourself to feel the joy. Now this is a little bit hard because it's not just bringing things in, but it might also be cutting things out. There were things that I did not like to do that I was still doing back at that time. I wasn't completely ready to give up on my law practice yet. I shouldn't say give up because it just wasn't in alignment, but I wasn't, I guess I wasn't ready to give it up, not give up on it.
I wasn't ready to give it up yet because being an attorney was a big part of my identity. I didn't think that it made me cool or special or anything like that, but that's what I had gone to school for. That was what I used my attorney background in all of my jobs since graduating, even for teaching. I was running a paralegal program and I couldn't really even think about what would I be doing if I wasn't practicing law or law adjacent.
But I realized that taking on legal cases just like killed me. I hated it. I didn't want to do it. I just, bleh, just, bleh. I don't even have the words for it, but that's the feeling I would get. And so I had to learn to say no to things. So it's creating the space. It's creating the space to do the things that you want, but also think about creating space by cutting out the things that you don't want. Cut out the things that drain your joy and your happiness.
Asha (05:58.433)
It might be filing taxes for you. Maybe that's something you can just power through and maybe that's something you can hire out for. In your business, maybe it's joy drains when you're posting on social media. So you hire out for that or maybe it brings you joy to post on social media and you want help with the back end or admin support. Make those decisions. Maybe at home it's about not doing the dishes because it drains your joy and asking for help from someone else in your house.
Or maybe it's outsourcing the laundry so you don't have to do it. Whatever it is, you have the ability, when you open your mind to it, to say no to the things that drain your joy and yes to the things that bring you joy. And let me tell you, you might not get it right the first time you decide, yes, I'm gonna live in joy. You might have to experiment and figure out what it is that actually brings you joy. And there's no problem with that.
And as you get older and have more experience and meet different people, the things that used to bring you joy won't bring you joy anymore. So I am really happy being in Lisbon, even though the Cuban salsa scene is, let me be polite, it is growing. It is a Cuban salsa scene without Cubans. So that is quite problematic. So you can already imagine how that feels. But,
the parties are from like 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. and I love it because I am not someone who can stay up until 1, 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning anymore. It takes me at least three to five business days to recover if I'm in bed after 1 o'clock and I don't like it. So it used to be just fine for me to stay out salsa dancing until 1 a.m. and I'd come home and I'd go to sleep and I'd be up by like 7 and productive the next day.
She is not me anymore. I am not her. I am not that woman. I don't know when she disappeared. She probably disappeared right before I turned 40, maybe when I did turn 40. So the way that I experienced joy through dancing now is just earlier. If there's a happy hour salsa dance, salsa party, I'm there. But the midnight ones, I'm good. And that's okay because I am adapting what brings me joy to the stage of life that I'm at and making sure that I always feel good when I'm doing it. Now,
Asha (08:13.263)
the third thing that you need to do to call in more joy in your life is to celebrate the little things. It's to celebrate and to spot the little things that you can that make you happy, the little wins. When your brain starts to spot little wins here and there, you will begin to see more of them. You will begin to see more opportunities to experience joy. So you might not know this about me, but I am a complainer. I'm a complainer, but I don't
sit in complaints without trying to make a change. And so for some reason, I feel like that makes me a little better than the people who just complain. I shouldn't say better than, but I like that about myself. Better than, you know, when people just complain without taking action. But for example, on this flight back to Lisbon, it is a flight from SFO San Francisco to Boston. I have a three plus hour layover in Boston and then another seven hour flight to Lisbon. I hate it.
I would much rather go from San Francisco to Amsterdam or to Paris and then take a two or three hour flight from one of those cities over to Lisbon. But I used rewards points to travel. And so, you know, I get to experience some joy in that because even though this trip feels like long and it feels like it's drawn out and it's just not efficient an efficient use of anybody's time, in my opinion, I didn't have to pay for it. Or maybe I just paid the taxes, I think, but I didn't have to pay the full price with.
for the fare. And so when I'm sitting on that plane and I'm going, this sucks, I'm also reminding myself, this trip isn't the ideal itinerary that you wanted, but you didn't pay for it with cash, you paid for it with points. And then when I got here, it was a journey to get from one terminal to the other. But on the bus or the shuttle bus that we had to take from one terminal to the other, we were driving around the airport where all the planes are. And I am so fascinated with the planes.
and we had to stop so some plane could cross right in front of us. It felt like a safari, but with airplanes. I've been on a safari in Kenya. It was amazing. This felt like a little mini safari at the Boston Logan International Airport, because there were planes crossing the path. There were those little cars there. Or maybe it felt like I was also in one of those Richard Scarry Busy World books for the kids. I don't even know if they still make those, but all the books that have the
Asha (10:32.793)
trains and planes and automobiles and it feels so busy and stuff like that. you know, little moments, right, where I could be complaining because I didn't sleep very well because I had set my alarm for 4:45, right? I have a layover in Boston, that's ridiculous. I have three and a half hours for a layover, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But how exciting to be able to see some airplanes. I was looking for a particular lounge, I couldn't quite find it, jumped into another one, and this lounge is pretty dope. I just had clam chowder and I'm about to go back for the ribs.
So all of this is happening even though I didn't get the itinerary that I wanted, but because I have conditioned and I am still conditioning my brain to see the winds, to see the little points of joy where I can, now an experience that I could easily have a bad attitude about and be irritated about is something that is more joyful. And the more you can pull out these moments of joy,
they will accumulate and they will begin to lift your mood. Also, let me just say, like, living in joy is your birthright. I haven't talked about connecting to your ancestors yet, but I do want to bring it back to that because that is really what I'm focused on in life, connecting to your intuition and your ancestors. We often only think of our ancestors as the most recent people that we've known, maybe our grandparents, maybe our great-grandparents. And if you are a person of color,
living in the United States or maybe just in the world, you understand the struggle and the sacrifices the people in your recent lineage have had to make to get you to where you are. But when I started connecting to my ancestors, they call them like the middle ancestors, not the like beginning or the ancient ones, but kind of the middle ones, maybe three, four or 500 years ago, it opened up something
different in me and connecting with the old, old ancestors as well because those energies aren't conditioned by the most recent lived experience. So when I think about an ancestor, I also think about my grandfather. My grandfather was a civil rights leader. He walked, worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. My mom also, she's not an ancestor, but she integrated the University of Mississippi, meaning she was the first black woman to enroll
Asha (12:51.877)
graduate from Ole Miss. When I think about my grandfather's sacrifices as an ancestor to register black people to vote in Mississippi where he risked his life multiple times, where families in the community would distance themselves from my family because they didn't want crosses burned on their lawn and they didn't want the KKK to come after them and they didn't want to get put be put on the FBI's most wanted list...
When I think about leaving the US and deciding not to practice law, sometimes I feel guilt because I think this is what my grandfather sacrificed for. Not necessarily so I could be an attorney, but that I could have this life that I have in the US. That made it harder to leave because I understood the most recent condition of what my people had gone through. When I connected to my middle and more distant ancestors, it opened up my understanding and my
context to know that those and all of the ancestors are fighting and just want for us to be free. right But the middle distant ones and the later distant ones Have are beyond what my present understanding of the conditions are right now/ And so when I started connecting to them, I would ask them for messages... of like yeah go and be free. All we have ever wanted was to be free.
We were free when we were connected to other people. We were free when we were learning and doing the things that we wanted to do when we were dancing. And that gave me the permission mentally, spiritually, emotionally that I needed to go and figure out what was going to work for me. And that really helped to unlock joy in my life because I am making decisions that are aligned with the life that I want to live. That's why it's important to connect with your ancestors because
it is great and important to honor the most recent ones, but the strength and the freedom that you can pull from the distant ones is unmatched.
Asha (14:55.601)
So where do you go from here? Make sure that you are on my email list because early next week, I think on Monday, March, what would that be? 10th, I think it will be. I am going to launch a Joy Activation Challenge in my email community. You will be able to sign up for the challenge later, but you're gonna get it directly if you are on my email list. So go to ashawilkerson.com/email and join the list. You can also
link to it in the show notes and get on there. That is where I am going to be spending most of my time talking to you all and sharing little tips and nuggets and wins that I have with you all because I want you to experience the same kind of transformation that I have been able to experience lately and it is 100 % credited to getting in touch with my intuition and trusting that bad boy and getting in touch with my ancestors and trusting their messages as well. All right.
I love you all. I love you all. I love you all. I will see you next week.