Crying: How It Sucks and Why I Highly Recommend It

I’ve stopped wearing mascara on my lower lashes. It’s become a necessity since I started crying.

All. The. Time.

Seriously though, there are days when I have put on makeup and DURING application, tears would come. I would clean up my face and continue to apply makeup only to walk out of the bathroom and begin crying again. The struggle is real, as they say.

The reaction of most people when they hear I’ve been crying is “Oh my goodness. Are you okay?” or “What is wrong?” or some other words of concern. I SO SO SO appreciate these gestures of compassion and love. Some days they are like air to me as I’m gasping for breath. If you are one of these people, THANK YOU for seeing me <3

I don’t cry EVERY day, but I cry a lot. Lately. Sometimes off and on for an entire day. For a couple months or so…

Why, you ask? Well…

I am currently training to become a Yoga Coach, in the first ever accredited program by Yoga Alliance. This means that I will be a Certified Yoga Instructor who integrates Life Coaching and Yoga together. It’s a brilliant mind-body marriage that creates a powerful medium for healing and forward movement. I am in LOVE with this work!

Part of the curriculum for our training (lovingly designed by my first life coach, Meadow DeVor) is to completely fall apart in your own life! Yeah, I’m not kidding. It sounds harsh but the reality is that learning the work, studying the research, talking about it, practicing it with my cohorts, and living it each day brings up ALL MY OWN SHIT! (It’s not just me. It brings it up for everyone)

This is actually a good thing…in the long run. In the moment it’s happening, it SUCKS!!!

By the way, this is exactly how Martha Beck designs HER Life Coach Training programs, too. I choose the BEST of the BEST to learn from. HA HA HA

The purpose behind this is that in order to take other people to the places necessary to forge growth and healing, we MUST do it first ourselves. I cannot ask my clients to do the really tough work if I haven’t been willing to do it myself. That would be like me teaching you to swim while I sit in a boat watching from a warm dry place (and being a non-swimmer).

What does all this have to do with my crying? SO many things!

I am grieving old pains, losses, unrealized expectations, love and friendships gone wrong, ideas of who I thought I was, regrets and unsatisfied needs. Fear is rising up in me as I plan the next steps of my life, making it up as I go. Guilt, sadness, anger, and all their relatives from joy to despair have been visiting me in their own time. This causes lots of tears to show up. With them comes a clearing, an opening, creating more space inside me where before there was congestion. Each time I cry, I feel a little more has been released and I feel ever so much lighter. This is the process of letting go.

Let me tell you what I’ve learned from crying…

First of all, it is my body’s way of telling me that it is tired of holding all this stuff! It takes an enormous amount of energy to hold on to the things we hold onto. It is far easier to get angry in the moment when the anger shows up than to stuff it for years and allow it to fester. We can all relate to that example. Can’t you…? If we allow that anger to surface, see it’s purpose, use it to better ourselves and move on, that is healthy and helps us learn what we are meant to learn. And ALL emotions have messages for us. If we resist them, we never get the message.

Secondly, crying is good for the body and soul. We are taught in our culture that crying is a sign of weakness. This is NOT TRUE. It takes a lot of courage to allow oneself to give in, break down and really FEEL that sadness, disappointment, fear. Anyone can “suck it up”, pretend all is well and go through the motions of life, emotion-less. I didn’t say it was easy. But we all know how to do it, don’t we? In reality, it is much harder on us in the long run. Stuffing emotion (that would make us cry) keeps us from showing up authentically in our relationships, our work and life in general. We can end up among people who don’t really know who we are or what is inside of us. We may forget how to relate to others or what we even want. That deep connection that we all long for alludes us when we strong arm ourselves out of REALLY feeling things.

Lastly, it is freeing. There is a surrender in the crying. When you really let go and ALLOW the tears to flow, there is freedom in that. There is nothing else to do, no one to impress, no more to resist. It just is what it is. A person, sitting, standing or lying down, releasing emotional energy through and out of the body. In its own way, it is perfection. When it’s over, it’s over. For that time. There is relief, a sense of calm, and a heightened awareness of self. That is my experience.

I am sure there are many more lessons we can learn from crying. That’s what I’ve got for now 😉

More profound is what I’ve learned about myself through this process and by going INTO the emotions rather than running from them. It was scary to go there. I’ll admit that. I tried to hold back the really deep stuff. I worked pretty hard at it before. I told myself I had to “be strong” or that I had to show up looking like I had my shit together. Or I totally ignored it altogether.

Now I am learning to honor the tears, the crying. I welcome it. I’m grateful for it.

IT STILL SUCKS. Yet I know its value. I encourage you to find out for yourself

<3