Feeling sad? Try this.

I was on the train the other morning.

Feeling sad.

Sad sad. The kinda sad that hurts. Makes your stomach ache. Forces tears to fall.

And I sighed. I sighed and silently begged for it to be over. For the pain to pass.

I said to myself ‘tomorrow will be a better day’.

And then I stopped.

I reasoned, Who cares if tomorrow is a better day. Tomorrow isn’t here. All I had in that very moment was sadness. Sadness was my present, so what was the point of wishing it to be different?

It’s a pretty natural response for us to want to escape uncomfortable emotions. It’s rare we encourage the fullness of their energy, feel the potency of what they offer. For fear they might engulf us and stick around… forever!

In that moment on the train, where I chose not to escape, I softened to the sadness, I settled into it and there was a sense of rejoicing in just ‘feeling’.

Sadness is loss. It’s expectation gone awry. It’s attachment – clinging. It’s endings. And endings, while they bring new beginnings, well, before the new beginning … begins, the ending, it can hurt.

Sometimes life is heavy. It’s sad and feels disconnected and lonely. It feels like abandonment of the highest level.

Other times though, it’s light and blissful and feels totally connected.

And then it shifts back again. Sounds obvious, but this is life.

The thing is, when we’re ok to be in our experience, without wishing it would change, the fullness of who we are – this becomes the experience. This is what is important.

When I dropped the hope that tomorrow might be better, I was able to acknowledge that life was doing its thing exactly as it needed to. And importantly, I was doing my thing within it. 

Wherever you’re at, in this very moment, do your best to be all there.

How?

Let life take you where it needs to take you. Surrender. Yield. And not with an energy of defeat, not at all. Instead with an energy of understanding, that life is merely working through you.