Joy Embodied (An excerpt from The Intelligent Body, by Celeste Shirley)

Celeste
Nov 29, 2025
5 min read

When Constant Joy Began: The Wizard of Oz of Bodybuilding

When I stepped on stage, my sense of being alive and complete absorbed into one moment. I filled in. I became all I am and all that I am here to do. And I was doing it. It was the Wizard of Oz moment; I went from black and white to full colour. At the age of twenty-one I came to know what life was for. It was for this feeling. The joy I felt was full on cellular. I was connected to, and in absolute harmony with, the world around me.

Now, just to take you into the scene, when you step on stage at a bodybuilding competition, you are practically naked. In so many ways. You are scantily clad in a Band-Aid of a string bikini to bare your muscular thighs, and your body fat is seven per cent (!)—and lower if you are male. You are also one hungry mama. You haven’t had carbs of any kind except broccoli since Thursday, and it’s Saturday. In all likelihood you feel weak. You are having a really hard time remembering your postal code or holding onto any kind of thought as your brain is in red alert from the low glycogen levels that reduce any subcutaneous water your skin may hold. If you see someone eating a muffin, you feel that you may jump them. Sorry, focus.

This carb depletion gets you so lean you look as though your skin has been shrink-wrapped. You have absolutely tight skin with no fat under it, you are super tanned, and it’s probably a good-hair day since you have spent quite a bit of time on your appearance for the judges and your family in the audience. You have not brushed your teeth with toothpaste in the last forty-eight hours as you cannot allow any sodium to enter your saliva glands in case you hold water. You have just pumped up your muscles by doing push-ups, squats, towel rows, and bicep curls backstage.

Let’s just say you are pretty ready to peacock-present yourself after the months, or in my case years, of training that you have invested to be the most symmetrically muscular and lean woman you can be. So here I am in that moment. I step on stage and have not one mental iota of presenting myself. I am celebrating Self. I am celebrating Life and all that it is. There is a picture of me smiling and leaning into the woman next to me. I am telling her, “You’ve got this!” I knew she would win. My feeling of joy went out everywhere. (She won.) I feel as though I’m at a carnival or in New Orleans caught up in the frolicking wave of abandoned street dancing. I am supposed to be concentrating on my dance routine, which I am about to do for the judges, to present the muscular physique I have been sculpting. I feel so happy I just want to go around and see everyone and appreciate how great they look. Yet they all look so serious. Oh, that’s right, they are my competitors. Silly me. I feel so connected and a part of Life that it is not possible to view any part of life as separate from me. I can’t compete! Against what?

I go on stage and have a wonderful time moving felinely and lyrically with great prowess into poses. Front double biceps. Side chest pose. Rear double biceps. The feeling of oneness with life is so complete; there is no me presenting this body. I feel I am one with the audience, judges, and you, if you were alive somewhere. I do my routine and I quite honestly go to the moon. At exactly the same time, I feel just as I had before stepping on stage. I didn’t feel elated—as if I’d had an epiphany or that I had been reborn at the top of the mountain and all that jazz. I felt quite run-of-the- mill, middle-path average, except I knew exactly what I was in that moment. I was everything. I also felt as if all that was happening was being orchestrated by an invisible harmonics engineer. Maybe it was Dr. Seuss himself, who was noted for saying “there is fun to be done.”

Afterwards I’m quite ready to go home, but I stay as this is a competition and I am interested in the results. My results were in, and how I felt was telling me: You are complete. I didn’t need to know anything past the moment I had posed on stage.

When I returned to university on Monday, my classmates and professors asked me how I did. I had to stop myself from claiming “I won.” That March 16th day in 1985, I set a cellular template for the rest of my life on the stage of Northern Secondary High School’s auditorium in Toronto. If you, the reader, trust what you read, you can believe that I felt the perfect semblance of enthusiasm, clarity, joy, passion, and calm that showed me what life is for: to be exactly who we are in the way we need to and live this each moment— through our actions and thoughts.

That’s it. You can close the book now. This was a quickie book. And I truly wish you find it that easy to live in joy all the time. It is that simple. It’s that we create complications and try to figure life out, and this only creates speed bumps. For that reason, there is a book—the book you are holding in your perfect hands will show you that, well ... you are perfect. Perfect in all your aspects. If I told my classmates that I had come in seventh that day, the next question they would have asked would have been how many competitors there were (answer: fourteen). But that was not a question! To me, I had won. I did all that I set out to do and felt completely who I was on stage. That’s all I needed. I told the truth to my friends, of course, the factual answer with the number seven defining my placement. I had produced the realistic answer to meet their question. If they had asked me how I felt about the competition, I could have answered with the truth, which is where the life is: I experienced all that I am and how to be it. The levity of the joy I felt changed me completely. All I had ever known about Life and how to live in it was cancelled. I knew a fresh clarity that replaced how I had perceived life up until then. I felt an intelligence that now was who I was.