About Joanna Bell

When I was 11, after being thrust into saving the life of my mother, I was placed in private school for a semester; I was to be held back a grade. I said, “no, that’s not happening, I don’t like that idea.” I asked her what it was going to take to keep moving ahead, and I did it. Later, when I was in the military, a warrant officer was screaming at me to accept a faulty piece of equipment: I said no.

In a thousand ways, I had learned to say “no” when something wasn’t right. It was only when I learned to start saying “yes” that things really kicked into high gear. When you want something deeply and truly, when you want to say “yes” to something, nothing can stop you. Not fear, not shame, not other people’s projections; nothing in the world gets in the way of a true desire.

There are moments in life when your decisions truly, truly matter. Being able to recognize when something matters, in the face of the nonsense and the fears and the insecurities, comes from trusting yourself. If you believe that you’re helpless, then you will listen to all the victimizations stories that tell you to stay in an unfavorable situation. It is the growth of awareness that sees that something is unfavorable, or that you don’t want something—perhaps because it’s someone else’s nonsense, maybe it’s your own—whatever it is, it doesn’t support you, and you can say “no” to it.

Yes, and No. It’s simple, but not easy. It’s effortless, once you know what you actually want from life.

I was raised in a traditional non-traditional environment, a homeschooled and extremely religious family, full of expectations. I wanted something more. I wasn’t bogged down by many societal expectations until I became an adult, went into the military, dealt with rampant sexism and all the emotional abuse that authority could muster.

I wanted to operate in a system without denying my own creativity. I had never seen creativity as something that could further someone’s life. I went into the military for a career, but I had no idea what to expect. It represented freedom, possibility, and security. I grew up as insecure as anyone else, until at 16 when I went to into college and started to be exposed to so many different kinds of learning that I could not help but see life differently. This was pivotal: being able to recognize that there were other ways of thinking and information out there than what I had been given, because what I had been given was so sheltered.

There are primal lessons we learn from life. The military taught me that suffering was a choice; that I could continue living to other people’s expectations, or that I could see that that the people who actually matter don’t mind when you succeed. My upbringing taught me that there is a very real need to discern the difference between desire to people-please and acting from a true reflection of your ability.

These are not lessons taught in any school. These are learned through careful observation of life and of the journey that you take.

There are many paths that come up, maybe forks in the road, many decisions to be made. “Yes,” and “No,” and on and on. When you call your friend, and say to them, “I have to have something more than this. This can’t just be my life; this sorrow, this sadness, this struggle, this can’t be it,” when you call out for help and don’t know necessarily where to start, then it’s very basic: you start where you are. You start by asking questions and questioning reality. You start by questioning what you know life to be, and it never stops.

Knowing your imperfections and completely casting them off is a start. Releasing the labels placed on you by others and acknowledging them for what they are is how you walk the path. You are not limited by a simple definition, the stories that you tell about yourself could never encapsulate who you truly are, how could they! 

So many of us are lost in the stories we tell about ourselves. The constant narrative of, “I’m not good enough, I can’t do it,” and all that. It’s all the primal fear of death and loss, and it continues until you actually realize that you are okay with death. The thing is—and this is so subtle—once you can face your death, you come to grips with your own life. You are never afraid of death, you’re just not okay with life. If you live in constant fear because you didn't know how to utilize the unlimited potential that comes with the individual's life force and what's possible there, what is life? You must see the limitless power with you, both in your outer world and within, reflected as take ownership of the fact that you can change things, even if it hurts. This is healing. This is cleaning out the wounds of life.

With this, and with further study and self-transformation, focused on the nature of forgiveness and the removal of one’s identity to what one thinks is “me,” by letting go of identification with false beliefs perpetuated through society, you will see and come to embody what you are truly capable of, with all the layers of traumatic experiences removed.

My work is focused on the individual: on understanding the power of the self. To not let false dogma penetrate the layers of truth, to cultivate, honor, and trust in your intentions: if you have the desire to do good, then your intentions are good. To understand the nature of doubt, and how to use it to further your goals. To remove identification from the herd and realize that you are not limited, not limited whatsoever. That there is nothing to fear, that you don't have to be afraid of anything that happens; that these are just things, and they mean nothing about your value.

To seize your autonomy back from a world that doesn’t value it. To make your gifts, the value of your gifts, determined not on other people's reactions, but on your own resonance.

I am still driven and enthralled by the same constant pull that has been with me throughout my life to know more. The realities in which we live can seem so limited, and they are; but thinking makes them so.

The Inner Child

In my path, I found a common thread: the paradox of surrendering autonomy. Every time a new lesson came from life, I discovered a new, more subtle layer, a nuance, of the autonomy that had already instinctively been found, but was just buried under layers and layers of nonsense.

When you’re a kid, you are your truest expression of yourself. That’s what I do now: try and get in touch with the inner kid. Because the inner kid knows what’s right. The inner kid is ignorant, but knows how to treat people. And I am very proud of that part of myself. It’s the truest and genuine expression of yourself. For me, it’s girlish charm, true understanding, not blocked by all the lies that accumulate to someone throughout their lifetime. Lack of judgement, empathy in its purest form, where you share in the feelings of others but don’t take them on. When you look at a kid, they are free. They don’t feel obligated to please people unless they’ve gone through traumatic experiences. When life piles on, the essence of the child, which is the fearlessness of curiosity, is not limited to learned perspectives. When you’re a kid, everything is possible. You can have imaginary friends and a pile of mud is a playground. You hear a song you love and just start dancing, and everyone thinks it’s cute, but you don’t really care about what everyone else thinks, you just care about, “this is my favorite song!”

The passion that we naturally have comes forward when we live our lives in such a way that we know about morality and the way the world works, and then bring that back to what we instinctively had as a kid, blending all the education you receive, without the nuances. It is a rediscovery, an uncovering, a realization, a tapping into, a connecting with that happens. It’s not obvious; most of us are so identified with our survival instinct that all we see is what’s going on right now. If you weren't focused on survival, if you remove yourself from the idea that you can be hurt, that your lifestyle is important and not your life, you begin to strip away and remove attachment from the way that you think things should look because ultimately those are conditions and they're not necessarily real.

Looking back through my life, I saw a common thread of autonomy, peeking out, a freedom, combined with a rediscovery of and reconnecting with an enlivened inner child that was always there, just buried under layers and layers of nonsense. Understanding this within myself, I began to understand the concept of mastery: that to truly master something, to make it your own, all you need is time. But you don’t have to focus on one thing at a time in order to become a master at it. It happens simultaneously. If you’re learning an instrument, you don’t just play the instrument 12 hours a day; you play the instrument and then do other stuff; you’re still learning the instrument, even though you’re not doing it all the time.

Diagnosed with a learning disability later on in life, I started to master how I learn, and to consciously reshape how I think. Christian background, but has further studied Zen Buddhism, Gnostic religions, Stoicism, and modern Psychological and Unitarian principals. The works of the Stoics, and modern Psychological and Unitarian principals became essential study and further expanded my perspectives from a predominantly Christian background, and I continued to explore the profound teachings of Zen Buddhism and the esoteric teachings of the Gnostics. Soren K. is my homie when it comes to taking personal responsibility for doing what you KNOW to be right.

I decided to not be complacent, to not limit myself to my age or anything else. I knew that the only thing that limited me was my attitude. So I did the only thing to be done: changed my attitude, changed my perspective, and opened the window to a more expanded view of reality. Focusing always on where I come from, understanding that if I come from a place of anger, I will create anger and frustration, and if I come from a place of childlike curiosity and limitless potential, I will see all the infinite space that comes with being fully aligned.

But in that space is the acknowledgement that where you are, right here, right now, is all there is; and yet most of us continue to live in the past and the future. My goal is nothing less than the merger of space and time within each and every individual.

By compressing time to where everything is, you have everything in your life simultaneously such that you're attuned to the future. You love and respect your past. And you see this as an ability to learn and grow so that it affects your present presence in a positive manner and a manner that directs you to where you're supposed to go. Through that, you develop a self-trust that is really just a relationship, true and honest, with yourself.

We often hear, “just believe in yourself,” which is just so cliche. But if you don’t, then you don’t believe you can do anything at all, and then there’s nothing but doubt. When you develop trust, there is no doubt. You don’t need confidence, because you know the answer. Instead of confidence, you have that bit of arrogance that sees things for what they are, and simply, effortlessly, knows what to do. It’s very direct.

And so am I.