Mystic Messages

There are many reasons that a person feels sad and identifying a source of sadness is important in learning what the lessons are.  Are you sad because a friend is ill or dying?  Are you sad because things are not working out the way you had wanted?  Might you be feeling sad because you have lost something or someone?

Sadness usually accompanies the grief of a loss in one’s life – the loss of a friendship, a job, a financial situation, or a dream.  Most often the loss is the loss of what might have been.  Have you lost a pet recently?  Pets are the models for humans of unconditional love.  When one loses a pet one loses unconditional love that might have been there for that pet owner.  Has a relationship ended – through divorce or death or a parting of the ways?  Have you moved to a new home and lost the connections, the familiarity that you once had?

Think of sadness and loss and grief in your life as doorways to personal growth.  When you lose something that you value you are given a chance to move through a doorway into something new.  If you are feeling sad because you feel lack or a feeling of ‘if only things were different’ then look around you to see ways in which you are missing what IS present in that moment.  Sadness can sometimes take you away from gratitude for what is available to you but sadness should never be ignored.

Western culture sometimes does not allow people to sufficiently experience their grief, their sadness about a loss.  When someone dies, the workplace often expects a person to ‘buck up’, grieve for 3 days, and then return to work as if their loved one hadn’t just departed.  Human feelings go beyond the 3 day window allotted to them.  Grief is not something that can be expunged because society is uncomfortable with it.  Sadness is not weakness.  These feelings are very real, and very important to one who is on a path of personal growth.

Allowing yourself to feel your feelings, to be in touch with what is truly going on inside you, allows you to make informed choices about your life.  If you try to choose only those feelings that are socially acceptable you do yourself and your journey of personal growth a disservice.  Right now, in this moment, give yourself permission to feel what it is that you are feeling.  Can you get in touch with your inner self enough to know what you feel?  This is an important exercise in growth.

Women and men who decide on a public persona, carefully crafted to project a certain image, may be doing a disservice to themselves by sometimes denying their feelings and refusing to examine those feelings for the lessons that are there.  Is this how you operate?

Feel what you are feeling and stay with that feeling until it reveals to you what you can learn from it.  Are you feeling grief about a loss?  Stay with that feeling of grief so that you can move into the energy and then, ultimately, through it.  Are you sad?  Are you angry?  Are you frustrated?  Are you feeling something that the world around you is uncomfortable with?  Then find a way to process that emotion so that you can learn from it.

Journal.  Meditate.  Speak with someone else about it like a friend, confidant, counselor.  Write a letter to yourself from that feeling.  What does the feeling want you to know?  You might want to create a ritual around your feelings so that you can preserve the learnings while letting go of the necessity of holding onto or stuffing/hiding those feelings.

Allow whatever you are feeling to be a teacher for you.  When you have learned the lesson you will no longer need to hold onto the feeling.  Now is the time to do the work to feel the feeling and grow from it!