Michelle Gill has been a professor for 23 years. She founded an award-winning charter school. She just published a handbook on teachers’ beliefs two weeks ago. And for the last few years, she has been trying to ignore a Frozen 2 song.
She finally stopped trying. Now she is building something called The Joy Club Way.
On Episode 5 of In Full Light, Carolina and I sat down with Michelle to talk about the work she is stepping into and the inner shift that made it possible. Michelle is a developmental psychologist and an educational psychologist, with a yoga teacher certification and 30 years of spiritual study layered underneath the academic work. Her credential list is long enough that she has been questioning whether she has any business writing about joy at all. Her answer to that question is the whole episode.
Michelle shared about how she volunteered to teach Intro to Psychology at a prison. She did not just teach the textbook. She showed her students how to use what they were learning to find more freedom inside their cells. Their final projects, she said, blew her away. And the line she said next was the one we kept coming back to.
“I felt more joy there than I felt in church, for sure.”
Michelle is not running a positivity program. She has chronic illness. She has years of meditation she does not actually enjoy. She knows what it is to sit with grief and rage and the long stuckness that nobody’s 10-minute walk after dinner is going to fix. Her definition of joy is sturdier than that.
“Joy is a sense of being connected to your purpose, to being oriented towards growth, to being present and to being connected.”
What makes Michelle rare is that she has the academic credentials to be a one-trick specialist, and she refuses. She wants the mind work, the heart work, and the body work in the same conversation. She wants developmental psychology and contemplative prayer in the same room. She references both Joe Hudson and Thomas Keating in the same sentence. The integration is the work. The thing she is moving away from is the part of her career that asked her to hide.
If you have built a career around credentials and you can feel a quieter voice asking you to bring more of yourself into the room, this conversation is for you. If you have been told to optimize, add the 10-minute walk, fit the meditation in, and you can feel that the prescription is the problem, Michelle has a different way of thinking about all of it.
A few other threads from the full episode:
Why Michelle thinks the yoga modification is not a consolation prize, and what teachers miss when they prescribe a pose instead of meeting the point of resistance
The Joe Hudson line she keeps coming back to: joy is the matriarch of emotions, and she will not enter the house unless her children come too
The Steven Pressfield War of Art passage about resistance, and why scaffolding is her answer to getting unstuck
The fourth-grade girl with the lowest IQ in the room, the poem she wrote, and the moment Michelle declared her the class poet laureate
A cold bath, a yoga modification, and a nutritionist’s diet plan walk into the same problem: when a teacher confuses the goal with the practice, students start overriding their own inner wisdom
The Frozen 2 song Michelle says brought her here, and why she still will not sing it (yet)
The mind, heart, and body framework underneath The Joy Club Way, and the three forces that derail each of them
Her closing line for everyone listening, which is the opposite of every productivity message you have heard this week
If you want to follow Michelle’s work, subscribe to her Substack, The Joy Club Way. She is building in public and the goodies only reach subscribers, not followers.
Thank you Claire Machado, Corine van der Werf, Julia K Howard, and many others for tuning into my live video with Michele Gill and Carolina Wilke! Join me for my next live video in the app.
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 26, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
