Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of

the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us

the beloved. Being the beloved expresses the core truth of our existence. I kept running around it

in large or small circles, always looking for something or someone to be able to convince me

of my belovedness.

Honore Nowan, the Life of the Beloved.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to my series on aggressively happy, a realist guide to believing in the goodness of life.

You may have noticed a slightly irregular podcast posting schedule,

and I will have to apologize for that

but also give a I think a very reasonable justification for it which is that I came down with

COVID for the last 10 days so I have been locked inside in something of a brain funk as well as a physical funk. And so I kind of

put some of my plans on hold and let some of the podcasts slip to the side while I healed from that.

I feel like the last two weeks have been a real, a real kind of embodied test of the principles and aggressively happy.

As the world has gone to a more and more desperate point and my own physical health has been in

some, some not terrible peril, but distress. But in a weird way, it's been kind of special to rest and to take many of the

lessons from my own book as scoldings from myself and to lean into what it looks like to

remember that I have a body and to cultivating a heart that seeks good and true

and beautiful things, not ignoring the darkness of the world we're currently experiencing,

but as a response to it. Last week on my Patreon reading group, we are a few weeks behind. We're going a little slower,

so we were doing the chapter on enjoying things unironically. And we read C.S. Lewis's Learning and

...