It is okay to feel sad as it is part of being human, but it does not mean you should let sadness control your life forever. If you let sadness control your life, you will miss every opportunity to be happy.
Feel the pain but don’t mistake it for who you are
I remember talking to a friend of mine who was in a very dark and unhappy place for many months. She told me how during all that time she didn’t take care about anything or anyone. She stopped exercising, meditating, she stopped going out, stopped seeing her friends and family, she stopped taking care of her physical appearance and something that really shocked me, especially because she always described herself as a clean freak, she stopped cleaning her house. Yes! She didn’t feel like doing anything, and later on she realized that because she stopped taking good care of herself, she stayed in that state for way longer than she was supposed to.
You see, this what happens when you allow yourself to identify with the pain you are feeling and become one with it. You forget how to be happy and you allow your mind to trick you into thinking that your life is over just because something bad happened along the way. Pain is just a feeling. it’s not who you are. It’s just something that we all feel from time to time, but not something we should identify ourselves with. So feel the pain, allow it to be there and to teach you what it has to teach you, but never identify yourself with it.
Claim back your personal power
In his audio book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle talk about how powerful our mind is, and how, if we don’t learn to use it, it will start using us: “The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. All the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind…”
Don’t allow your mind to drag into the most painful, dark and cold places by believing every fearful and toxic thought you think. Know that you are in control of your own life, not your mind. Take authority over your thought and feelings and learn to differentiate between the thoughts that are real and the ones that are not.
In the same way you would want the world to love and appreciate you, learn to love and appreciate yourself. Stop bullying yourself. Let go of the need to constantly repeat to yourself that you should be feeling a lot better by now, and that it’s not normal to feel sad for so long, and just be kind to yourself.
Be gentle with yourself. Treat yourself with compassion and instead of complaining about all the things you think you’ve done wrong, appreciate yourself for all the things you did right. Appreciate yourself for your strength, your courage and your resilience. Open your eyes, your heart and your mouth and start appreciating the beauty, the perfection and the splendor of who you.
