Accepting Our Sadness/Melancholy

Just wanted to share a couple youtube clips I find myself feeling passionately in agreement with. Maybe a conversation about our experiences with sadness below would be nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaZ1EmPOE_k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c

I, like I'm sure a lot of you, have had (and will again have) our times of feeling like poop... but I think between our social conditioning and just the discomfort of the feeling tends to make it difficult for us to just let us accept the feeling for what it is, and for what value it can have. I wonder if this difficulty we have of accepting it makes us behave in ways that involve disconnection from other people including one's self (beating one's self up concerning the feeling or what is behind it), and other things.

How can we learn to accept our own feelings of melancholy when it hits us?

Do you tend to have difficulty dealing with this? What do you do about it?

My mom actually had the best answer I recall.

"Sometimes I just need a night to myself to cry."

I had accidently stumbled in on my mother crying while watching Titanic. It's one of her favorite movies and she was always crying watching it. I never understood as a kid... But at some point just before Highschool I went with a friend to watch "Ever After" and I cried....I cried alot. It's not really a good cry movie like Titanic is...but the waterworks were turned on and refused to stop flowing. Afterwards...I felt really good. Relieved. Invigerated and very happy.

Later in life I discovered other magical moments that involved crying for the sake of crying. For the sake of being sad. The sake of Grieving. The sake of letting those emotions free. It was the goal....To go into yourself and let it go.

Its an important part of life

Sometimes it will hit me like running into a brick wall. I'll be stuck just dwelling on the reason for the feeling, I usually just try to identify and understand what made me feel this way and why, even then it can persist. A lot of it usually comes about when I'm bored not doing anything constructive, because I like to think about life's ups and downs. I will typically focus on the lesson I can learn from whatever made me feel down, then I am reminded of Batman and go from there. :laugh: :laugh:

Thanks for starting this. I loved the Louis C.K video. As part of the conversation, I'd like to share that I find myself often going out of my way almost automatically to avoid feeling sad or malancholy. And that sorta numbs and stretches out the feeling in time and so I live in discomfort for a while until in some way or another it passes.

However, on a rare occasion I do let myself be sad- one time I decided to write how I felt and I really connected with being sad and cried for a moment. And truth be told, I did feel a bit better afterwards. It is something good to do- connecting with your feelings, sad or otherwise, and letting them happen rather than fight against it and say 'I MUST be this or I shouldn't feel like this'. It sorta avoids reality and that doesn't make for a very fufilled life...

Anyway, thanks alot for starting this mate,