Delighting In
Delighting In
I love to delight in life. Regardless of what is going on. I am not delighted because the things outside of me are delightful, necessarily. Even though they often are.
As long as I can remember, I have found life to be joyful and delightful. If I let it be.
People around me would point out, "What about this bad thing over here?" or "What about that bad thing that happened to you?".
I couldn't reconcile how they saw those things with my experience of delight. They are from two different understandings of life.
The outside-in way of attributing our experience of life is the most common way people understand how life works. Something happens outside of us, and if it's a good thing, we feel good, and if it's a bad thing, we feel bad. In this model, our experience comes from what happens to us or around us.
A variation of this is that we attribute our experience of life to our response to outside events. It's still that we are experiencing things coming at us from the outside. How do I feel about what happened? It's still an outside-in model.
The inside-out way of experiencing life (that actually aligns with how our neurology actually works) is that we are the actual energy of life, and that energy has a feeling to it. We have a feeling of aliveness. We generate other feelings and emotions based on our creation of life in the moment, using the principle of thought. We literally create how we perceive the world around us, what we think happened, and then we have more thoughts about our initial perception/thought creation.
If you didn't follow that, it's all from inside. When we attribute our experience of life to ourselves, it all feels much more spacious and delightful. Nothing needs to change on the outside for you to feel good on the inside.
I have noticed that as I delight in life, life seems to delight in me. More and more delightful things happen. And when less or not-so-delightful things happen, I get ruffled less and less. Smoother sailing, you could say.
It's as if the whole Universe or life itself is a small puppy, and it responds to us when we love it. Love it for no reason other than its existence and your existence. Love it when it's delightful and cute, and love it when it scratches you and poops on the floor. Love it when it eats all the sofa cushions and barfs on the floor.
If life is your beloved, then you will respond to it very differently than if it's an adversary.
What is your relationship with life? Are you the lover? Are you passive and expect to get all your needs met by someone else, and then get bitter when it doesn't live up to your expectations? Do you treat life as if it's a bad dog? For the record, I don't think there are any bad dogs; only bad owners or badly trained dogs.
Sometimes I call it ridiculous enjoyment. Literally everything that occurs in your day is a new experience that you've never had. Even if it's routine. It might be the 10,000th Wednesday you've brushed your teeth in the morning, but it's never been THAT morning before. Enjoy it, ridiculously.
By "delighting in" we treat life how we would like life to treat us, and it reciprocates. Amazingly. You may think that this is a simplistic, unrealistic or sugary way of looking at life, but I would encourage you to experiment for yourself. If you would like to feel more love and delight around your day-to-day life, the best way to see something for yourself is to try it out. Take the idea out for a spin. Live with it as if it's true. Then see what happens.
My kids always want me to cook crepes for them. I do make a kickass Parisienne-style savoury crepe. My favourite is with an egg, cheese and jambon or a turkey cold cut slice and topped with real maple syrup. You've got delight on a plate. I make the kids cook them up. I'll do one and show them the parts to it, and then they have to cook their own. They tell me that they can't do it like I can. What they didn't see, though, was years of misshapen crepes that I ate anyway until I got it right. They seem to think I was born making French crepes like a Parisienne. Not so.
So, try out delighting in life, no matter what happens, for yourself. It's not about making a bad thing seem good or making a place for bad things or accepting what you don't like. It's about not making life bad in the first place. Whatever happens simply is. It's life. Enjoy it.
Also, you don't have to enjoy or delight in anything you really don't want to. You are always allowed boundaries and to say no to things you want to say no to. You can delight in having boundaries and saying no.
If this understanding of living with more peace and ease from the inside out appeals to you and you'd like to experience it more deeply, we have, as of this writing, three spots left at our upcoming retreat day on Sept 20th, where we will experience the peace and joy that underlies life.
With Love,
Sara Joy
Upcoming Events
*LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER!* Immersion Retreat Day: Saturday, September 20, 2025, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm *Only 3 spots left!
St. Brigid’s Villa, Ignatius Jesuit Centre, Guelph, ON New! Online option available
The Immersion Retreat is a rare opportunity to pause, reconnect, and awaken to the beauty of your own existence. As Joseph Campbell said, “What we’re all seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences resonate within our innermost being.” This day is designed to help you feel that rapture of being alive, with effects that ripple through your life long after the retreat ends.
Details and registration at https://www.liveyouralivelife.com/retreat-day or email http://frontdesk@drsaraoneill.com
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