I was discussing sadness with some of my friends the other day. We talked about how when you hold emotions in, there is always going to be huge pressure building that is bound to end with a negative outcome. When you hold in anger, inevitably an explosion occurs when it can’t be held in any longer, and often innocent bystanders get attacked by that force of emotion. When you hold in fear and anxiety, the results can end up in things like panic attacks and nervous breakdowns. Stress is one of the biggest causes of disease and discomfort in our bodies. And when you hold in sadness, the dam that is holding back all of the tears, will eventually buckle under all of the pressure, but in the meantime the building up of the sadness inside of a person, becomes all encompassing, like a vast, quickly rising, swirling body of water, making it hard to breathe and giving the sensation of drowning. However, if you use God’s natural release valve, and you cry some tears, there is less pressure on the inside, because the tears let the sadness flow out, and eventually the rivers and the streams of tears of sadness, dry to just a trickle.
Whatever we are feeling (and 2020 has certainly been a harvest year for feelings), let’s find healthy, positive ways to release these feelings. When we hold in any one emotion, that emotion has a tendency to take up the whole of us, and doesn’t allow room and space, for the variety of emotions (and a lot of enjoyable emotions) which we are meant to process and to experience, every single day. When we feel the ease of a peaceful conscious, we have open gates and open dams which allows all of the different feelings and sensations that we experience on a daily basis, to freely come and just as freely, to go. When we can accept our feelings as just part of being human, we don’t have to hide them and store them and let them build up inside of us. We can just quietly notice our natural feelings, allow our feelings to be, and process our feelings, in natural, healthy ways (like crying tears) and then just as peacefully, we can let those feelings go, leaving lots of space for happiness and tranquility to seep in.