From Grief To Tears to Triumph
What do you do when you feel the urge to hold back your emotions and your tears?
Your ego tells you it’s not ok to cry. You must be strong and avoid showing your emotions.
You are someone who is the cheerleader for others, the one who ALWAYS sees the silver lining in life. The glass is half full when others see it empty, and life is meant for living in positivity at all times! Do you know what I am talking about? Many of us feel this way in the world while the other part has an attitude somewhat like Eyore from Winnie the Pooh.
If your anything like me, we also have a fear of being judged or questioned about why you are crying. So you hold back the tears and begin to apologize by saying “I’m sorry”.
In some circumstances, the “timing” doesn’t seem “appropriate” to cry, but you so desperately want to let go and let the river of tears just flow.
I know well this feeling of restraint and avoidance. The lack of allowing and expression of your emotions.
I grew up with this conditioning throughout my childhood years. I even felt this way in my marriage and while I was raising my family. I would experience shame when my emotions were crying out to be expressed. Especially when I was surrounded by family, or friends, watching a movie, or in conversation.
Have you ever just wanted to hold your tears back and finally, you can’t hold on to them any longer?
AND you felt SO good after allowing yourself just to be, to feel, and to surrender to all.
Today, something very interesting occurred as I was having a session with my coach. It didn’t seem that it was an “appropriate time” and place to shed my tears over a coaching call about marketing. Yep, that really happened! AND, I believe it happened FOR me, not to me because it truly unfolded exactly the way the universe would have it. It was supposed to happen exactly the way it did. As she was sharing her story with me, I go so emotional I wanted to cry. It was time for me to come out of hiding and share my story, the story I never wanted to tell. And on this day I did so with tears. I didn’t try to hold them back. I just let them flow because they wanted to be felt. Later when I was sharing my story with my private Facebook community of Women Wanting More I didn’t know how it would unfold. I just knew I needed to do it on a FB live!
We all have a story like this that can bring us to our knees and sobbing on the bathroom floor. So why don’t we share these stories? It seems that it’s more comfortable to just go on with life, and not speak about it. But what we don’t feel, we can not heal. Tara Mohr speaks about this in her writings below. That our tears can take us to the other side….where we can live fully in truth, authenticity, and feel our happiness because we made it to the other side.
What if you were given permission to shed those tears, and grieve your past so you can move into the future with real happiness and joy?
Tears are truly a beautiful expression of soul and self.
Here’s the rest of the story written by Tara Mohr. Lots of love, Shelley
“In this interview with Alanis, one idea, in particular, struck me and called out to me to be written about, and shared with you.
Neufeld says,
“So often, happiness
is on the other side
of tears that have not yet been shed.”
He speaks about the irreducible necessity of “having our tears” – of crying about our losses, about what didn’t go the way we hoped, about the limits we’ve come up against, and been thwarted by. The tears must be shed, he explains to us, so that we find our way from frustration to sadness, to the renewal that comes afterward. And, he offers us this seeming paradox: happiness is on the other side of our tears.
If you aren’t sure how radical that is, just consider how often, when you want greater happiness in some troubled area of your life, you think to yourself, “Okay, the first step is to cry.”
There are so many ways we chase happiness in our culture – the goal setting and health regimes, the seeking for new or different relationships. Of course, some fraction of that is worthy and useful. But much of it – we each know – turns out to be a futile pursuit, a run on a racetrack that takes us right back to where we started.
What I hear in Neufeld’s words is the hint that happiness often doesn’t come out of the discovery or achievement of some next thing. It lies on the other side of the tears we need to shed about things that have already occurred. It comes out of going into our grief to complete what has unfolded so that there is truly room for “next.”
Most of us are taught that tears are to be gotten done with as quickly as possible, or not shed at all, so we all carry ungrieved losses around with us.
If you feel like you’re futilely trying to change something, if it feels sometimes like you are trying to slap pretty wallpaper over a decaying wall, perhaps it’s time to take a break from the striving and looking forward – and instead, look inward at the disappointments, and allow the yet uncried tears to come out. What if we could let go of our fear that’s a bottomless well and trust there’s a finite and restorative process waiting for us there?
It is impossible – gloriously impossible – to know what you will find on the other side of your tears.
Love, Tara Mohr”
PS If you are ready to gain clarity, and experience freedom in your life, let’s discover what’s holding you back. You can jump on a free clarity coaching call with me using this link: https://smarenka.as.me/schedule.php
