Aoibhneas Croí: Learning to Live from Joy

The Irish blessing of soul-joy, and the mission that has been waiting for me all along.

Today, I am filled with Aoibhneas Croí (pron. eeev-ness kree), meaning joy of the soul or joy of the heart in Irish. Like many words in the Irish language, aoibhneas means so much more than joy.

It means bliss, divine bliss, the kind of soul-joy you get in prayer, or the breathtaking thrill of being in a landscape that quite literally takes your breath away. Aoibhneas is the joy, the wonder, the magic of connecting with that which makes your soul sing. And aoibhneas is what I am filled with today.

This morning, as I drank my coffee in the early sun, listening to the cows in the field next door roar their discontent as they waited for their breakfast, I realised that I am about to step onto a new path in my work and in my life.

‘Holy shit,’ I muttered to myself, getting to my feet and beginning to pace up and down the garden, preparing myself to have a full-on argument with God. I trailed my fingers through the Hawthorn trees that line our land, asking them to give me some kind of solace as I submitted to the birthing pains that come with changes of life.

And then it came, all of a sudden, soft like a cashmere blanket on my shoulders. The absolute, unquestionable knowing that this shift, this evolution, is not a tumultuous one. It’s seeded, ingrained, and woven in unconditional love. It’s the shift I’ve been waiting for my whole life. It’s a choice to live the rest of my days in partnership with the joy of life.

You see, I’m quite a dark and twisty person. I’m a person who has run at my trauma like a freight train, shouting, ‘Come and get me!’ to clean it out of my system. I don’t hide from my pain. I howl and scream and sigh and cry and wail. I love hard, and I grieve with tsunamis of emotion. I walk into the belly of my beasts, make friends with them, and then ask them to go to sleep, please.

And somehow, I have built invisible foundations for a new life. I have been building diligently for a decade, a life that I never dared to dream of, and I was so busy doing it that I took no notice of it at all.

In a healing session with a fellow practitioner recently, she remarked that it was as though I had been living in a giant mansion, but only occupying one room. The image landed somewhere deep inside me because it was true. For years, I have been so focused on healing, growing, tending, rebuilding, that I never stopped to look around and see what had already been created.

This morning, I woke with the full force of a new wave of creation running through me. As I walked in circles around the garden, sifting through the realisations and the prayers and the hopes and the dreams, I realised that this wave is a new mission that I am undertaking, and will do so for the rest of my life.

My mission is simple. It is to live and teach the simple, and possibly most important, part of our human existence: to live rooted in the joy of life.

This does not mean that I intend to bypass all the dark and twisties. Oh no, not at all. I will celebrate them, because like the seasons, dark and twisties are part of our existence.

Rather, I will throw myself into the joyful immersion of that grief or that pain. I will howl with abandon now because, rather than hurling myself into the abyss, I will do so knowing that somehow this howling will help me swim to the other side of the river, where joy lives, where flowers bloom, where love abounds.

I am sending a clarion call out to all the people who are done with the constant looping back into cycles of old shit and who want to claim their own power and use it to root a new energy of unconditional love into the earth. To the people who want to sing and dance and rest and play in the beauty of life. To the people who have done the work and are asking: What next?

I am calling on the people who know that we are on the precipice of great change and that the only way forward is love. Let’s play together and find community as we explore the meaning of joy, allowing our own Aoibhneas Croí to act as the compass for the map of our lives.

If you, too are standing at the edge of a life built through years of healing and wondering what comes next, I would love to walk this path with you. Join my mailing list, and I’ll share the unfolding of this work, the foundations I’m building, and the many ways joy teaches us how to live.