Mindfulness and unacknowledged Sadness

Unacknowledged Sadness

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, "Joy is the greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
Kahlil Gibran – The Prophet

When I was teenager crying came quite easily to me. It didn’t take much to set the “water works” going. A sad movie or an animal in distress touched me. I was a sensitive young thing. I remember walking around a local market with my mum and seeing this lovely old gentleman sitting behind his stall doing absolutely no business whilst all other stall holders seemed to be doing plenty. My heart went out to him and I was on the verge of tears just seeing this and feeling sad for him. I really had no idea what the situation really was for him but I knew how I felt.

As time went on and I get older and probably not wiser something changed, I am not saying it’s good or bad but something changed. I noticed I was not as sensitive as I was when a teenager. I didn’t seem to “feel for” people as much as I did. Once I reached my early 30s I think the taps were very much turned off. It took a lot to set me to tears then.

That was until I went on a solitary meditation retreat. It was my second solitary and I was alone for two weeks in a lovely remote hut in the Welch countryside. I had no idea that things were going to get interesting. I was meditating for around 4-5 hours a day. Along with that I was doing very little reading and taking a few walks. After about the 4^th day I started to feel unsettled and couldn’t quite understand why.  I started to feel sad but kept up my routine of sitting and walking. During an evening meditation something inside shifted and the tears started to flow. It wasn’t exactly painful but the tears were flowing. I didn’t know why, but intuitively I knew I didn’t need to do anything. I have often trusted my intuition in situations like that. I know that I have to just get out of my head and let it happen. 

For the next few days the tears came and went, and so did the sadness. In between bouts of sadness I actually felt very light and happy. Then the sadness would flow again but I was getting kind of used to it and just let it flow the best I could. I wasn’t unsettled by it now in the way I was at the beginning. The sadness slowly eased over the next few days and I felt very light as a result.

During the last day or so it dawned on me that the sadness that I felt was emotion that I had been carrying around for years. It was the hurt of childhood and the hurt of loved ones leaving me.  It was the hurt of my dad spending many months in hospital with burned feet when I was about 6 years old. In a nutshell it was what I called unacknowledged sadness. It was sadness that I had ignored because I didn’t want to experience it for various reasons.

The fact that this happened then and in the way it did didn’t really surprise me - though it did a little too. After all I knew enough about meditation to realise that to release blocked emotion was one of its benefits. What was surprising is that I didn’t realise I had “all that sadness in me.” It makes perfect sense now of course as I hope I am just a little bit wiser.

I often recommend to people who may be ready to do a solitary retreat. It allows you to feel and express things that are difficult whilst living our often busy lives. Some people I will advise starting with a weekend, others I may say just jump into a week or more. Yet others may be better talking to a friend or a good therapist.

In my teaching and the leading of retreats I see unacknowledged sadness a lot. We have all had experiences that have been painful and left their mark, and if we don’t allow ourselves the space to “work through” and release these experiences they remain lodged in the body.

That is why I emphasise awareness of the body when teaching meditation. Sensing into the body and feeling the sensations are of paramount importance whilst sitting. It’s so easy to spend the sitting time lost in your head fantasising, or trying to control your experience so that you don’t feel any uncomfortable emotions.

When I talk about unacknowledged sadness almost everybody nods their head in agreement, we all know that it exists.  

But most of us understandably so are quite wary of touching and experiencing it. But to be happy and free we must do just that. It may not be mindfulness that does it for you but if you sense that you have unacknowledged sadness than I encourage you to befriend it in the kindest and safest way possible. It will make a huge difference to your level of happiness. If we don’t attend to it, it can in some cases lead to depression. The human body seems equipped to deal with a certain amount of held emotion but the threshold level varies between individuals.

How we approach this whole issue in meditation is crucial to whether we heal our lives or not. We can meditate for many years and we may have been better off “practising our swimming stroke.” This is because we haven’t actually engaged with ourselves and our pain. We have been too busy trying to get out of our experience trying to have a “better” one.

When we meditate there is one crucial element that is often overlooked and that element is curiosity. When we meditate we need to be curious. We take our place and we ask “what’s happening?” This question, this curiosity helps us to remain present with our experience. We may notice a tickle on the top lip, or a sensation of tingling in the hands. We may notice the sound of birds singing, or the patter of rain. If we remain curious we come into the present moment and are alive to it. If you are willing to do this you may even begin to sense some unacknowledged sadness and to experience this little by little is to heal your life and give happiness its rightful place.

In meditation, curiosity has two elements. One is the obvious being curious - wanting to know what is happening. Through this element of curiosity we discover sensations, sounds and thought patterns that we may previously only been dimly aware of. The second element is being curious enough to stay with a sensation/feeling so as to allow it to unfold. This is where it gets very interesting, and often what a lot of us don’t want to do, or don’t value because we have an agenda to change ourselves, rather to be aware of ourselves, and trying to change ourselves doesn’t work!

If we remain with a sensation (A tightness, a heaviness or whatever) and stay curious we begin to sense new things about it. We may notice it tighten, or loosening and relaxing. We may notice an image associated with it. Perhaps we sense an emotion connected with it and feel flushed or a little nervous. How it unfolds is slightly different for each of us. But the healing happens if we stay there with gentleness and kindness. The key is - wanting to know a little more about it. Tears may begin to flow.

Most of the sadness that we meet in our practice is personal, meaning that it arises out of the events of our own life. However, there is another level of sadness that is not really personal at all. It has nothing to do with how you have lived your life. This is what we could call generational sadness or generational pain, as it’s not confined to sadness. This is the pain and sadness passed down through previous generations. This is pain that has not been resolved by our parents, grandparents, and even earlier ancestors. It may also be cultural and social pain that a society has not come to terms with. We may have had parents or ancestors that suffered from alcoholism, or were abused. We may have had grandparents that suffered during the terrible world wars. The list of why’s are endless of course and we don’t need to know why.

What can be interesting is that as children we start out as 100 watt bulbs, full of love, warmth and enthusiasm. But if the family as a unit are shining at only 40 watt than the child has to shrink in wattage to fit it – and the child must fit in. This shrinking down however can be the cause of great pain and sadness in later life as some of us know from our own lives.

There are various therapies for dealing generational pain one of the best that I have come across is Family Constellations pioneered by Bert Hellinger. You can Google it and find a practitioner if interested.

Sadness is not of course the only thing that meditation is concerned with. Its main purpose is to awaken us from spiritual ignorance. In other words it is concerned with clarifying how we see ourselves and the world – because how we see the world is how we experience it!!!

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