Dear Ones,
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!
And so it is.
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Mystic Messages 
MUSE-INGS: “Seek the Light in the Dark Feelings” by Rosemary Bredeson
December 21, 2010 — RosemarySadness? Grief? Loss? Who wants to think about those things?
But, if we are committed to living a Conscious Life, then we must be aware of our feelings for they do represent important guidance for us along the path of personal growth. How comfortable are you with those feelings in yourself? How about in another person? Is it hard for you to experience another’s grief or sadness and really be present to them when they are feeling those feelings?
I know it can be hard to stay with what is uncomfortable but that great growth is the blessing in learning to do this. There is always Light on the other side of that which appears to be darkness. The Light is in there somewhere. Searching for the Light requires that sometimes we must make peace with the darkness. It is like allowing your eyes to become adjusted to the lack of light in a room. Once you have adapted, you can see far more than you could see initially.
It’s the same with feelings that we might be tempted to judge as ‘dark.’ When you stay with that feeling, keeping your eyes open and seeking what is available within the feeling to help you grow, you will become immersed enough for your vision to clear and show you the lesson.
A good friend will be present with you when you are feeling these feelings. A really good friend will hold you in a healing space and help you to stay in the feeling long enough to learn the lesson. The temptation to joke or lighten up the mood takes us away from the honesty of what we are feeling. And honesty is the necessary quality in order that we might go deeply enough into our feeling to learn the lesson that lies there.
Can you give yourself permission to be honest with yourself? Can you suspend judging yourself and those around you for feeling what feelings are coming up? Learning to recognize feelings and to work with them becomes a part of the process of personal growth. A very important part.
Feelings emerge from a place deep within us. Often feelings look as if they are about something going on around us at a particular time. But sometimes those feelings are attached to something from the past and we are fooled into thinking that they belong in the present moment. If you have suffered a hurt in the past and something arises that brings up that past hurt, you might be tempted to react as if the past and the present events have merged into one. This can increase the feelings so that they are no longer appropriate for that one moment.
Losing someone can be linked, in the unconscious mind, to previous experiences of abandonment and the feelings of loss can be increased because of this linkage. Becoming conscious of the source and depth of our feelings puts on in a place where we can be effective in learning from the entire experience. If we know that there might be something in the past that is still begging for our attention so we can learn the lesson then we owe it to our self and to our personal growth to stay with that feeling until the lesson is revealed.
But all of this does not mean that we must wallow in sad feelings and cling to them while ignoring the life around us. As in all things, we must find balance in our lives. Clinging to feelings without doing the processes of working with the feelings, learning the lessons, is a form of self-centeredness that can drive people away from us. Feeling the feelings, working with them, moving forward in our personal growth – this is the path with the most reward. For when we choose to actually DO the work of growth then we can move through and beyond the feelings that we are feeling. It is in refusing to do the work that we become stuck.
Decide today to choose growth over being stuck in your feelings!
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Please feel free to re-post this article and share it with your readers. All I ask is that you include the following information when you do: