Dear Reader,

Joy is on the list. It is just at the bottom.

After the emails. After the laundry. After the errands and the meal prep and the thing you promised your friend and the thing you promised yourself you would handle before the end of the week.

Then, if there is time, you can rest. Then, if you have energy left, you can do the thing that makes you feel alive.

Most days there is no time. Most days there is no energy left. So joy quietly slides to tomorrow's list, and tomorrow's list is already too long by the time you wake up.

Most people who try to open their third eye start with a forty minute meditation.

There's a much smaller doorway in. Three seconds, done correctly, and you'll feel the difference behind your forehead before you finish reading this sentence.

Try It Once Here

That's all it takes to know if it's for you.

You have been telling yourself this is temporary. It has been this way for years.

I did this with painting for almost a decade. I told myself I would paint again once things settled down. Things never settled down. Ten years later I realized "settled down" was never going to arrive, and I had been trading a decade of joy for a condition that did not exist.

I was not disciplined. I was postponing my own life on the assumption that my worth had to be earned before I could touch anything good.

Here is the honest truth. The list was never going to end. The list is the mechanism.

As long as joy is the reward at the finish line, you never actually reach the finish line. There is always one more thing that has to be done first. That is not accidental. That is your ego protecting you from the discomfort of receiving something you have not earned in some measurable way.

A quick dispatch from a colleague on the smallest practices producing the largest shifts this year. See the dispatch here →

You have made yourself believe that joy is what you get afterwards. But joy that only exists after everything else is done is not joy. It is a coping mechanism you keep dangling in front of yourself to justify how much you carry.

The ego runs this because feeling good without a reason feels dangerous. If you can be happy right now, before the list is done, then the list loses some of its authority. You would have to face the possibility that you have been earning something that was never for sale.

The joy was always available. You just kept telling yourself it belonged to the version of you who had finished everything.

Today, do one small thing purely for joy. Not to recharge. Not to be more productive tomorrow. Just because it makes you feel alive.

Read the book. Take the walk. Call the friend. Light the candle in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. Do it before the list is done, precisely because the list will not be done.

Notice how uncomfortable that gets. That discomfort is exactly where the pattern lives. Sit with it and do the thing anyway.

This is your magnetic mindset: you stop treating joy as the reward for finishing your life. You start letting it exist inside your life, and the whole rhythm of your days adjusts to a woman who does not have to earn her own aliveness.

Something to take with you today: "Joy is not what I get after. It is what I take with me through."

The list will never be done. That is the reason you must stop waiting.

Something to ask yourself today:

What brings you joy that you have been postponing until the list is done — and what would it feel like to do it today, before anything else?

Mindfully Yours,
Magnetic Mindset