DailyJim: Resistance to sadness will kill us all

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, January 28th, 2025. Today's topic, resistance to sadness will kill us all.

It's been a hard couple days personally, but also I would imagine for a lot of people around the world. So just in my personal life, but also seeing what's happening politically, see what's happening with so many decisions made by the U.S. Government and other things, to almost seek vengeance, to almost retaliate, not because it makes sense, but because people feel hurt. Because people feel hurt and then they lash out. I've seen this in my personal life. I've seen this in, again, this political sphere I see as well.

That so many of us have a resistance to sadness. And that even if some of us, or even if many of us are okay feeling sadness, actually embrace the sadness, are grateful for feeling sad, even cry, it may not matter if other people have resistance to feeling sadness.

And what is a way to describe resistance? Okay, this meta-emotional response. So somebody feels sad, and then immediately feels angry that they feel sad. And then often this person will seek vengeance especially if they think you're the one that made them feel sad because they want you to know how it feels they want you to know their pain and so they will go to great lengths often to make you feel that pain but not great enough lengths to tell you that they're in pain it's actually a shortcut an ineffective shortcut to communicate pain to someone else. It's almost if somebody is bleeding and being like, well, instead of telling somebody else that I'm bleeding, let me cut them and make them bleed. Now we have two people who are bleeding. It doesn't help resolve the wound. It just makes two people bleed. And now depending on how that person reacts to pain, maybe they will seek help in resolving the pain and resolving the wound or maybe they'll just slash somebody else. So that's one way I think it will kill us that we just get stuck in the cycle of vengeance because we feel sad, then we feel angry and then we attack other people to make them feel the pain that we think they're not feeling. And this is because we don't feel the sadness. If we feel the sadness, we recognize that other people are feeling sad. We recognize that other people are going through so much shit in their lives that if they're just trying their best to keep their head above water.

How else might resistance to sadness kill us all? Some of us have resistance to sadness by going into fear. So we feel sad, then we feel afraid, and then we run away. And so we fall in love with somebody or we get closer to somebody. And sometimes the sadness comes from just missing somebody that we cared about so much, from feeling so much joy, so much tenderness. And now it scares us because they might go away or they go away and we feel some sadness. And maybe they just go away for a day, maybe they go away for a week, or maybe they just they look the other direction. Then we feel the sadness. We can turn into fear. Now we've run away. Sadness often, I think, tells us that we want closeness. But when we feel sadness and we go into fear, we run away and we create more distance, which can cause more sadness in the other person because the sadness, again, often wants the closeness. We want someone near us. And so we want this intimacy. We want this connection. So when somebody runs away in fear because they feel sad, it creates more sadness on the other side. Again, it's, I don't know what the best analogy is, but it's similar to the bleeding. I feel pain. Instead of telling you I feel pain, I run away, which causes you to feel pain. And now we both feel pain. And depends, again, on how the other person responds to the pain and sadness. If they get angry, maybe they attack you for running away. If they get afraid, maybe they run away as well. And now the distance is even stronger. How else do we have resistance to sadness? Some of us go into laughter. Some of us go into maybe this kind of pseudo joy where we'll tell jokes. It's very common amongst comedians where there's a high amount of depression. I would say rather there's a high amount of sadness that is being masked by joy. And you can tell it in the jokes that they're telling. Sometimes the jokes are very bitter. Sometimes the jokes are again of kind of like joy, but anger. They're cutting, They're roasting. They're really going deep at people. And for me, it's because they're feeling the sadness. But when they transmit the sadness through joy, it can cause even more sadness. How else? Sometimes when we feel sadness, we actually go into like, so I'm just rifling through these different emotional states that they talk about in ALBA, this ALBA method training.

Sometimes when we feel sadness, we go into being horny, actually. We go into another mood of like sexual energy because it is a way to escape the sadness. I don't want to feel the sadness. And so what I'm going to do is go into this other thing that this other feeling that doesn't have to do with the sadness. But the sadness is still there. We can't escape it. It just shows up. It shows up. It transmits anyways. We are communicating it regardless whether we want to or not. And it's okay. It's okay to feel sad. It's okay to not want to lose things. It means we love things. We love people.

It actually brings us closer together.

How else? What other emotions do they have in that class? Fear, sadness, joy, tenderness. Tenderness. When we feel sad and then we go into tenderness, it can actually help.

Because it's, I feel sad, especially when somebody else is feeling that, or even when we're feeling that. If I feel sad and then I go into this state of tenderness where I'm like, oh there there it'll be okay really trying to pay attention in a very soft gentle way and coming closer i think that's what we need we need but to get there we have to feel the sadness, we have to feel the sadness um but also so for me tenderness as a response to sadness is not really a resistance to it it's an acceptance of it it's an embracing of the sadness it's saying whoa you feel really sad because you feel sad i feel sad one of the ways that we can get out of this is to one cry it out together and but two to just be here with you to give you more attention more attention more closeness more connection not running away not pushing the other person away, not laughing it off and pretending it's not a thing not uh going into sexual mode to try to run away, like again, run away. It's, it's kind of a way to run away from it. Um, or it's like, it brings the bodies closer together. Maybe, maybe that's what it is. It brings the bodies closer together, but not necessarily the hearts. Um, tenderness can bring the hearts closer together.

And so maybe what's so it's fear tenderness joy uh erotic uh love uh fear anger yeah i think those are it um and then there's neutral um some of us go into kind of this neutral state where we just kind of seem to disconnect from the world completely we almost seem to be a zombie we just disconnect, we disassociate. We get so overwhelmed with emotions, we just kinda, the sadness is too much that we literally just kinda freeze, almost zombie-like.

But what if we felt the sadness and we went into tenderness? Or what if we just felt the sadness? What if somebody started crying and I started crying with them? And we both started crying because it was a sad moment. What if our leaders actually felt the sadness and embraced the sadness and went into the tenderness, which again is sharing that sadness, kind of being compassionate towards that sadness. What if we went into those states, instead of going into anger and rage and vengeance and bitterness and terror and fear and paralysis and satire and being sardonic and really just going into so many different directions that avoid the feeling of sadness and create more distance in society, more distance in our families and our communities, more distance with our loved ones, more distance with ourselves. Because if there is resistance to this anywhere, even if I feel okay feeling the sadness, if other people don't feel it, then they can launch into the anger. They can launch into the fear. They can launch into these other behaviors that make it really hard to stay in the sadness because the sadness increases and increases and increases and increases.

And then you want to feel sad. And if the capacity is there to feel the sadness, it causes the other person to feel more anger, causes the other person to feel more fear, causes the other person to feel more fake joy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so if there's resistance somewhere in the network, that resistance can spread.

But how do we change it? We have to change it one by one. We got to stand up and say, I don't care. I'm going to cry. I don't care. I'm going to feel sad. I had to fight hard at my mother's funeral. And I don't think it's bad intentions, but a friend of mine told me, hey, just make it lighthearted and make sure you're celebrating her life when I gave a eulogy for my mom. And I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm not allowed to cry when my mom dies? When the hell am I allowed to cry?

I even warned people to step out of the room if it was too much for them.

I've said it before, if we are not crying, we are dying.

And it's almost like if we are all not crying, then we are all dying.

But I don't blame people for being where they are. Culture has passed this down generation to generation. We've told people to not cry. We've told people being sad is wrong. We told them, just pick your head up, move on with life. Hell, we even have religions that tell people they should stop crying after a certain amount of time after a death.

Maybe it's okay to cry. Maybe it's actually really good to cry. Maybe it's really good to feel sad. Maybe it's really healthy to feel sad. And that when we don't feel sad, we are killing ourselves and we're killing the people around us. We're killing the people we love. I was supposed to stop working on this stuff around the time that my mom died because I didn't make the monetary goals that I wanted to do. But it hit me so hard. How many people are dying because they're not crying? My mom rarely cried. My mom rarely cried.

How much resistance did my mom have to smoking? How much resistance, or sorry, resistance that she had to sadness? How much did she use smoking as a crutch to run away from the sadness? How many people use drugs, alcohol, smoking, sex, gambling, work, all these pills, like pharmaceutical pills, all this stuff to run away from sadness. to fight against sadness? What if we just felt the sadness?

What if we just recognize one of the essential components of being a human being and frankly, probably being a mammal or anything on this planet is to feel sad?

What if we had the courage to actually do this? What if we had the strength to do this? How would this world look? How would our lives look? Because if we don't, I am worried that we're going to keep going into deeper and deeper trouble. We're going to have more wars because wars perpetuate sadness. I feel sad, therefore I attack you so you feel sad or I run away from you and then you feel sad. And then we don't want to feel sad, so we're going to make the other person feel sad. And we perpetuate this cycle of sadness without even being aware of it. Or maybe you're aware of it, but we don't have the courage to admit it.

So many people are dying. I have friends in Goma right now in Congo, DRC Congo. She sent me a message, a video of her brother looking at his phone on this beautiful compound with gunfire in the background because rebels have taken over the town and I believe the borders to Rwanda have been closed. And I think Rwandan troops and also Congolese troops and rebels or something are all shooting at each other. Because we don't feel sadness. How many people die from cancer because they feel sad? They don't want to tell anyone they feel sad and they just hold on to that pain. They don't tell anyone, so they don't get treatment. How many people drink themselves to death? How many people commit suicide because of sadness?

Because of unfelt sadness?

So I'm going to keep feeling sad and I'm going to keep loving and I'm going to keep having deep close relationships with people because that's what we're meant to do and it's going to piss off a lot of people and it's going to make a lot of people really afraid and it's going to make a lot of people go into the haha everything's fine joking and lots of other things but, But slowly, slowly, we're going to get there. Slowly, slowly. It's going to be a hell of a fight. But I believe we can get there. I believe we all can get there. And what a glorious day it'll be when we do. Where we can all just hold hands and cry and smile, have tears in our eyes, and give each other really big hugs because we are just so grateful to have each other in our lives.

That's it for today. I'll talk to you all tomorrow.