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Today's
Meditation:
From where do we get this notion that we can't show our
feelings? Why do people, when they see us sad or
grieving, tell us to "cheer up" or even
"get over it"? What if I don't want to
cheer up-- is that so bad? What if I want to stay
with the sadness long enough that I can deal with it
completely and allow it to work its way out of my
system? I have every right to do so, but others seem
to think that their lot in life is to push us to feeling
better, when doing so may be the worst thing for us (even
if they see it as the best thing for them).
Telling someone who's sad to "cheer up" borders
on cruelty, for it doesn't acknowledge the true feelings
that the person is going through-- it tells that person
that they're doing something wrong and that they need to
change. It isn't acknowledging the important idea
that "to everything there is a season,"
including sadness. It would be silly to think that
we can go through all our days on the planet without
feeling sadness, though some people do act as if they can
on the outside. But as Shakti says, it's important
that we allow ourselves to be sad so that we can open
ourselves up to other emotions that are also important.
(Even as I wrote the last sentence, I almost wrote
"other, more positive emotions." Sadness,
when we don't allow ourselves to get mired up in it, is a
positive emotion, for it allows us to move past certain
incidents or stages in our lives.)
There seem to be two more dominant problems with
sadness: other people have problems dealing with our
sadness, and sometimes we allow the sadness to go on for
too long, until we lose sight of the beauty and wonder of
the world. But just because others have a hard time
dealing with our sadness doesn't mean we should shove it
back inside ourselves and not allow ourselves to feel it,
for then we'd be moving on in life with unfaced issues
that need to be dealt with.
Others can help us when we allow sadness to take us over,
for they often have a perspective that's much more
objective than our own. Sadness can be an attractive
state to be in, depending on our state of mind, and we
don't want it to take control of us. Because it is
true that "to everything there is a season," there's also a time when we must move on from sadness and,
as Shakti says, "feel more love and more joy."
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