The gift of joy

'When the True Self breaks through, a new and impassioned approach to life often makes itself known. We tap into an inner radiance that I call delight.'

Sue Monk Kidd

The French call this delight 'joie de vivre', the joy of living. We speak too of a love of or zest for life, or of joyfulness or deep gladness. When we feel such joy, we are in a sense saying 'yes' to life with every fibre of our being. We are embracing life fully and unreservedly. We are savouring every moment of life whatever it may bring us. We are, as Monk Kidd puts it, living our life 'in such a way that it becomes a dance'.

The experience of such joy is one of the greatest gifts the soul journey brings us for joy is far more deeply rooted and enduring than happiness. In a sense, it is not only an emotion, but also a state of being and unlike happiness, it is not dependent on what is happening in our lives. My own experience tells me that it is possible to tap into this inner joy even in the midst of the pain and distress that life often brings with it. Harnessing it is a little like finding our way to the eye of a hurricane. The dark winds continue to rage around us but in this calmer inner space, the wind drops away and the skies are clear. I have come to think of joy as a deep inner well that is always there, always accessible, always waiting for us to turn our attention inwards and plunge ourselves into its depths. And the greater the joy we discover within ourselves, the more capable we become of facing the suffering that comes our way without bitterness and with equanimity. As the Dahlai Lama puts it, 'We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.'

What I have learnt too is that the more deeply connected we are with our soul, the greater the joy we experience. When we are living from our soul, 'you feel a river moving in you, a joy', the poet Rumi tells us. For joy flows freely when we are being our best self, when we have found our way to our innermost, truest and most fully human self, when we can see the utter mystery and beauty of that self and when we can recognise, as the poet Hafiz puts it, 'the Astonishing Light of your own Being'. It flows freely when we are 'living deep' as Henri Thoreau describes it, when we are living our life with passion and purpose, when we are able to draw with ease on our deeper knowing, our intuition, our creativity and our capacity to love from our soul. It flows freely when we are we are in touch with our spiritual self, when we are able to sense the presence of the More within and around us, and when this deeper awareness and knowing leads us to look and reach beyond ourselves, to care for others and our world as we have come to care for ourselves.

For me, the greatest joy comes when I am drinking deeply from life, when I am able to welcome each breath as a sacred gift and feel its enlivening of me, body, mind, soul and spirit. It comes when I reach deep within myself to the very core of my being, to what is essentially me, and live from that place. It comes when I am living the freedom I have been given, the passion that sings in my veins, the song that sings inside me. It comes when I am alive to the wild possibilities within me, when I am living each moment as if it were the only moment I have to live.

One of the images that speaks to me of such joy is the image of a dolphin breaching, using its powerful tail to thrust itself out of the sea with abandon, sometimes flipping and twisting itself above the surface then splashing back down again, slapping the water joyfully with its tail. I have always loved dolphins. I have several books about them on my bookshelf. Photographs of them have often adorned the walls of my office and I also have a beautiful glass carving of a dolphin breaching which sits on the desk in my office. One day, I felt prompted to take the glass dolphin and hold it in gently my hands. In those moments, it spoke to me powerfully of the wildness within me that I was not yet fully living. It spoke to me of awakening, of breaking free, of living life to the full, of the joy and exhilaration of finding the freedom to be fully who I am. It sits on my desk still, an ever-present reminder of the journey of becoming I am still on many years later and of the depth of joy that I have come to know along the way. And for all of that I am deeply grateful.  

Bibliography

Shirazi Hafiz (2006) I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy. From the poem 'My Brilliant Image'.

Sue Monk Kidd (1990) When the Heart Waits. HarperOne

Dahlai Lama and Desmond Tutu (2026) The Book of Joy. Penguin          

©Copyright Kaitlyn Steele 2026

Kaitlyn Steele

www.insearchofsoul.co.uk

kaitlynsteele16@gmail.com