The Sad Dance

When life feels like a sad song, learn to dance with it. Your body knows the steps.

Sadness has colored my experience lately. A couple weeks ago, a stark transition happened in my life. I had momentum going one way, then a brick wall stood up before me and knocked me down. It hurt, and I am sad about it.

I’m grieving the the loss of where the momentum was leading me. I feel a familiar tricked feeling that can creep into my awareness. I am noting where I feel sadness in my body and the vices I rely on to escape the pain.

As my awareness becomes more and more lucid, I am then able to exercise my choice. I may choose to talk about the sadness; just watch it, feel it, move it, sit with it, sound it out, write about it, or even put it away for now. So I’ve been exercising my choice of what to do with my sadness.

“The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21)

Gestalt literature suggests that the whole is greater than the sum of our parts. Any denial of aspects of ourselves keeps us stuck in who we are not. When I feel the urge to deny the sadness that creeps in to my awareness, I seek to notice that denial. Because in the end, awareness is the key to the kingdom that gives me more autonomy over my internal landscape.

I started a grieving practice a couple years ago. At first, I didn’t know how to give myself permission to really feel the grief. After a few years of steady practice, I can be much more efficient with it now. I can feel incredibly sad one day, crippled in my bed, just allowing it to consume me, and the next day feel the joy behind that sadness like the clearing after the storm. All along, my sadness has been asking me to feel it so I can see what’s next. What’s behind it. What has not been felt yet, that needs to be felt for me to move on.

The body knows the way

While my western mind is enamored by the efficiency, I am also aware that I can’t “efficient away” my sadness. It is a cyclical emotion that will always be with me. I can’t kill it, but I can dance with it. And how I dance with it is my choice. Right now, I am slow dancing with my sadness. I am leaning on it, limp. Moaning sobs of relief. That is the mental image (a gestalt point of awareness) of my expression.

I leave the dance floor from time to time to honor the modulation of my internal agency that asks for a break. I will come back to that dance floor willingly until my sadness leaves the floor and I can switch the track and get on with the joy that is my birthright. Sadness is a portal to peace.

I will step through it on my way to the new momentum that is already creeping in as my body shows me the way.

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I am a certified Gestalt facilitator. I invite you to try this awareness practice.