Over the past few weeks, I have frequently been overwhelmed by sadness, sometimes to the point of emotional paralysis, and always with the feeling that behind it there was an ocean of tears I could not cry. When I did find tears, that didn’t necessarily help either more than temporarily.
I have been following for a few months now breathwork sessions with a guy called Geoff near Brussels (who I certainly recommend if you live near here) and last night this resulted in a new realization for me, which I’d like to share with you. It is that I cling so much on to this primal sadness because, actually, I really love it. And I really love it, because it is the way I comforted and loved myself when the small person I was met frustration, incomprehension and suffering. It felt good to be in that sad place, I felt alive there, it was a place where I knew myself and I knew the truth. I embraced my sadness like a teddy bear.
As I felt the sadness leaving my body during the session, I felt a real sense of loss, a presence that had been comforting me for so long that now was saying goodbye. That sense of loss moved me to tears. And yet I know that, if for some reason I want that sadness, I can always call it back …
But the sadness occupied such a default position as my easiest and most accessible “best friend” that that was where I always went for comfort. I feel that no person could compete. It was always harder to step out, trust and ask to be held than to go inside to this familiar primal place.
The problem is that that place, for all its warmth and comfort, is indissociably linked with feelings of low self-worth. It is very, very self-limiting and it always carries reinforces a sentiment of failure. When I am in that sad place, whatever I have objectively achieved in my life and towards my goals of healing always seems like nothing, and the path ahead an insurmountable mountain.
That is, however, not true.
I do not know if it is time to befriend my sadness or really to say goodbye, but I know that the sadness is mine and real, and honor it; and I know that the lies are not.