Sadness is a tough one isn’t it! ?
An old friend of mine died last week, three days after he got married, leaving his wife, family and friends undoubtedly feeling immense sadness.
I know you will have experienced it yourself and felt the sadness of a loved one as you empathised with them.
Can Mindfulness help? Definitely!
As we grow up we are encouraged to do things that make us feel happy… have fun with friends, take holidays, etc.
We are also protected from anything that causes us sadness or pain because our care givers don’t want us to suffer. So we naturally avoid painful emotions and we distract those who suffer.
Facing sadness can be extremely difficult but we are able to learn to stop fighting it and allow it to just sit next to us for a while.
Acceptance is the most powerful attitude of mindfulness and if we can find the courage to accept our feelings, even when they are intense, we find that we can endure more than we think.
When we observe our emotions with a tentative curiosity, without creating the thought stories that cause us additional suffering, we find that our pain eases ever so slightly.
Someone hurt my feelings the other day (I’m a sensitive type), so I sat on my bed and observed how it felt in my body. Swirling in my stomach, tightness in my chest and an intense need to create sentences in my head about how hurt I felt. I kept my attention in my body and resisted the urge to write the ‘poor me’ story that would commit the incident to my memory. After just a few minutes, the hurt feeling disappeared and I laughed about how quickly it had gone.
Easier said than done with immense sadness of course, but paying attention to the sensations we are experiencing in our body can lessen the pain our thoughts create in our head.
If we can just sit quietly with sadness and hold its hand rather than wish it would go away, we find that eventually it will lovingly walk away by itself.
Sending you love if you feel sad today. ❤️