I’m Amanda Gore and welcome to the Gospel of Joy website! This site is dedicated to creating a ‘joy tribe’ – a global village of people committed to rediscovering the joy that already lives inside them – and learning how to tap into it. When I speak at conferences and seminars, I often ask ‘what’s the number one thing that people want in life?” and always -always – the most common answer is ‘happiness’! It seems to me that the vast majority of people in the western world are searching for joy.

The difference between joy and happiness for me is that joy comes from deep within our hearts and happiness is more of an external concept. It reminds me of the difference between being hot and having a hot flush! LOL . I am going through menopause and have personal experience of this! When I have a hot flush (or flash as we call it in the USA), I feel as if a hot coal is inside my stomach and the burning heat radiates throughout my whole body. When I am just hot, it’s a very different feeling – it comes from the outside in – whereas a hot flash/flush is from the inside out. That is what joy is like! It comes from the inside out – it radiates through us and brings us peace, fulfillment and inspiration.

I invite you to, and hope you will, engage with this site and send us your joy stories and pictures and see if you can ignite the joy in others. Send as many people to the site as you can; start joy tribes in your community; read the book in book clubs and work on a chapter each month; create your own joy book club in which you work through this book and it’s exercises and help each other and read other inspiring or joy filled books – or books that make you laugh out loud; begin a joy journal (we hope to have some available soon) and chart your journey to joy; form a group who go and volunteer with some group or organisation; look at the 12 chapters – gratitude, compassion, hope, reverence, generosity – giving and receiving, forgiveness, energy and vitality, listening, laughter, love, cheerful enthusiasm and equanimity, and share the ideas with others; find ways to connect people in your life and community in joyful pursuits.

You will have many more ideas than I can think of and i would love you to share with me the creative ways you find to bring joy to your world and enlarge our joy tribe – to make it a real force for good in the world.

Write to me and give me your ideas; make suggestions about what you would like to see on the site; and about what you have done in your world to create your own joy tribes. Help me make this a site and tribe that truly makes a difference! Thank you in anticipation!

After I wrote the book with my Mum and the Committee’s guidance, I was left with two very clear ideas of the core components of joy,
1. it is impossible to feel joy if you are not serving others in some way
2. to connect with our joy, we need to connect to God (or to whatever spiritual concept you believe in)

Here is a note I write in the book about the real authors!

I write this page to share some of my experiences with you-and to say a prayer that you too find the process of reading this book a blessing and that it helps you find your own path to joy, as writing it has done for me.
This whole book is dedicated to eliminating unhappiness, giving you more control over your moods and helping you soar through the clouds to God’s sunshine above.

To give you a bit of background about me, 25 years ago, I was a physical therapist in Australia, working in sports medicine, ergonomics and occupational health. I had coauthored a book called “The Office Athlete” which prompted a meeting planner to invite me to a conference. Noted inspirational speaker Ron Tacchi was the emcee at the conference, and at the end of my session, he said, “You should be a speaker!” I answered, “What’s a speaker?”

Ron then mentored me into the business, which in itself was a huge blessing. I have been speaking, consulting and writing since then about emotional intelligence, connection, the human spirit, communication and relationships. I came to the United States in 2000 and was blessed from the moment my feet hit the ground here!

The journey through writing this book has led me to a whole new dimension and understanding of life. I had the knowledge in my head of all the principles and ideas I elaborate on here prior to writing this book, but I did not truly know all of them; I did not have them embedded in my heart. I did not operate from those principles, although I tried to.
For example, I understood forgiveness as an intellectual concept that I knew was important, but I now know about it in my heart, comprehend it better, and have experienced forgiveness-and being forgiven, although I am still working on both!

Instead of struggling with just writing about equanimity, I have had some blinding flashes of the obvious and can see many aspects of my life from a completely different level and am behaving differently-with more equanimity!

I did not create this book. I wrote it, of course, but really my Mum, who passed away in 2006, and her “spiritual writing team”, (which included Miss Steve, my English teacher for all my years in primary school and Gracie) created it. I was just a scribe! Many people may find this hard to believe or imagine, but it’s my belief system, and my experiences have shown me how alive my Mum’s spirit is!

Have you ever woken up with a crystal clear thought or idea, seemingly out of nowhere? Well, one morning, almost a year after Mum passed, and after months of struggling with how to write this book, I woke up and I knew it was to be about joy; and I knew that the format it followed would be 12 weeks to joy, and I knew Mum and her team would help me, and I knew I had to meditate!

So I did, and each morning an idea would come to me and I would sit in silence with it, and then go and write. It only took about two days for each chapter as the words flowed easily out onto the pages. I could feel Mum, Gracie and Miss Steve and a host of others helping me in this process- it was an amazing experience!

I want to thank them for patiently teaching me such spectacular lessons which have made my life much more joyful.

And please note: Throughout this book, wherever I have written “God,” if this is not appropriate for you, please replace it with The Divine, Spirit, Universe, Source, Buddha, Allah, Love or whatever it is that you believe in.

I believe it’s important that we all have the freedom to have faith in whatever we wish, even if it is just ourselves. (Although if your faith is just in yourself- you may wish to consider something a little bit bigger!)

THANKS MUM! I LOVE YOU.