What is Joy?
For me, joy and well-being are inseparable.
It is a sense of well-being, of wholeness, of goodness, regardless of the circumstances around me. That doesn’t mean it never wavers or is never questioned. In fact, my experience of joy has become more solid, more real, because of my wrestling and questioning. Through the sorting and sifting, through life’s challenges, I have learned to connect with it from within as part of my connection to Source.
When I think of joy as the expression of well-being in my life, it becomes paramount that I value it and listen for it. This isn’t selfishness at all. Who can truly love, serve, or care well for others if they are disconnected from their own well-being and unwilling to take responsibility for it? Love would have it no other way.
When we think of well-being as having all the “good stuff” or believing everything must be in order before we can finally say, “It is well with my soul,” we underestimate our own capacity for wholeness. We are still depending on things outside ourselves to determine how we feel and even how we define ourselves. That is a very shaky foundation.
The surprising thing in life is discovering that we can be well even when our circumstances are not—when life is not unfolding the way we had hoped.
I know.
It surprised me too.
But it’s true.
There is a deep well within each of us. We spend much of our lives drawing water from the world’s buckets—achievement, approval, certainty, relationships, possessions. Those buckets eventually empty. But beneath them all is a spring that does not depend on circumstance. Joy is learning where that spring is.
And though it sometimes takes time and effort to find our way back to it, Love holds us. Through enough life experiences, if we’re willing to notice, a pattern begins to emerge:
Love always holds us.
So in case you didn’t know, this is true for every one of us.
Well-being isn’t something we create.
It’s something we uncover.
No one wins the “joy lottery.” Joy belongs to all of us if we learn how to reconnect with that well from within.Well-being is our natural state. Joy is what we experience when we're connected to it. When we lose our sense of joy, it isn't because joy has disappeared. More often, we've simply become disconnected from our selves and lose our sense of well-being. The invitation isn't to chase joy somewhere outside ourselves, but to return to the place within where it has always been.
Ways to reconnect with joy and your well-being
Practice gratitude and appreciation. Instead of focusing on everything you don’t have, begin noticing all that you do.
Pay attention to the activities that reconnect you to your well-being—walking in nature, exercising, creating, praying, resting, or simply doing one thing at a time instead of always multitasking.
Feed yourself well. Consider the television and movies you watch, the books you read, the conversations you have, and the people you spend time with. Everything we take in either nourishes us or depletes us.
These are just a few examples.
As you become more deeply anchored in your well-being—your joy—you’ll notice something begins to change. You become aware of the things that drain your sense of well-being, and you begin making different choices. You course-correct more quickly. You discover that some things are simply too costly because they require you to sacrifice your joy.
Eventually, joy becomes your plumb line.
It becomes the measure by which you decide what to welcome into your life and what to walk away from. It influences how you spend your time, what you allow to occupy your thoughts, and how you choose to love yourself and others.
Joy is not waiting somewhere “out there.”
It has been waiting within you all along.