Letting Sadness Be

Aleph, Paulo Coelho

For some unknown reason, I felt a great sadness weighing me down part of the day yesterday. It's a moveable feeling. It shows up every now and again, as though I have lost something or someone recently. Grief. And yet not quite to the defined extreme as grief can be.

When I came across this quote, it was amazingly applicable to what I felt. Most specifically, Tears are words that need to be shed. Something inside me, deeper than I knew possible at the moment, needed to be shed. Needed, even called, to be released.

I know people who believe that we continually need to keep our energy and perspective at the highest vibration or level possible. If we continue to focus on the positive and the best outcomes, we draw that to ourselves. That's the Law of Attraction. Although I agree with the principle, my experience is that For me personally, I must let the emotion be. I must call it by name, not to focus energy on it, but to acknowledge it. If and when I do that, I release the emotion into the Universe, into the hands of the Divine, to be transformed. If and when I do not acknowledge it, it continues to knock on my inner door, disturbing my stability.

That brings me to the final sentence of Coelho's quote: Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end. In my life, I have kept tears at bay. I have swallowed them before they ever left my eyes. I have walked away from situations so I would not let the tears flow. Without the tears, and the ensuing words that create and embrace them, dullness takes over. In my experience, I cannot call it sadness because its texture is different. Sadness has emotion and power that arrives with it. What I feel is dullness. As though nothing can penetrate and touch my space, my mood, my being. I would rather let the tears come, let sadness be, know that tomorrow will bring another chance for joy.

What do you do when you feel sad? Do you ever feel a general sadness, without a reason? How do you handle that? How does it feel when you act as though sadness is gone (and it truly is not)? What do you do to work through that feeling?