In the case of joy, I think it wants to celebrate.

In the four-quarter model we use in Shadow Work®, joy is the "gateway" to the Sovereign archetype; that means when you feel joy, your Sovereign takes the stage. (For more on the four-quarter model, see The Shadow Work® Four-Quarter Model at the Shadow Work Seminars site.)

What a Sovereign wants is to bless or support something. If you're feeling joyful, you're likely to want to share it with the people around you, to bless them with your sense of the goodness of life. In my experience, joy has at least two volume levels: the loud variety is boisterous and wants to spread itself to everyone around, while the quiet kind of joy is more likely to want to stay still and enjoy itself in private.

Also that there's a fun-loving part of me, even if I'm serious a lot of the time.

One common way is in the face, where a gleaming smile shows joy. Joy often brings movement of the whole body, and you feel like dancing, running and jumping. I sometimes find that joy feels as if I've got bubbles inside that want to rise to the surface and pop.

If you can become familiar with the way joy shows up in your body, it can give you useful information, perhaps about what it is that you're accepting about yourself or your surroundings. It might sound odd to think that you wouldn't know you were feeling happy, but I'm pretty sure it's possible. If you spent a lot of time earlier in your life with people who had a rather unhappy view of life, you may have found that expressions of joy weren't much appreciated. An unexpressed feeling doesn't go away, however, it generally finds another way to come through. In the days when I smoked cigarettes, I generally lit up a cigarette when I was feeling really happy, which struck me as odd once I realized it. As I thought about it, I realized that spontaneous expressions of joy had often been considered "loud" or "obnoxious" earlier in my life.