The Arc of Tearfulness

Crying is the primary doorway to transformation. Someone who cannot cry will never grow into maturity.

Resting into grief and tearfulness wasn’t modelled well for me in my family. My parents were both sent to boarding schools when they were just 8 years old, and I can imagine that that contributed greatly to them closing down their more tender and vulnerable feelings. To this day, I can only ever remember my father crying once, when his mother died. I can recall my mother crying a few times in moments when she was moved, but never from surrendering to an ache of sorrow.

As a baby, I’m told that I cried a lot. The doctor said it was colic. Today this makes sense to me in the greater context of how much grief both my parents were repressing. The accumulated pain that they refused to feel came spilling out through me.

It wasn’t until my 20’s when I started going to personal growth workshops that I began to learn how to let go emotionally. I saw others around me crying freely in front of the group and slowly began opening to be able to do the same. Being witnessed by others was very difficult in the beginning so I challenged myself to be more public with the authenticity of my feelings. If I became tearful in a café with friends, I practiced staying faithful to my feelings and cried no matter who might have been looking at me. If I became tearful around someone who was obviously very uncomfortable with my emotion, I would practice pushing their feelings into the background so that I could honour my own process uninterrupted. In time, I even learned to remain so present to my own experience that I could simultaneously coach someone else through their discomfort with what I was expressing.

The more we cry, the easier it gets. When we’re not practiced at it, there can be a lot of tension. When there’s been so much conditioning against it, and a huge backlog that’s gone unexpressed, there can be quite a lot of friction in surrendering to allow it. In the beginning we can get quite red-faced with the tension and become even more self conscious because of how we look. But the more we allow our grief to flow freely, the greater relaxation we can experience in the release. When we learn how to go with the flow, instead of fighting it, falling into tears can bring such welcome relief.

In nurturing this expression of grief, there’s a simultaneous opening that occurs at the other end of the emotional spectrum. There’s much more room for bursts of joy when we’re not congested with unresolved sorrows. Tearfulness can emerge much more readily in very sweet and tender moments when we’re deeply touched or moved. This is the very best kind of crying. Uplifting. Soft and deeply heartfelt.

I have so comprehensively cried to release the backlog of grief from my entire lifetime that now I’m free to cry only in response to breathtaking expansions. On a number of occasions, I’ve stepped into the kitchen to prepare some food and burst into tears out of nowhere. It’s such a sweet and precious feeling. I usually go to collapse on my bed to surrender all the way into the overwhelming swell of how happy, or blessed I’m feeling in that moment for no reason whatsoever.