I feel obligated to warn you that I'm gathering an army

An army for a joy rebellion that is!!!

I posted the following invitation on a dear online community that I am part of:

your mission, should you choose to accept it:
To become a bombastic warrior chick (or dude), a fierce member of the joy rebel army.

your training: hand to hand combat against that greatest of evils: self doubt
Expert use of rampant positivity, disciplined funkiness and deploying radical self acceptance against all odds. Your training will come at great sacrifice. Negativity dealers will confront you, energy vampires will attempt to kidnap you. You will become vigilant against their attempts to seduce you.

Your duties: To employ your own unique brand of joy. Wonderfully awful art, messy love, spontaneous dancing, cozy cuddling, quiet tears, angry letters, epic poems.

*warning* You may experience brain washing as your heart expands and floods the inner critic sentry that resides in your cranium. Side affects are: ridiculous grins, toe tapping in public, enchanted cursing, imperfect magic and a slight pink tinge to your aura.

So I stand before you, oh potential warrior. Do you choose to accept your mission??


And people did. This thing sort of grew and has some really fun energy behind it. Enough to the point where we plan having actual missions. Fun stuff like writing 'joy' on the sidewalk or giving yourself a warrior name or leaving a love note in a library book or...well, whatever we come up with.

So much fun, in fact, that I thought hey, I'll invite the switched on humans that I know in the blogging community too.

What I love about this is..well, if I can be honest. It's not another self help thing, another 'to do'. must clean house. must read book on self growth. must fix me. Don't get me wrong, I have had amazing and wonderful experiences because of what I've learned in several key self help or spiritual books. I'm not saying that growing and learning aren't important.

But if you want to know the truth, I think once you've read a few books, been to a few classes or workshops, you start to realize that the basic principles are the same. This is a good thing. It means that sound knowledge is still being passed down and shared. Whatever the newest self help book is on the market probably has the same basic ideas as 'power of positive thinking' from the 80's and 'think and grow rich' from the 30's (?).

Is anyone else tired of beating themselves over the head with critisicm and fear and this list and that book and cleaning the house and saving the planet and getting a sale and getting published/discovered/written up/interviewed?

God I'm so sick of all of this. I'm tired of just trying so damn hard all the time and never taking time to appreciate and enjoy the life that I have now. The good now. The joy in me now.

The basics haven't changed.
listen to your heart
be kind (to yourself and others)
live in the moment
simplify
think positive
do good
breath
and my personal favorite: it's not enough to know these, it's time to live them.

So let's do that shall we??? Let's go have some fun.

I post weekly missions on the board. Of course anyone that wants to join the community is welcome to but I was also thinking I could just post them here as well (every monday).

Who's with me???