About Call to Joy and Sally Churgel
Call to Joy Mission
I’m committed to a world where each person is connected to their joy for an empowered, thriving life.
I founded Call to Joy for those who yearn to live life fully and in a continuum of joy as your base note rather than a rare and random experience because
Joy is Your Birthright
The Call to Joy mission: To galvanize more joy in the world by guiding you to listen to the innate wisdom of your body and the communication from your soul in order to be the brightest light you can be. You have the tools within to (re)connect to your heart, body, brain and soul for daily expressions and experiences of joy.
My Joy
My personal joy comes from moments throughout the day when I stop, breathe, pay more attention to the experience in front of me and remember who I truly am. Some of my guaranteed joy practices:
- Argentine tango dancing for a guaranteed oxytocin
- Chanting in many spiritual traditions
- Haiku writing (see my collection of Joy-Ku)
At last, good enough
No shame, no blame – beneath all
A river of joy
- Poet Laureate of Ner Shalom
- Creating collage art
- Kayaking, bicycling, hiking, pilates, yoga and spin classes
- Hot tubs and hot springs and a good long hot shower
- Banter and deep talks with friends who get me and I get them
- Exchanging cat joy with Tara and Gaté (18½ pounds of pure cat muscle)
From Shame to Joy
Everyone who comes to me has their own unique struggle and leaves with their own unique version of self-empowerment and joy. It can be exhilarating to become the joy filled person you know yourself to be (or yearn to be). The process can be gentle like climbing a beautiful coastal hill. My own experience (and I’m guessing a few of you) is more like an unexpected storm while climbing Mt Everest. My shame was like a snow storm that enveloped me with a white out effect from my denial, blame, defensiveness and an inability to truly take responsibility for my joy.
My personal exploration has allowed me to know, all too well, many various permutations of pain including divorce, death of loved ones, losing a home, car accidents, decades of physical discomfort and fear of success.
I’ve come to accept that all this pain is human and so is our joy. I still have challenging moments when I worry that I’m a fraud and wonder how I can be doing this work. The difference is I now have tools to re-access my joy and return to a more even keel and balance. Every day I know appreciation and calm despite my occasional strong upsets.
Joy Powered Studies
These are the roots of my work: the sources from which I found how to access joy moments throughout the day and how to return to joy when I’m in overwhelm, stress and imbalance. These don’t even include the many courses on meditation, chanting, spiritual retreats and myriad of self-growth classes I have taken in the past 40 years.
Integrated Awareness® (IA®)
This is the heart and soul of my own healing and the work that I do.
Lansing Gresham, Founder, Integrated Awareness
My exploration of Integrated Awareness began in 1993, when I was drawn to IA® for physical pain in my neck and back. After numerous sessions and classes, I realized that I had actually come to learn self-acceptance, forgiveness, presence, and to discover my life purpose. The neck pain released and I began the long process of bringing my outer life into congruence with my life purpose.
It is with eternal gratitude that I thank Lansing Gresham, IA® founder and his brilliant gift forh translating the complexities of energy and movement to a work that is accessible and profoundly healing. It is through this work I found the optimal way to express my own life purpose: help others find access to their Joy birthright.
Lansing taught me that healing requires presence and a willingness to be as vulnerable as the people I work with.
This is how Lansing defines IA®:
“Integrated Awareness® is an innately human set of skills for healing and wholeness through movement, touch, enhanced awareness and changes of consciousness…..which enable us to guide this marvelous system without the fears, wounds and rules which have held us down so far below our inherent capacities.”
After spending over 20 years studying with Lansing, I am convinced that his mastery of the work is genius level. He studied with pioneers and power houses in the field of healing, body movement and somatic awareness in the 1970’s and 80’s: Moshe Feldenkrais, Fritz Smith (Zero Balancing), Jean-Pierre Barral, John Upledger and June D’Estelle.
Certified in 1996 and now senior teacher. Learn more
Emotional Brain Training (EBT)
Dr. Laurel Mellin, EBT Founder
EBT is a science based methodology that teaches individuals how to rewire their own brain. EBT is on the forefront of neuroscience research that has proven that wires that are the root cause of anxiety, depression, overeating and unhealthy habits can be weakened and erased.
We need emotional tools to rewire emotional circuits. Each unique tool gives us the power to wire our brain to move through stress effectively back to a state of connection and well-being.
I have observed in myself how these simple powerful tools have changed my set-point of joy to a higher more adaptable brain state. I am less reactive to typical stressors. When I am reactive I have simple tools I can use on the go that returns me to balance rapidly.
EBT was developed by Laurel Mellin, PHd and her colleagues Igor Mitrovic, MD and other faculty members at the University of California San Francisco over the last 30 years. I became a certified EBT trainer in 2015.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
The IFS Model views a person as containing an “ecology of relatively discrete minds {parts}, each of which has valuable qualities and each of which is designed to — and wants to — play a valuable role within.”
The Founder, Richard Schwartz, Ph.D, writes,
“…parts take on common roles and common inner relationships….these inner roles and relationships were not static and could be changed if one intervened carefully and respectfully. I began conceiving of the mind as an inner family…The internal world works the same way an external family works, when children are forced into extreme roles by external circumstances and, once it seems safe, they gladly transform into valuable family members.”
This work allows a cognitive awareness to emerge from the depths of the touch and energy aspect of my work. Personally, it has allowed me to transform relationships as I have grown keenly aware of what is mine and my trigger and what I’m likely projecting onto the other person. I completed a one-year intensive study in IFS between 2011-2012.
Art Therapy
I would not be who I am or where I’d be in the world without these most important women in my life who have loved, laughed and cried with me. For over twenty years, they have nurtured my authentic nature and fostered my artistic side, as well as, held me in my deepest losses and confusions. The greatest gift they gave me was a ceremony to accept and own Joy as my life purpose.
Kaylin Noblin, MFT, ATR, our loving illustrious leader, held me through years of deep diving into my depths always with a buoy nearby. With wisdom, quiet strength and mama bear tough love she has helped me learn to love myself as the “still coins thrown there by someone who wished for something different.” (David White)
Meagan Pugh (Art to Heart Counseling and Somatic Art Therapy), LPCC, taught me through her trainings, Spiral of Healing and Moving into Joy, to trust that the visual art is a form of healing that effectively heals trauma and opens our body and heart to joy. Meagan has opened her heart and home and family to me for which I’m ever grateful.
Leslie King, 5 Rhythms certified teacher, writer, permaculture maven, bee keeper has taught me dignity and beauty as a way of hanging on and hanging in and ultimately healing.
Sally Criss, Lac Taught me that my tendency to hold an issue like a dog with a bone in its mouth is an advantage. Her specialty with Chinese medicine, acupuncture and herbs have been healing and a balm on numerous occasions.