Episode Six: The Meaning of Life

Last week, I talked about hitting a bottom over and over again — an experience I wrote about in my book, The Way of Being Lost: A Road Trip to My Truest Self.

It all started one morning, exactly a month before my 49th birthday — when I looked into the mirror and realized that, despite trying to do — and on paper looking like I really was doing — everything right, I was miserable.

That year would have been my dad’s 100th birthday, and so, as his daughter and biographer, I was invited all over the world to talk about him. But instead of doing what I’d done a decade earlier on my US and UK book tours, I did something completely different. I didn’t talk about what he had done in his life; I talked about how he lived it. And as I did that, something happened. I put my feet in his gigantic size 13 shoes and remembered how it felt to be around him.

It felt full of JOY!!

When that year ended, I thought to myself: “You need to bring that joy into your daily life.” So, I tried and failed, and tried and failed over and over again. Until I hit that desperate bottom where I was willing to listen instead of trying to do or to be.

What I heard was this: Create a daily practice of joy.

What did that mean and how would I do that? No clue.

So, the first thing I did was read everything I could about “practice” and distill it to its essence. I decided that practice entailed *doing* something — as opposed to just thinking about it — and then doing that something in a conscious, committed, daily, and deliberate way.

Okay.

The next thing I needed to know was what “joy” meant. I knew what joy *felt* like. But how do you *practice* something you are just supposed to *feel*?

Joy is the pure and simple delight in being alive.

When I found this definition, something in my heart sang. Wow! Just wow! How I yearned for that!

I decided that I was being asked to practice (i.e., *do*!) something every day in a conscious, committed, and deliberate way that made me feel the pure and simple delight in being alive.

So I did. Every day, I took a walk, cuddled with my sweet dog, photographed colorful flowers, listened to my favorite music, binge-watched *I Love Lucy* episodes I had adored as a kid, enjoyed vibrant hummingbirds buzzing at their feeder, and remembered to stop and really see the beauty of a sunset. Every day I did something, anything, that felt like joy. And then—because I am a writer, because I love to write, and because writing always has been one of my go-to ways of healing—once a week I began blogging not only about what I had done but also about how a lot of old voices in my head had tried to stop me.

I had written books, magazine and newspaper articles, and screenplays. But I had never really blogged. I loved blogging! Not only did it feel liberating and joyful to write whatever I wanted, however I wanted to write it, but blogging connected me with other people who also wanted to create more joy in their lives. These were people just like me, struggling through their own battles with self-loathing and self-doubt, trying to find their true purpose, and learning how to love and be loved.

Blogging kept me accountable to my practice — a practice I felt like I was sharing with others.

Practicing joy. Writing about my practice. And sharing it with others. These three things changed my life.

Truly. From that dark basement, I finally emerged into the light! I went from being someone who loathed herself (a lonely workaholic who ran herself into the ground, an unfulfilled woman in her fifties who believed she had never shown up to her own potential or to love) to becoming someone who felt grateful and at peace and who loved sharing her joy with others.

I know it sounds crazy, except that everything felt transformed. This joy practice stuff actually worked!

After an amazing year of practicing joy and sharing it with people, I began to feel as though I had discovered a magical formula. Now, if I just could understand *why* this had worked, I was pretty sure it could help others as well. I thought that if I could make my life into a kind of spiritual experiment, maybe I would be able to discover why a made-up practice had succeeded when nothing else had.

It was during this time that the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of a book I had loved when it first came out was republished: Marianne Williamson’s *A Return to Love*. While rereading it, a huge lightbulb went off when I saw this: “Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.”

I saw that this was the reason creating a daily practice of joy worked when nothing else had. My whole life, I had been trying to fix what I saw as broken. I believed I had left the Field of Love and that it was my “job” to find it again. But when I began a daily practice of joy, I did something different. I didn’t try to change a behavior, habit, or way of thinking as I had in the past. Instead, I began “living as if”—as if I were still living in the Field of Love. By doing this, I invited who I always had thought I could be back into my life. Because she was really who I was! Even if it was for only twenty minutes a day, I lived as if I was the person I always had longed to be as an adult: a person overflowing with immense joy, feeling deep connection, filled to the brim with hope, expressing her creativity, connecting with others in meaningful ways, and experiencing profound peace.

In other words — for at least twenty minutes every twenty-four hours, I was living Love!

Before that, I had been trying to fix my problems using the same mindset that created them: I was *afraid* that I never would feel good about myself, *afraid* that I never would be able to change my life, *afraid* that I would fail myself and others. And from that place of fear, I tried to find the ways to mend myself.

Remember what Guillermo del Toro said. Every day, we have to choose between love and fear. What my heart-centered daily practice of joy did for me was shift me out of the habitual choice of fear into living Love.

Creating a daily practice of joy and writing about it shifted me out of a lifetime of fears and helped me remember the only thing any of us need to remember: *The whole meaning of life is Love*.

That’s how huge heart-centered practice is — and it’s why I’m dragging myself — and anyone listening — through this yearlong podcast journey. Because — oh let’s quote a quartet of Liverpool lads you might have heard of called the Beatles — All you, or I, or anyone needs is Love.

I have one more episode left and we’ll be all the way through — the introduction to the book. Yep. We haven’t even gotten to Chapter One. But don’t worry, it’s a short book.

That said, next Tuesday is May 27, my dad’s birthday. So, I’m going to delay the end of the introductory chapter of the book by throwing in a bonus episode called The Heart-Centered Practices of Vincent Price. Should be FUN!!!