2011-02-16

Cry Your Heart Out

Hi Everyone, I hope you are all doing well. I came across this book on Facebook. It was good for me to read this excerpt, as I have had a few good cry's over the past couple of years. I suffered a lot of loss at once. Even though I have been feeling much more upbeat the past few months, this past year has been tough. Being alone everyday, gets so quiet, that at times, the tears begin to fall quite easily. I don't like to write about this, I want to keep my posts on the upbeat, but sometimes you just need to share, get it out. In the quiet, I often reflect and think about how I got to this place, this place of isolation. It is all due to my actions under the influence of Alcohol. The feelings of much regret and remorse for my stupid, stupid actions are overwhelming, but I cry if I need to and keep moving on. Eventually the tears and feelings will go away as time brings about better things for me. I have faith in that. I hope this helps any of you who feel you need a good cry to get through some things in your life right now. Don't feel weak, eventually, like it say's below, you and I will get passed whatever it is hurting us, and come out of it in a beautiful place, like a garden.
Thanks for visiting my blog,
Love ya,
Janet :)

Photobucket

CRY YOUR HEART OUT
An Excerpt from The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart

“He who sits in the house of grief will eventually sit in the garden.”
— Hafiz

Hard times, more than any others, reveal to us the truth that the signature of our humanity is our emotional nature. What differentiates us from stones and butterflies is the degree to which what happens to us affects us on an emotional level. We don’t just experience things — get a divorce, lose our house, watch our dog die from eating poison — we have feelings about these events. It is the depth and nuance of our feelings — of our joy, sorrow, anger, and fear — that give texture to our humanity.

Sorrow and grief are the emotions that apply when we experience loss, and crying is the body’s mechanism for expressing grief. It may seem self-evident that we should cry when we’re in pain, but it’s surprising how much we resist our tears. Often it is only when we’ve been overtaken by them that we finally discover how terribly aggrieved we are.

We live in a culture that’s afraid of grieving; we don’t know how to cry. When our lives fall apart in one way or another, we usually try to take control of things and solve them, forget them, or deny them — rather than experience them, accept them, or see the meaning they may hold for us. That’s because underlying many of our responses to difficulty is the unstated assumption that we should be able to engage in life, liberty, and the unbridled pursuit of happiness without ever having to grieve — over anything. It’s almost as if we believe that pain, suffering, and challenge are bad and should never be a part of our path.

The truth is that pain is one of our greatest teachers, hurt can be a birth, and our sufferings are the portals to change. This being true, we need to know how to grieve, to mourn, to shed our tears, because grief is the cure for the pain of loss. Tears are the medicine of grieving.

When life is hard, when you’re in a crisis, you should cry not because you’re weak but because crying holds the power of healing. Tears, in fact, are the vehicle for transformation. When you cry, your loss moves through you to the point of exit. What was holding you up and eating you up, what was stuck inside your body, gets released and moves outside your body. Your physical structure is quite literally cleansed and, like a blackboard sponged clean, is available to receive the imprint of whatever wants to come next. That’s why, when you have cried, you will be reborn, free to begin again.

Hard Afternoons on the Couch
It has been clinically demonstrated that when you suppress sadness you also suppress positive emotions. What we don’t feel on one end of the emotional spectrum, we don’t feel on the other. As a consequence, people who try to be happy all the time, who suppress what they perceive to be the “negative” emotions of sorrow and grief, actually, over time, become more anxious and depressed. Crying is not a sign of weakness; we shouldn’t staunch our tears. They’re a healing balm, a river to the future.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a bunch of really great cries in my life — days, afternoons, and nights when I took to the couch or my bed and liter-ally wailed about the hardships of life. I’ve cried over sweethearts who left, lovers I couldn’t get rid of, bad decisions, feeling forsaken by God, people who didn’t “get” me, wrecking my dancing shoes, selling my house, feeling isolated, wretched, and unloved, and feeling the impending sorrow of death. I have cried because of my stupidity, my naïveté, and my lack of courage, because of tornadoes and earthquakes, because of money I lost and money that was stolen from me (a lot of both).

At times I’ve been surprised by the magnitude of my tears, by the amount of sheer wailing and letting go that certain circumstances called for. I’ve been shocked, almost worried that such a big cry might have been some sort of hysterical emotional excess, some kind of performance. But the quiet integration, the fragile and yet sublime peace that followed each vintage cry was the measure of the healing power of those tears.

I’ve always felt better because of having cried. I have felt reglued, reborn, strong, silken, vulnerable, permeable, powerful, radical, formidable, tender, pure, loving, exquisite, invincible, clear, new, real, whole.

When you stop and think about it, there are things worth crying about every day. So cry, for God’s sake. Cry your heart out.
Daphne Rose Kingma

To Order her book click on this link
http://www.daphnekingma.com/

8 comments:

  1. *hugs*

    I feel a lot like you feel, just for different reasons. It really sucks.

    Thanks for the book excerpt, I might have to pick that one up when I have some extra cash. It's hard for me to let go of the idea that crying and experiencing emotions are weaknesses that I must conquer. And sometimes I'm afraid that if I give in and let myself cry, I'll never stop.

    Have a wonderful day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. hugs back at ya Raven, sorry you feel like me too sometimes, I am going to pick up that book, I'll share it when I can. If you let go you will probably be surprised how you will be able to stop at a certain point, it is truly like a cleansing. If you cry you are still strong, don't forget that!
    Janet :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I don't cry often but when I do it's almost like opening up a dam. However it can be very cleansing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ah Janet, I had my own battle with the demon drink many years ago - did a pretty spectacular crash and burn. Even in the full meltdown phase, where I had admitted to myself and others that I had serious problems, it took me nearly three years to put Humpty Dumpty back together again - and the scars and cracks were still very visible, brittle and fragile.

    It's part of the process to feel sad and sorry about the mess we made - as you have sensed, this is even part of the healing process; for ourselves and the others we have hurt. But we go on. And it gets better.

    There is even a positive side to it all; how many people go through life without a major wobble and, as a result, never get the chance as adults to really look at their lives and make conscious decisions about the kind of person they want to be and the kind of life they want to lead? Yes, we pay a high price for it but now, ten years after coming out of that phase, I am more and more thankful - for everything I went through ...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Francis this one of the nicest things anyone has taken the time to share with me since I got sober, thank you so much for the hope and inspiration to keep on keeping on!
    Congradulations on your sobriety!
    Janet :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thank you Mary for sharing that with me, it helps me not to feel so alone,
    Take Care,
    Janet :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Dear janet,

    thank you for sharing this.

    Love and Light
    Rainer

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you Ray, good to hear from you,
    Take Care,
    Janet :)

    ReplyDelete