DailyJim: We are either crying or we are dying

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Monday, August 19th, 2024. Today I want to talk about a topic that I'm calling, we are either crying or we are dying.

So this one may be a little more morbid, a little more intense and heavy than you may expect, or maybe more than I expect. So I didn't see my mom cry very often. I'm not sure if anyone in my family or in her life saw her cry very often and after she passed away it's something i reflected on a lot i've spent the last 10 12 years focused specifically on the expression of emotion, and i wondered how much did she suppress especially how much sadness how much pain.

And not this is not to blame her in whatsoever a way it's to just try to understand what are the impacts of trying to be really strong what are the impacts of trying to hold it all together what are the impacts of pretending that we're not feeling pain on the inside or, fighting to get through it instead of just recognizing it. And again, this isn't specifically about my mom. It's about how I've met so many people in my life, and I've been to so many different cultures around the world where crying seems to be very taboo, and maybe not even very taboo, but almost forbidden. So taboo that we're not allowed to do it at all. And i think we assume it's like okay men are not supposed to cry but i think it also applies to a lot of women a lot of women um i think.

I think we hold so much pain in that it comes out in really strange ways. When I did a project in Germany, it was Make Music Not War last year, there was a participant who comes from Ukraine, but the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine, and he said that when we don't express how we're feeling, often it can come out in very violent ways. And I think when we don't express our sadness, especially through crying, it can come out in very violent ways. We can turn the sadness into anger very quickly, and the pain that we feel, we can try to make other people feel. And instead of making them feel the sadness and the pain by crying and showing them the pain, we often try to pretend it's not there, go into anger, and do something to intentionally hurt that person. Or maybe it's not even intentional, maybe it's a reflex. flex. But to bring that other person into the state of pain that we're in without realizing we could just cry to do that. Now, I think for many of us, the danger in crying is that we lose control. We just melt. I took this ALBA training before, and I've got an episode with Nancy Lloyds talking about it. And we would go through level one, two, three, four, five of sadness and level five of sadness was literally on the floor bawling in a fetal position and.

How many of us have been in that position and for how you know how long has it been since we've cried that hard and how long has it been since we've cried that hard in front of somebody else i think sometimes we're afraid that if we cry we let go we turn into a mush and we actually get closer to other people.

And I think sometimes we just don't understand that we're crying because we lost somebody we really cared about or we lost something that we really cared about. We're crying because of a loss of some deep connection that we had. And I think we're afraid that if we cry, we're going to form another deep connection. And then that deep connection will eventually disappear. We will lose it and then we will cry even harder or we'll become even more inconsolable, inconsolable, we'll become even more of a pile of goo and just, if we're lucky, stay alive or thinking that the tears, associating the tears with suicidal thoughts or associating the tears with hopelessness and wanting to give up on life.

And I think we have it wrong. I don't think that's how it is. I think when we actually cry, when we actually go through the tears, we come out of it. When we don't cry, the pain festers, the pain compounds, and the sadness doesn't get out. There's some research talking about, they said there's three types of tears. Two of them are basically to clear the eyes if something gets in the eyes. And the third they call emotional tears. But this idea that they they believe that when we cry those emotional tears uh i think they it either triggers certain hormones to happen in the body or even certain hormones are released through the tears so a cleansing in a way a literal um excretion of things just like sweating just like urination getting things out of the body breathing in x inhale exhale again putting things out of the body. And I think we just don't recognize the importance of this. I think many of us are just terrified. What did somebody tell me once? I heard somebody said they were afraid to cry because they didn't know if they would ever stop. But again, if anyone has ever done this class, you'll realize it's very hard to cry for too long. The body gets exhausted and we typically typically want to sleep. And when we sleep, we sleep very deep sleep very often, I would say. Or we go through the sadness, we cry, we cry really hard, and then somebody will tell a joke and we laugh so hard. It can unleash, it can release the body so much. I remember I was at the Save a Warrior program and I was a witness and I put that in air quotes you can't see. But so I went through the program as well and when I showed up I was I think the only non-military or non-paramedic firefighter that was there and so many people had beanies on their eyes were super closed off and by the end of the week and through so much of the crying that happened, people's eyes opened up people's eyes were twice the size and their smiles went from ear to ear and they didn't have a beanie and some people started shaving, they started showing their face. Such a dramatic change, just I believe, I think one of the main triggers was just giving people a space to cry, to grieve the things that we have lost over the years, whether that's a person, whether that's innocence, whether that's a certain idea about ourselves. And to.

Get back to feeling. Now the challenge is if we cry again, we start to maybe develop deeper relationships with other people. But isn't that the same opportunity? Eventually, we're going to lose everyone and everything in this life. I mean, unless speaking from a non-religious perspective, at least in this life that when we are alive on this planet, we will lose everything. thing.

Or they lose us before we lose them. And so there's just sadness is a part of the human experience. Crying is a huge part of the human experience. And I do not know why we deny it so much. The impact it has on the body, the impact it has on relationships, the impact it has on productivity or whatever you want to talk about. The way that suppressing the tears can really just shut down so many things. And I think to an extent it could really shut us down all to the way where we start dying on the inside if we don't start dying physically. We start dying emotionally, spiritually, or whatnot. And I'm just so tired of seeing people in my life hold back the tears and telling me to hold back the tears. Maybe it comes from when we see little kids and they're crying and we don't know why they're crying. They're just crying and crying and we feel so helpless. We don't know what to do. How do we help the little child that is crying and doesn't give us any clue as to why they're crying?

I think we feel overwhelmed and we tell them to stop crying. And then I think we carry these behaviors into adulthood and I think we ignore the pain that we feel on the inside. We don't show people that we're struggling so we don't get help. We might have cancer and we don't tell the hospital docs. We don't tell our family members. I've heard of some people who've got to stage four cancer before they told their children that they had cancer.

How many people are driven to drugs and alcohol and other types of addiction because we just won't cry?

I'm tired of this shit. It makes me really sad, but it also makes me really angry because we got into this, but we can damn well get out of it. And I really hope that we start to reevaluate the importance of crying and that we have the damn courage to cry, even if people are telling us to stop crying, because somebody's got to start this. Somebody's got to change the way we do this because I really think it's slowly killing us. We just went through a pandemic and how many people are crying about the pandemic? We're probably still in the pandemic. How many people have cried about all the people who died and all the people who lost their jobs and all the people whose lives were fundamentally changed, relationships that broke, societies that toppled and flipped upside down.

I just i just hope one day we start crying more because i'm tired of all the dying eventually we're all gonna die but can we at least try to live a little more, so anyways um i hope you appreciate this is probably a really long episode today oh only 10 minutes not so bad but uh yeah i hope you appreciate this i would love to hear your comments join the gym and friends forum i'd love to hear your comments there reach out to me talk with your friends about this just i hope this inspires a conversation, because i really think we need to start talking about this all right thank you all bye.