The Sacredness & Vulnerability of Tears

I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s and not much was understood, taught or accepted around “feeling your feelings”. 

To show your feelings or emotions, especially in public, would mean you were labelled as weak, unstable, over emotional and even…..drum roll please……MAD.

I will never forget watching a movie at school and having an emotional reaction to it and then being ridiculed deeply for it. I was also sent home from school to go and “recover and pull myself together” 

I was deeply ashamed.  That one, on top of many experiences of being told to stop crying as a younger child, taught me that it was totally not safe to feel..full stop. 

So where exactly does emotion go when it is denied, shut down and shamed?  Does it poof into the ethers because you were imprinted to not feel it, see it, express it? 

No….it drops into the body and psyche and festers, becoming an aspect of the dark passenger (to coin Dexter here…I do love Dexter), the unseen self, the hidden, the pain body. It radiates out of your aura and clogs up your heart, numbing you to the magic of existence and the ability to feel joy. 

Literally millions of humans are walking around on this planet shut down, numb, unable to feel and lost. 

It’s an epidemic.

As Empaths, with our sensitised and heightened systems, we have the power to see and feel this suppressed emotion deeply and if not supported and trained how to manage, it gets entangled and meshed up with our own and can cause an enormous amount of suffering. 

Have you ever walked past someone and literally been knocked out by their energy field or spent time talking to someone and come home wiped out for days on end and totally in the dark as to why?  Or felt upset and don’t know how you got that way and are unable to express it? 

Unpicking these entanglements is the first step to Empathic freedom and it starts with finding safe spaces to unfold into.  

To tend to the inner child who doesn’t feel safe to feel and to heal those patterns from your own past.  

An UN-learning and reprogramming of your beliefs and teachings.

Then, to begin to embrace your own emotions and learn how to safely ride them.  

A Re-membering that emotions are “Energy in Motion” and just want to move.

After spending nearly 20 years in the healing fields, women’s temples, circles and leading group spaces, I have been gifted with this powerful reframe.  I now see crying as the beautiful gift that it truly is. The shame is no longer there…..just awe.  There is power there and nothing to fear. 

There is nothing more soul moving and heart opening than the knowledge and experience that crying is the body's way of healing and releasing through water. 

There is nothing more moving and healing than when women cry and weep in unison - collectively it heals us ALL.

Feeling your feelings means you are alive, tuned to the frequency of love, heart open and free and isn’t that a world that’s worth creating? 

I will leave you with a quote from Washington Irving on the sacredness and vulnerability of tears:

“They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. 

They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. 

They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, 

of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”

What safe spaces do you have to feel your feelings?  I’d love to know, dear reader.

With love and grace

Jacquie Eva Rose