The Six Types of Joy
The benefits of joy are extraordinary — not just for yourself, but for those around you, too.
Scientists generally define joy as a positive emotion where you feel feelings of freedom, safety, and ease, that generally arises in response to something good happening in your life or in the world.
All that is true — but that definition is certainly lacking in the poetry that a writer would use to describe how it feels to experience joy. Like Emily Dickinson, who said “Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.” Or the poet Rumi, who wrote that “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Or author Iris Murdoch, who said “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
Joy is such a wonderful emotion. But we don’t learn how to create it in school or in most of our families — leaving us with a joy deficit in our society today.
My own personal definition of joy is that it results from connection. We feel joy when we are truly connected to ourselves, with the people in our lives, with the world around us, with nature, and with the present moment.
