There’s something strange about feeling sad in the summer. Everything is bright and full of light - and yet perhaps the still heat and slowness draws us more inward, to what is underneath the surface.
This past week I have been feeling a lot of sadness and grief, and also very much resisting it. I was trying to get back to how I felt a few weeks ago - juicy and alive and full of subtle contentment.
However, the more I was resisting this feeling, the more I was struggling and feeling trapped in it, and then there was the struggle on top of the sadness. Not so fun.
Eventually I started to remember one of the first things I learned in somatics:
The body’s experience is never wrong.
Sometimes the first step to feeling better is lovingly embracing and being with how shitty we actually feel.
After attuning to a sense of stability in my surroundings (a helpful process to anchor in before going into something hard so as to not overwhelm the nervous system,) I just began to gently turn towards the sadness.
I sat with it and allowed it to be there. And underneath that I felt a strong surge of power.
I remembered - oh right. Being sad is one of my powers - it connects me to a sense of feeling and caring and grief and tenderness for the world.
Simone Seol, one of my big inspirations, once talked about “feel good facism” - as this societal thing where somehow you’re “failing” if you don’t feel good all the time.
It’s weird how much this can get internalized EVEN if like me you have spent a lot of time diving in the depths of your poetic emotional nature.
I genuinely think that sad people have A LOT to offer the world. If you’re like me, you may also need tools to not get totally lost in it (hence so much of the somatic experiencing work I do)
But it’s not about getting rid of the sadness.
The maturation is the learning to be WITH the sadness and to also cultivate a resilient container to hold it, so we don’t drown in it but instead maybe we learn to make art and love even more deeply.
Ooh I love this for the world.
So if you’re having some summer sadness, I hope you know you’re not alone. And I hope sharing this little journey inspires you to relate to it a little more, or not!
If you’d like some somatic support in this terrain, I’m still offering 1:1 somatic hour long sessions for a discounted rate while I’m in my training. You can reach out to me to book.