Okay, okay: maybe the word “joy” right next to an exclamation point is a little much for a Saturday morning. Alas, sometimes I’m a little bit of (as my earlier self would say) a cheeseball.

From James Baraz’ Awakening Joy, as excerpted in the Spring 2010 issue of Buddhadharma:

There’s only one of you, and if you let yourself be the best one of yourself possible, you may also like what you see. In time you may even love yourself.

Someone tell Whitney Houston that one Mr. Baraz is on to her! He continues:

Learning to love yourself is a process that evolves over time. It begins with letting go of self-criticism and forgiving yourself for being who you are. We forgive ourselves for habits and behaviors we continue to get caught in that are less than wholesome. We forgive our bodies for how they look or for how they function, forgive our minds for being scattered or not being smart enough, forgive our personalities for not being witty or interesting enough.

As you stop focusing on what you don’t appreciate and start seeing yourself as a unique, mysterious, changing being, you allow your best self to shine through. And the joy of that radiates out to the world.

—

My “opportunity for development” is saying yes to less (stuff; activity).  My “monkey mind” leaps from thought to idea with ridunculous frequency. “Wait; what did you say?” was apparently the question I asked at the dinner table most frequently as a child, my mind disappearing from the family conversation and somersaulting into my head leaping with this, that, and the other.

What suffers on account of my squirrel-brain is stuff like continuous attention to projects like DinnerGrrls.org. Since the last event two years ago in Manhattan, I’ve moved four times, shut down my company, gone in-house with a client, bought a house, undergone a major surgery, and gotten married. (!) My next project, truly, is to keep working on less projects!

DinnerGrrls.org, however, is the hopeful beneficiary of all this, as I can focus more on it, and awaken the joy that I have always felt sitting at a dinner table somewhere with other interesting women who really want to squeeze more meaning out of their lives in a way that’s authentic to their interests and values. So over the past few weeks I’ve been working on cleaning up our discussion forums (which were riddled with no less than 14,000 spam bots) and gently becoming more active with the Facebook status updates and tweets.

And more importantly I’m working on getting a Q1 dinner set up for 2012 in the new town of me and therefore the new “HQ” (ha!) of DinnerGrrls.org — Philadelphia. Which I hereby declare the city of sisterly love, dagnabbit.

Remember:  there’s only one of you! So be nice to her. Because she is friggin’ fabulous.

xo