20
We’ve been relying on sadness in its free-flowing state to get into our bodies, connect to the earth, and release things we don’t need. Now we’ll visit sadness in its mood state.
Sadness is your psyche’s water-bearer; it restores life-giving fluidity and movement when you’ve become arid and inflexible. Sadness helps you slow down, feel your losses, and release that which needs to be released-—to soften into the flow of life instead of holding yourself rigidly and pushing ever onward. Sadness asks you to trust in the flow of time, in the surprising flow of vision and inspiration, and in the ebb and flow of human relationships so that you may release yourself and others from contracts that aren’t healing, and settle into the flow of deeper and more fulfilling relationships. Sadness also helps you release yourself from behaviors or ideas that take you away from your authentic self; if you can truly let go, the gentle nature of sadness will lead you to peace of mind that comes not from chaining yourself to a formal set of beliefs or ideologies, but from listening to your own innate wisdom.
Sadness also has an important biological healing component: tears cleanse your eyes and sinuses and release toxins (and excess tension) from your body. Crying is a potent detoxification process that helps you move fluidity through yourself in tangible ways. When you welcome your healing sadness and your tears and release that which must be released, you’ll feel freer, lighter, and more focused in every part of yourself. This is probably the most important thing to understand about sadness: if you truly let go of your outdated attachments, you’ll be rejuvenated and revitalized by its healing flow. If you refuse to let your sadness perform its healing tasks, you’ll lose your sense of flow, your focus and agility will fade away, you’ll experience excessive tension, and you’ll have trouble finding or connecting to your deepest path and dearest loves. If you never let go, your heart’s true knowledge will be obscured by your outworn attachments to unsuitable people and ideas. When you reject sadness, you cannot be rejuvenated; therefore, your vitality and your flow will be impeded by your unmet needs, your unsaid words, your unshed tears, and your grinding soul fatigue.
Welcoming your sadness is not just a process of allowing honest sorrow and tears back into your life; if it were that easy, we’d all have done it by now. No, we all have very good reasons for repressing and ignoring our natural sadness, and surprisingly these reasons don’t have as much to do with sadness as they do with anger, or to be more precise, with how sadness and anger work together.
Many people think that anger and sadness are oppositional emotions, that the fierce strength in anger has nothing whatever to do with the sorrowful softening in sadness. In truth, anger and sadness are intimately connected in a wondrous and fluid dance; unfortunately, the steps to this dance seem to be hidden from us.
When you move into the softened releasing posture of sadness, you can uncouple yourself from the ideas, situations, or people you’ve outgrown or whom you attached to with improper intent (because you felt lonely, because you felt pity or responsibility, because you needed security or position, or because nothing better was available). Sadness moves forward to question your outdated or hollow attachments in a slow and persistent way, and it asks you to release them (and yourself) back into the flow of life. If you move through your sadness honestly, you’ll encounter honest pain, honest sorrow, honest emptiness, and finally, an honest reconnection to and rejuvenation of your heartfelt self. Your honorable journey through sadness will rejuvenate your psyche, but stepping back into life without the camouflage of those outgrown attachments can feel very disorienting. Therefore, your anger will step forward to help you restore your boundary and protect your new position so that you can support and maintain your important changes (instead of falling backward into your old attachments as soon as you feel lonely or weakened again). Your healthy anger will strengthen your resolve, which means that you may appear somewhat unsympathetic to people who only knew you as a pushover. This transition is wonderful and necessary, but if you’ve been trained to see anger and sadness as oppositional emotions, this natural emotional progression may startle you.
Your healthy anger may also arise just in front of your sadness, in order to protect you while you perform your necessary release work. When you move consciously into your sadness—into a softened, deliberate, languid posture—your boundaries will most likely intensify in response, and your anger may wrap you in a protective cocoon. Have you ever moved into your sadness fully and felt an unusual heat emanating from your face or chest? Have you ever let yourself cry deeply and felt a sense of timelessness in those moments? That’s your anger creating a protective boundary of privacy around the sadness in your psyche. Anger will often move forward during times of sadness to help you maintain a connection to your strength and security while tremendous change is occurring inside you. If you can welcome the heat and protection of your anger as the ally of your sadness, you can use your anger to surround yourself with a ring of fire so that you can move deeply inside yourself and make the serious changes sadness asks of you. When you’re protected inside your vigilant, anger-defined boundary, you may be able to release a long-held idea or goal that no longer feeds you, because your anger will remind you that your strength doesn’t rely on any exterior possession or accomplishment. And when the sentry of your anger calmly walks the perimeter of your psyche, you’ll be able to alter or end a relationship that serves no one, because your healthy anger will help you make clean and respectful separations with honor and dignity.
When the noble sentry of your anger and the graceful water-bearer of your sadness work together, you’ll be able to release outworn ideas or unworkable relationships while you restore your authentic purpose. When you release dead weight and restore yourself to a focused and upright position with the help of your anger and your sadness, you’ll actually feel rejuvenated, wiser, and more aware (instead of empty or lost). You’ll feel the pain of having been attached to people or ideas that could not meet your true needs, but you’ll also feel deep relief at being once again on your own true path. Creating harmony between your anger and your sadness, then, is vital if you’re going to work with either emotion effectively, because each contributes to and supports the other in a vibrant and purposeful way.
If anger and sadness aren’t harmonized in your psyche, they can throw you into precarious behaviors. If you reject your sadness and use your anger all by itself, you’ll just protect and restore, protect and restore, without asking if what you’re protecting is worth keeping. If you can’t access your sadness, you won’t be able to identify or let go of things that no longer serve you, so you’ll end up defending indefensible positions. You can feel this sort of imbalance when you’re arguing strenuously with someone and suddenly lose your entire train of thought. The argument begins to seem absurd, and you become embarrassed about having started it at all. If you could disengage and apologize, your sadness would be able to come forward and help you release whatever essentially meaningless thing you were fighting about, but that doesn’t happen very often. Without a proper connection to your sadness, your anger will fight just to save face, even if there’s no reason whatsoever to stay in the fight.
Similarly, if you use your sadness all by itself, without the protective assistance of your anger, you may release so much that you lose parts of yourself in the torrent. Without your anger’s certainty and resolve, your sadness might release too many attachments. If you’ve ever felt that any movement toward sadness or weeping would be dangerous—that if you started crying, you’d never be able to stop—you were probably sensing a lack of healthy anger in your psyche. Without anger’s presence, your sadness can add overwhelming amounts of water to your system, and you can be swept away. When your angers (and consequently your boundary) are impaired, you may express your deep sadness and find yourself not only ending relationships, but giving up your art, your dreams, and your selfrespect in response to your sadness, which is a clear sign that your anger wasn’t available to protect you while your sadness surged through you.
If your healthy anger has the freedom to do so, it will often protect you from dropping into your sadness when your surroundings aren’t safe or emotionally supportive. Sadness asks you to drop all crutches and pretenses and get back to the center of your unrepeatable self—to feel things only you can feel. This is not a casual request; this is real soul-work. Your anger knows this, and it won’t let you move into sadness until you’re safe enough to do that work. You may experience this protective movement as an inability to cry unless you’re completely alone, which is not a sign of emotional incompetence. There is real danger in crying or showing deep vulnerability in our society. Many people see crying and sorrow as unstable, weak, or even disturbed. Crying in public can threaten the image you craft for yourself, and it can make you lose face in the eyes of friends, family, and co-workers. Your anger understands this, and it tries to protect you and your position in the world. If you understand what your anger is trying to do, you’ll be able to thank your anger and channel it into your boundary to strengthen your resolve. Then if it’s at all possible, you can immediately find a private place in which to mourn and cry. If you don’t understand why your anger is preventing you from moving into your sadness, you’ll probably force your tears back into their ducts, repress your sadness, and go forward with grim resolve. Perhaps you’ll cry later, during a phone company commercial, or perhaps you’ll hurt yourself accidentally, so you’ll have a justifiable reason to cry. The tears will come out eventually, but when you don’t understand your anger or your sadness, you probably won’t be able to feel (or even remember) your teary connection to the original saddening event.
In many cases, poorly moderated anger and sadness can get into a contentious relationship with one another. For instance, your movements into anger may amplify your sadness in unhelpful ways (you may cry or become despondent when you get angry, which won’t help you restore your boundary at all!), while any movement toward sadness and release may bring your anger stomping onto the scene (you may find yourself lashing out with inexplicable fury when you’re actually quite sad). As you can imagine, this sort of inner turmoil is terribly destabilizing. It’s hard to maintain your balance while you’re rocketing back and forth between boundary devastation, fury, fatigue, and despair. In no time at all, you’ll lose your focus, your relationships will fall into disrepair, and you’ll struggle with a great deal of shame—both for having hurt yourself and others with your poorly managed anger and sadness, and because it’s embarrassing to be alternately rageful and then crushed by sorrow. When your anger and sadness are allowed to remain in conflict, you’ll be neither protected nor softened; you’ll just be battered by these seemingly adversarial emotions.
If you have skills, though, you won’t have to put up with such chaos. When you can maintain your focus and your grounding, you can respond appropriately to both your sadness and your anger. That’s where the dance comes in—where your sadness supports change and vulnerability, while your anger offers stability and protection. When your anger and sadness can work together, they can help you move with strength and grace toward their shared goals of clarity, release, rejuvenation, protection, and authentic wholeness. When you can dance with your anger and sadness, you won’t second-guess or wrestle with any anger that arises in front of your sadness; instead, you’ll realize that anger actually should move in front of your sadness because anger exists to strengthen you when your boundary and self-image are challenged (as they always are when sadness appears). You also won’t second-guess your sadness or repress it simply because it isn’t convenient. You’ll be able to channel your anger into your boundary to create the time and space you need to address your sadness mindfully, and release your outworn attachments to the ideas, behaviors, attitudes, or relationships that brought your sadness forward in the first place.
In a well-moderated psyche, anger is the primary emotion—the boundary-setter and sentry of the soul—while sadness acts in a more interior way to restore flow, grounding, and integrity. In many people, however, this relationship is turned around in that sadness is their leading emotion, while anger limps behind, if it appears at all. This dynamic is present in what we would call soft or passive people, those who are very sensitive, malleable, and attentive to others, but not very well-protected or defined. Such soft people can’t make good separations between themselves and the world around them, or work with their anger in conscious ways. In psychological terms, these people are often called passive-aggressives, but that sort of labeling crushes the spirit and converts a normal human behavior into a pathological condition. Leading with sadness is not a condition; it’s a choice.
People who lead with sadness are often children of raging or addicted parents (or survivors of other ongoing violent childhood traumas). Having experienced firsthand the horrors committed in the name of anger, these children often shun anger completely in response to the carnage. This is not usually a move made in weakness; it’s often an almost swashbuckling, death-defying decision. All children know that anger can protect them (that’s obvious), but these children make a choice to live differently than their families or tormentors do—to feel differently and to behave differently. They make a choice to drop their anger completely, and this is a very brave, dangerous, and life-affirming choice. It’s sad that the aftereffects of this choice are so tragic, because living in a rage-filled house (or through a brutalizing childhood) without a boundary is a very brave thing to do. Sometimes it’s the only path to survival, because there’s not enough room in most raging families or cruel authoritarian structures for more than one angry person. If you display your anger in these settings, you might be brutalized; it’s better to drop your anger and survive.
Here’s the problem: Brave survival skills (like raging, dissociating, freezing, fighting, fleeing, or dropping all anger) are fantastic and brilliant, but they’re only supposed to be used in response to danger or trauma. Survival skills are perfect when you need them, but they’re only meant for times of need. Survival skills contain tremendous power, but unfortunately, if you use them as a matter of course, you’ll remain in an overly activated survival mode—constantly preparing for and anticipating danger, rather than coming fully back to normal life.
Survivors of repeated trauma learn to rely on their survival skills because there is so little chance for them to relax into their authentic personalities. As they grow, these survivors tend to present their survival skills as their personalities, which means they often gravitate toward situations or relationships where those skills will be called into play. For people whose survival choice was to lead with sadness rather than anger, those situations almost always involve mates, bosses, co-workers, or friends who have trouble with anger. As such, people who lead with sadness perform a fascinating function in our emotionally impaired society. Because they don’t lead with anger and don’t have strong boundaries, these softened people can often find startling truths in troubling events or deal in remarkable ways with enraged people. Softened people will attach themselves to furious people or enraging situations (or assaultive jobs), and instead of putting up defenses, they’ll accept whatever is thrown at them. Often they’ll process the assaultive turmoil in their own bodies in a kind of empathy, and gain a deep understanding of the inner torment of troubled people or situations. This can be a good skill if it’s balanced with the protection and resolve of healthy anger, but in people who lead with sadness, this balance is rare.
People who lead with sadness often struggle with physical and emotional instability, cycling depressions and anxieties, unworkable relationships, and excruciating loneliness (even though they’re usually surrounded by people). After a while, they realize they’re trapped in a dreadful cycle of stabilizing unstable people and systems over and over again, in an exhausting repetition of the first two stages of their childhood traumas. Breaking this debilitating cycle and moving toward the liberation of stage three begins when they realize that leading with their survival skills (rather than their authentic emotions) ensures that they will remain in survival mode. The task of passive and overly softened people is to become reacquainted with the healing heart of anger, and to destroy their contracts with the depraved and dishonored anger they witnessed in their parents, authority figures, peers, or siblings.
Leading with sadness is a choice; therefore, it can be brought forward, looked at as a contractual decision, and dealt with in empathic ways. If you’re an overly softened person, you can free yourself from the thankless task of incessantly healing angry people and abusive situations, and you can restore the honorable sentry of your anger to its rightful forward position in your psyche. When you can protect and restore yourself with your healthy anger, your already advanced ability to work with sadness will help you release your painful and devitalizing attachments to unworkable relationships, behaviors, memories, or ideas.
The practice for sadness is very simple: you just stop, drop into yourself (which grounds you almost automatically), and set your boundary strongly as you ask the internal questions, “What must be released?” and “What must be rejuvenated?” It’s important to ask both questions because most of us link sadness only to loss, which is why our protective anger so often places itself in unfortunate opposition to our sadness. However, in true and honored sadness, there is certainly loss, but it’s always followed by an amazing sense of quiet and utter relaxation. If you hinder your sadness by refusing to let go of your outworn or inappropriate attachments, or by allowing your anger to stomp on it, you won’t experience the rejuvenating flow that always follows healthy sadness; therefore, you’ll be unable to let go, your anger may intensify, and your flow will evaporate. In response, your sadness will have no choice but to decay into full-blown despair or depression, and you’ll be in the rapids for no good reason.
The movement through true sadness is as simple as it is healing. All you need to do is to create sacred space for your sadness by setting a strong boundary (whether you feel angry or not). If you experience a great deal of anger when you’re sad, you can channel your anger and illuminate your boundary very brightly. If you don’t feel a lot of anger, you can just envision your boundary in a fiery color and proceed with that imaginal support. Usually all you have to do is get quiet, welcome the protective heat of anger, let your tears flow if they need to, release that which needs to be released, and relax into the flow of life again. Honestly—that’s it! You may want to bring forward a few contracts, but sadness usually washes away old attachments or contractual entrapments all by itself—without the need for any special techniques.
If you drop into the trapped states of despair and despondency (see in chapter 20), you’ll need to burn many contracts, but when you’re in the territory of sadness, you’ll have easy access to the flow you need to release yourself from inappropriate attachments. When you’re done, you may not even need to rejuvenate yourself (unless you want to), because sadness brings incredible healing energies with it. Sadness arrives with its own tool kit to ground and comfort you, wash away old attachments and contracts, and heal your soul.
When you welcome your sadness and allow it to flow through you, you may become a little bit weepy at first, which can seem troubling if you don’t understand the healing power of tears. Don’t fight the flow, and don’t underestimate the healing power of a good cry. Crying is an incredibly simple way to add the tempering influence of water back into your psyche. If you’re tense and overstimulated, crying will help you cool off and soothe yourself. If you’re rigid and unbending, crying will break down the boulders in your soul. If you’re zooming around on too much intellectual stimulation, crying will restore healing humidity to your system. Crying helps you unwind and relax into yourself after hard work, loss, hectic situations, or self-sacrifice—so cry as often as you need to. It’s the all-purpose healing balm of the soul.
As you move into a closer relationship with your healing sadness, be aware of your habitual responses to hectic situations. Notice how often you distract yourself when your tears and sadness attempt to come forward, and watch for any movement toward the siren song of “fun.” When you’re inflexible and desiccated and you need to bring flow and relaxation back to your life, notice how often you move as far as you can from your healing sadness. If you’re like most people, you’ll respond to tension and stagnation by trying to bring more joy to your life, which will never work because flow and relaxation live in the realm of sadness; they don’t live in joy! Joy and its comrades (happiness and contentment) are lovely states, but they don’t work in the way sadness does. Manufacturing joy, chasing happiness, and courting exhilaration—these are distractions and avoidance behaviors that cannot and will not heal you. When you require deep relaxation and deep release, you must move honorably and meaningfully into sadness. When you do, joy will naturally follow your sadness, and fun will naturally return to your life. This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s the emotional truth.
What do you do when the people around you are sad? The first thing most of us do when we’re confronted with sadness is to smile and affect a cheery attitude. The more skilled among us might be able to listen supportively, but eventually we’ll try to put a happy face on any sadness we encounter. Very few people are ever given the time or permission to feel truly sad for as long as they need to. We dry their tears, hug them, make jokes, and wave Mr. Bunny at them. Unfortunately, this lengthens their stay in the house of loss and stops them from receiving the rejuvenation sadness brings.
Because sadness is so misunderstood and dishonored, it tends to wander through our culture like an orphan, grasping on to anyone it can. If you don’t know how to work with sadness, the sadness of others will probably travel into your tense and boundary-impaired psyche and incapacitate you in the way your own sadness does. For instance, if you’ve got a lot of unshed tears inside you, the sadness of others will make you cry. You won’t have good psychological hygiene, and your boundary will probably drop just because you need to cry. However, if you can set your boundary and make room for softness and release inside your properly protected psyche, you can welcome sadness in others—without having to share it with them. Once you set your boundary and soften yourself a bit, you can easily make room for crying and sorrow in another person because you’ll have the patience and the timelessness you need to simply sit and listen—without offering unsolicited advice or inappropriate cheerfulness. You won’t have to become a sage or a counselor, because if you can just let the sad person speak in sacred space, their sadness will do all the work required. Trust this beautiful emotion—in yourself and others. It can and does restore the soul to wholeness.
Sadness arises in response to specific issues, it meets the situation and allows for conscious release, and it contributes rejuvenation, renewal, and relaxation before it moves on. When sadness is not allowed to run its natural course, it will decay into the troubled state of despair (also called despondency). Despair signals that the mood state of sadness has become imprisoned in a feedback loop where rejuvenation cannot occur.
Authentic sadness moves through your body in waves—sometimes gentle, sometimes powerful—and that fluid motion bathes and rejuvenates you. Despair, however, doesn’t move at all; even if you cry your eyes out, it remains stagnant. Despair occurs when sadness is not experienced in its wholeness, when only the loss inherent in sadness is attended to, while its releasing and rejuvenating capacities are obscured. Despair is a sign of stagnation, and it can also be a survival tool for abuse victims who learned to respond with a despairing and brokenhearted posture (rather than with anger or vengeance) in order to elicit some leniency from their abusers. This sort of despair feels not like an emotional choice, but like a specific stance required for survival. However, despair is not a good long-range survival tool because it dams up the emotional realm and eventually destabilizes the psyche.
If you can ask your body to don the posture of despair, you’ll immediately feel the difference between it and sadness. In despair, the natural softening and inward-turning posture of sadness becomes a nearly hangdog pose, and unfortunately, when you’re trapped in despair, your anger will escalate into imbalance right alongside it. At first your anger might react in a useful way, perhaps creating heat or stillness so that you can experience your despair in private. However, because despair cycles endlessly with no resolution, your anger will begin to cycle along with it. You may begin to rely on rage or hatred to create emergency boundaries for yourself—either openly, or in passive and sneaky ways. Usually, despair will knock you into a tailspin that will cause you to unintentionally injure people as your dishonored anger careens unheedingly through your relationships. Your behavior will be so unpleasant that you may eventually find yourself alone and unwanted, which will reinforce your despair on a daily basis. When you make an unconscious decision to maintain despair and woundedness at any cost, it begins to cost more than anyone could ever imagine.
When your sadness is trapped, your mind and body will become clogged, and you’ll probably dissociate to get away from the whole mess. Despair can imprison you, but if you can understand the purpose of despair, you can begin to free yourself from its grasp. It’s vital to understand that staying in despair and refusing to release your sorrows puts you in a perverse position of power as the wronged or wounded one (my mother called it “the tyranny of the weak”). Being wronged, being wounded—these things do occur, and it’s important to recognize and honor those times when you were hurt. However, your life must be measured not by what happens to you, but by how you deal with what happens to you. When you cement yourself into the territory of despair, you become a thing—a slate upon which the wrongs of the world are written, or a tally sheet of pain and trouble—instead of a fully human being. When you can break through despair and restore your flow, you can awaken and live again. You can move from the crumpled category of victimhood into the upright category of survival. Then, when you’re able to ground yourself and burn your contracts with your woundedness and despair, you’ll move from survival into grace.
When you channel despair, you’ll release a massive clog in your psyche. If you’re not grounded and centered, you may be knocked down by the sudden restoration of your flow, so make sure that you ground and focus yourself before you begin. You may want to work in the presence of a therapist who can help keep you safe and focused. You’ll also need to have many imaginal contracts at the ready, because much old and unhealed material will need to be felt, examined, and released. During the channeling of despair, it’s important to prepare yourself to move through the emotions and attitudes that should have followed your original wounding. Though your own mix will be unique, some form of fear, anger, depression, and grief should follow all seriously disruptive life events. When you become trapped in despair, though, these natural states can’t flow properly. Therefore, when you channel your despair, you could find old angers that may have decayed into rages, old depressions that may have decayed into suicidal urges, or old fears that may have deteriorated into anxieties or severe confusions. Your emotions have little choice but to intensify themselves when there’s a blockage. This is why a therapist may be necessary.
The proper channeling of despair will call all of your skills into play. Being focused and safe behind your bright, anger-supported boundary will reintegrate you and give you some much-needed separation from all the desperate torment despair creates. Grounding will help your body release the trapped sense memories of your wound or loss, all of the trapped emotions, and the self-talk that keeps you focused on how unfair and brutal life has been. Grounding will also connect you to healthy sadness in its free-flowing state, which will help you support the flow that’s been missing. Your contract-burning skills will take a central role in helping you disentangle yourself from all the stances and behaviors you’ve adopted in response to your despair. You should also take full advantage of conscious complaining (see in chapter 10); it restores your feistiness and your zest. If you can complain loudly about a situation, it is very hard to remain in despair about it!
After channeling despair, you may feel a little worn-out. If so, congratulations! You’ve done some serious work, and you’ve freed up enormous amounts of trapped energy; therefore, you’ll need to rejuvenate yourself. This finishing touch is important in cases of despair, because despair depletes your energy and your boundary. Rejuvenation will help you reestablish your sense of strength and balance. Also, as you’re healing from your despair cycle, please make sure to welcome your anger and sadness in their free-flowing and mood states. It’s important to honor and channel these protective and softening emotions; they’ll restore your boundary and your flow, and protect you from dropping into despair again. Welcome them both.
If your despair does not move or shift after you’ve channeled it a few times, please seek more intensive help from your therapist or doctor. Despair can cycle you into a serious depression, and for this you need to seek outside help.
Creating sacred space for despair in people who don’t have skills is almost impossible. Because despair imprisons healthy sadness (the very emotion that restores flow to the psyche), it can erect a kind of life-sapping vortex around itself. You’ll find yourself pulled into a despairing person’s drama before you know it, but nothing you do will alleviate the anguish. You’ll fix one problem or meet one need, and four more will pop up—because despairing people have no real investment in working through their troubles. They honestly can’t invest themselves because they’re not resourced and they’re not living in the present.
Despairing people can also be somewhat dangerous in interpersonal relationships because they lead with their sadness (or this trapped form, anyway), which means their anger will leak out or surge forward in illogical and senseless ways. They’ll tend to hurt you without meaning to or even being aware of having done so. If you try to help a chronically despairing person who has no skills (bless your excellent heart), you’ll find yourself spiraling with him or her into a drama that has no end. Please know that in many cases, the most loving thing you can do is to let someone know when they’re in the rapids and require more help than a friend can provide. Despair creates a difficult and entangling situation that is best left to trained therapists to unravel.
I make a distinction between despair and depression because I see them as very different states. Despair is almost a personality type. People seem to move their entire psyches into the house of despair; they filter everything they encounter through a despairing, crumpled, defeated posture. In depression, though, there’s more of a cyclical relationship between many different moods. Depression includes despair, but it has more facets than mere despair, and in many cases it has an unusual connection to elation that despair doesn’t have. I see depression as a constellation of many emotions and many factors, most notably a jarring estrangement among the elements and intelligences. The back-and-forth, seesaw nature of depression points to a deep and long-standing conflict in the psyche. When an emotional state repeats endlessly and doesn’t ever resolve, there’s always something underneath that can’t be felt or expressed properly, but with depression there’s much more going on than that. Depression is a cyclical movement through any number of repetitive states; it often incorporates despair, but it isn’t made of despair alone. Depression is such a rich topic that it will be explored in its own in chapter 22.
Remember to welcome your sadness in all its forms: as your free-flowing ability to ground and relax into yourself as you let go, as your mood-state ability to access the fluidity of tears and rejuvenate yourself, and as the rapids-level depths of despair that can help you restore and rejuvenate your psyche after terrible loss. Welcome and thank your sadness.