"Why aren't you dancing with joy at this very moment? is the only relevant spiritual question," Sufi seer Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan said. Yet most of us feel so burdened down by the troubles, pains, cares and disappointments of life that we have little time or energy to be elated. Add the weights of the suffering of the innocents and the rampant injustice in the world. In the face of all this, we must give ourselves permission to by dizzy with joy. After all, we live in a multidimensional wonderworld that challenges our spirit and engenders our blessings.

Roger Housden, one of our Living Spiritual Teachers, loves poetry and has edited the bestselling Ten Poems series. In this collection, he has gathered 99 poems from 70 poets that delineate the many different shades of joy. He notes:

"Joy, like suffering, is a quintessential human experience that comes unbidden; yet it is much rarer than its dark sister and is therefore more precious. Which is all the more reason, I believe, for a volume like this that serves to catch the many forms of joy on the wing and hold them on the page as a mirror for our own moments of quiet or ecstatic abandon and that serves also as solace and inspiration for our own dark days, which, as we know, will always come. Finally, whatever else it is and in whatever form it shows up, joy is ever and always a gift; and it has been a gift indeed to me to have the opportunity to gather all these joys etween two covers and send them on their way out into the world."

Here are some of the poems you will find on these pages:

• "Happiness" by Jane Kenyon
• "Welcome Morning" by Anne Sexton.
• " 'Tis So Much Joy!" by Emily Dickinson
• "Dance in Your Blood" by Rumi
• "I Am Really Just a Tambourine" by Hafiz
• "Eternity" by William Blake
• "i like my body when it is with your body" by E. E Cummings
• "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams