Getting Started On A Joyful Life

The Emerald City on the Wizard of Oz was a destination. When Dorothy reached the city with her motley group of misfits, she thought all of her problems would be solved — putting her on the path to her joyful life. The solution didn't turn out to be quite what she had imagined, but in the end she did wind up getting home and her misfit friends did get the answers they sought.

That's the Emryld Life that we seek in our own way. The joyful life we seek is in front of us, but often we can't tell we're standing next to the yellow brick road, or already walking down the road, or perhaps are even standing squarely in the middle of Emerald City looking straight at the thing we wanted. We think we're still traipsing through the wilderness of Oz trying to get there, waiting for the house to fall on the wicked witch.

In our case, we're not on our way to Oz. We're on our way to our own inner Emerald Isle, with the inner joy in that Emryld Life we can build right now from where we are today. We built this site to encourage others to travel with us while we take our lives just the way they are and make improvements, pulling happiness out right from where we are. If you like what you see you can make use of the programs we have coming up when our home at Shamrock Trails Ranch is ready, and we have a facility to meet with people and conduct in-person classes beginning in the summer of 2007.

Does a Joyful Life Mean Living Our Dreams?

Emryld Life is all about helping you hang in there and persevere until that dream you've have been holding fast in your heart materializes in the flesh. Then, of course, we work together to reshape those dreams so that reality and our dreams can co-exist. We can learn to improve our heart health, make diabetes control a reality, get a grip on weight management, achieve spiritual joy, and live our lives in good mental health. As the song said "It don't come easy", but it does come.

There are times in life when we don't stay in our own little box anymore. Something comes along and we wake up and notice that the world is bigger and more complicated than we had imagined. Our sense of position in the world gets out of alignment, and we realize that we don't fit into the spot we had envisioned ourselves to occupy any longer -- and we wonder if we ever really belonged in that spot.

Who are we?

Steve McDaniel is a retired educator who taught elementary school for 11 years, then secondary school for many more years after that. He has lifetime teaching credentials for elementary and secondary school from the State of California, as well as a K-14 pupil counseling credential. He also holds a M.A. in Human Behavior and Counseling and a B.A. in Education. That's a fair amount of book learning. The life learning is probably the biggest plus, though. Steve has been battling illness and disability as well, and has learned a lot from it during is 63 very active years.

Kristyne McDaniel is a software developer who was originally educated as a mechanical engineer back in the early 1980s. As a young engineer she worked on projects as diverse as advanced Army projects for FMC Corporation to the Space Shuttle and SDI for General Dynamics to the B1 Bomber for SAIC. She has been fighting her own health battles with weight management and diabetes control, and has a long way to go to bring her weight into the normal range for her height and build. Her new software project in support of individual health and life priorities is adding to her own version of a joyful life.

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_{This page was last updated on Friday, July 06, 2007}