“Most of our aliveness is caught up in the suppression of sorrow.”

—Francis Weller

For me, this is a million-dollar insight.

I can see pretty plainly that, for most of my adult life, I’ve actively tried “not to feel” my deepest emotional pain.

It isn’t that I’ve had such a terrible life, or that I was so mistreated. There’s no single Grand Tragedy I’m talking about here.

Somewhere along the line, some foolish part of me decided my best course of action was to push down sorrow. Hold it in. Tough it out. Slap on the smile. Pretend everything is hunky dory. Pretend “I’m fine.”

I understand that I was trying to protect myself, keep myself safe from being crushed by emotional pain.

But when you become the sole container of your hurt, it has nowhere to go—your heart becomes (as Francis Weller says) a “permanent recycling center” for your pain. You think you’re sparing yourself, but you are polluting yourself with stuck pain.

I’m currently practicing new ways of processing that old sorrow (as well as new sorrow) that involve honoring the grief by feeling it. I don’t mean letting it overwhelm me or getting trapped in it. But rather letting it feel its way through my nervous system without trying to hold it down (like a beach ball underwater).

I frequently have to remind myself it’s okay to feel sad, let the body do what it naturally does with sadness.

This is an outstanding video about grief, featuring Francis Weller’s discussion with Anderson Cooper. Anderson’s father died when he was very young, and he struggles with feeling the grief of that loss even though it’s a decades-old loss.

It’s very powerful.

If you struggle with letting yourself feel sorrow, I highly recommend watching it: