I made the difficult decision yesterday that it is time to help my dear Sukha cross the rainbow bridge. So, I took yesterday to let myself be sad and just grieve. In my years of study of shamanism, I learned the deep value of grief ritual as a way to process the feels and move on in a healthy way. I facilitated many grief rituals for various communities and small groups. I have supported families through hospice and the dying process, and provided guided meditations for funerals. I'll share those processes in another post after Sukha's crossing.
What's particularly hard about this grief is that I have no tears. You see, I lost my tears some five years ago or so. Honestly, I think they just all dried up after a long stretch of crying too much after my divorce. I always wondered if my well has just completely dried up, and I figured that if they did return, it would probably happen when Sukha dies. So far, not so much.
As an HSP and Empath, living without tears is in some ways MORE painful than living with them. We empaths cry easily (or I used to). For me, without tears, I get all the other signs of crying. I get the familiar knot in my throat, the emptiness in my heart, the vacuum of my breath. I even get a little wetness in my eyes, but never enough to drip more than a tiny one-drop trickle down my face. The full-on blubbering I once knew hasn't happened in nearly have a decade, if not more. Instead, I get this burning down the inside of my cheeks. Like the tears are flowing rivers of lava down the inside of my skull, from my tear ducts, through my nasal passage, to the back of my throat, landing in a bubbling lava puddle that is the knot in my throat.
Yesterday I sat with that burning all day long. I went to bed feeling like the inside of my face was charred to an acid crisp.
I caution you, dear empaths, to never curse your tears. Once upon a time, when I was crying a lot, too much, I begged them to leave me. I cursed them. And they did. And now I miss them. I miss them terribly. Tears are your blessings. You need them. They serve you, and they serve you well! There is a sacredness in tears. They are the rawest physical expression of the deepest of human emotions. Our tears are our body's way of getting rid of stress and pain. Emotional tears hold the hormones of our painful emotions. It how our body gets that sh*t out! Value them. Respect them. Appreciate them!
Gratefully, I woke up feeling better this morning. While I know Grief will come back to visit me at various unexpected times to remind me of Sukha's essence in my being, I know that Grief always walks hand in hand with Love. Yesterday, I let Grief hold me, and today, I am embraced by Love.
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