This post is the second part of a six-part series including:

The 5 Components to Anti-Aging

Exercising the ‘Tude

5 Ways to Keep Your Body Young

Food is Medicine So Don’t be Lenient with Convenience 

3 Simple Ways to Reduce Your Exposure to Toxins (AND Be  An Earthkeeper for Your Environment)

The Missing Link to Anti-Aging

How you see things in life is how you will experience it.  Let’s be clear…this is not about taking reality and sweeping it under the rug when you encounter stress or setbacks.  It’s all about how you deal with those stressors.  Being a multi-dimensional healer, I have learned that there is a fine balance between how you want to experience life and reality.  Many times, we are tested to see if we can hold the vibration needed to manifest what we want in life.

If you want to look, feel, and stay young, then you have to feel it in your spirit and your attitude first.  That is the key to tapping into your own fountain of youth.

Recently, I was talking with one of my senior clients about the attitude of anti-aging, and the word “joy” came up a lot.  We concluded that joy is the key to staying young.  Do you have joy in your life, or are you always looking for the bad stuff to happen?  Or, as one of my fellow healer friends put it, are you “vibing” with all the stuff that you don’t want in your life, or are you “vibing” with what you want?

YOU have the capacity to choose your joy or pain and suffering.  Here’s a challenge for you…how do you take a not-so-joyful situation and turn it around to find your joy in it?

Just to be clear again, it’s not about denying your feelings, nor your hurt, nor your pain. It’s about looking at how you can learn from the situation.  I’m not about judging things as negative or positive; situations are what they are.  When we get stuck saying that they are one or the other, then we tend to feel jaded.  The key is feeling what you feel–I’m all about getting the yucky feelings out–and once you’re done, look at how you can find the lesson in the situation.

So, I’m going to share a situation that I was dealt over a year ago.  I allowed a friend to stay at my home during Thanksgiving week while I went away to spend time with my family in Southern California.  While I was gone, my friend somehow flooded a good part of my house and damaged the hardwood floors.  Granted, I am not the owner of the house, so we had to inform the homeowner.  Lo and behold, the homeowner decided that he wanted to sell the house without fixing the floors while I was still living there.  Now, housing in the SF Bay Area is outrageously expensive, more than I was willing to pay to live by myself.  Thankfully, a friend invited me to stay with her, though I was initially upset about losing my home rental.  However, I saw many good things about the situation, too–the house had a beautiful panoramic view of the Bay Area, and it was in a more central location than my previous home.  Also, I no longer had to come home to an empty house on Friday nights, yet I had time to myself when I needed it.  As for the friend who flooded my home…I let her go after she didn’t see anything wrong with what had happened.  When I needed a place to stay, she wasn’t there for me.

So from that situation, I learned discernment.  It’s MY responsibility, ultimately, to make sure that I only allow people into my space who will treat me the same way that I treat them.  The joy I found in all this is learning to listen to my inner guidance.  And here’s more joy in my life–I live right down the street from this beautiful forest where I now hike every morning, meditate, and sungaze.  These three things help me to tap into my fountain of youth!

I would love to hear from you in the comments below how you have applied this exercise to a situation in your life.  When we start practicing having joy in our lives, it becomes a habit.

If you would like some more help with your anti-aging journey, check out my

30 Days to a Vibrant, Healthier, Younger You!