Working With Sadness - KamaYoga Early Bird Ends Soon
"Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place." - Rumi
Yesterday morning I received the news that my uncle has passed away. I have been processing my sadness ever since, and will continue to as long as needed.
But I also had clients to see today, and work to do, so I had to find a way to honor my emotions and my responsibilites.
We all have to do this at different points in life for different reasons. Loss and sadness are a part of life, but life doesn’t usually provide the space or tools for sadness to serve us. Feeling sad is not on the wish list… so we often try to avoid it, or get rid of it as quickly as possible.
But how we work with sadness, or any other challenging emotion, makes all the difference in the quality of our lives. Like the quote above points to, there is a connection between sorrow and joy, even though these two emotions can seem worlds apart.
When we know how to let the sadness have a place at our emotional table, joy gets a seat too… but they probably won’t show up at the same meal.
There are cultures where they have rituals and traditional ways of grieving and honoring sadness; there’s an acknowledgement of the naturalness and necessity of these emotions. But for most modern westerners, many of the ways we deal with sadness involve, food, drugs, alcohol, and shopping.
I indulged in the latter... some shopping. And I expereinced first hand the difference between retail therapy as means of relieving sadness.... and using a practice like the ones I’ll be sharing in my upcoming Kamayoga Series.
I made a quick video about what I learned from my experience… be warned, I purposely decided to keep it real, so I did not put on a pretty face, or 'clean-up' for the camera.
If you want to learn the practice I did to work with my sadness, along with a bunch of other profound practices that will help you navigate your emotions no matter what life’s throwing at you. Join me and the great group that is forming for this 5 week journey. The series is filling up and the early bird price that saves you $50 off the regular rate ends this Monday Sept. 26th.
I'd love to hear some of the ways you've worked with your sadness. And they don't have to be enlightened, I'm really just curious about how other people respond to these emotions. Leave me a comment or send me an email!
with love,
Kamali