Sadness

Thoughts on sadness.  May we give ourselves the courage to feel sad.

Anger is a way to not feel sad.

I was at an NA (narcotics anonymous) meeting one night, and the speaker said something I will never forget:  “Everything I didn’t want to feel, I turned into anger.”

“Every man has his secret sorrows of which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”   ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“For many of my clients, anger functions to avoid sadness. – Marsha Linehan, psychotherapist, founder of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

"You cannot selectively hold down emotions." -Brene Brown

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself against happiness.”  -Jonathan Safran Foer

Give words to your sorrow

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” -Macbeth 

“Sorrow is a burden hanging heavily upon the lonely but easily sustained by two sympathizing souls.” -HP Curtis

"A joy that’s shared is a joy made double; A sorrow shared is half the trouble." -Mom

So, you mustn’t be frightened...if sadness rises in front of you

“So, you mustn’t be frightened… if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; …life has not forgotten you, it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”  -Jean Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Don’t turn away.  Keep your gaze on the bandaged place.  That’s where the light enters you.”  -Rumi

  “Your wounded heart is a very beautiful heart.” -Fred Rogers

“Whenever sorrow comes, be kind to it.  For God has placed a pearl in sorrow’s hand.”  -Rumi

 “(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.” -Mary Oliver, Thirst

Ev “Our sorrow is linked to other sorrows.  We all have some experience of grief, sometimes it is about what we’ve had and lost like a relationship.  Sometimes it’s about what we’ve never had.  Every loss triggers the pool of grief that is there  -- the everyday grief, the ordinary grief of our lives.  Our grief isn’t just about death, it’s about lost dreams.”  -Frank Ostasenski, hospice nurse

You are sure to be happy again

 "In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all.  Perfect relief is not possible, except with time.  You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better.  And yet it is a mistake.  You are sure to be happy again.  To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now.  I have had experience enough to know what I say, and you need only to believe it to feel better at once." -Abraham Lincoln

Sorrow prepares you for joy

 “It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter.  It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place.  It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow.  Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”― Rumi

“Some of you say, ‘Joy is 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.’” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Enjoy the beauty.  When Miss Joy enters, welcome her charming company but don't try to stop her; she is beautiful, but fickle.  Let her go; don't lock the door because Mr. Sorrow is coming. Welcome him with open doors lest he break the windows. He is not very popular.  He stays a little longer…He goes; Miss Joy is returning.”- Swami Swaroopananda

“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.”― Kahlil Gibran

I was better after I had cried

 “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.” – Charles Dickens- Great Expectations

When I was a young man, still at home, in late adolescence my father was doing a lot of international refugee work. He had to be away for long periods of time and his practice in those days of not so easy international communication was that he would every day speak into this cassette recorder and once a week he would send it home. So we would receive a cassette, and hear who he had been meeting and what he had been doing. So on this occasion, he had been in a refugee camp in Cambodia in the wake of the killing fields, and he met children who had lost their parents, and parents who had lost their children.
           And at the end of the day, he came out to the car where he was being transported back to his accommodation for the night and He began to speak into the tape recorder and as he began to speak about what he had been in the midst of and the pain that he had been hearing, he began to weep. And the really extraordinary thing about that moment is that he chose not to turn off the tape. So what I heard was my father weeping for a couple of minutes. And I often think if he had turned off the tape, or erased it or if he had tried to shut down to that flow of passion and sorrow, I don't believe he would be able to the same extent to do the work he was doing.

          So that moment of hearing my father’s tears has been a moment that has always been within me and part of what I pray for in me, in others, in communities, the strength to be and to do is to learn how to weep not in a way that paralyzes us but in a way that moves us more in the direction of action…

And at the same time let's pay attention to what is amazing and glorious in every moment... Philip Newell

              We need to learn to fly with two wings -sorrow and glory

Hildegard of Bingem the 12th-century mystic and saint says we need to learn to fly with two wings.  One is the wing of awareness of life's glory and the other is the wing of awareness of life's pain and suffering.  If we don’t feel both then we are like an eagle trying to fly with only one wing; we will never reach the heights we are called to.

  “We used to say in the supervision at Reno, ‘There is as much living in a moment of pain as a moment of joy.’ We forget that.  We get so busy trying to extract the hard things from our lives, we miss that there are sweet and very interesting things sitting right next to them.  We are so focused about ‘I have to get rid of x,’ a lot of times that we miss y and z that are lying right next to x.”  -Kelly Wilson,  Podcast: ACT in Context.  Episode: 7 An Introduction to Contacting the Present Moment with Kelly Wilson

Jesus Wept

W What is the shortest sentence in the Bible?  It is one noun and one verb.  “Jesus wept.”  The most perfect human being showed us it is human to weep.  He never said he was too evolved to weep.  Instead, he wept.

Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace

God, grant me the Serenity
To accept the things I cannot change...
Courage to change the things I can,
And Wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.

Taking, as Jesus Did, this sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it. -Reinhold Niebuhr