It's Ok to Cry

There was once a great and wise Zen master who taught his students about life and death, truth and illusion. His students hung on every word. One day the master's son died. The students came to the master and found him weeping. One of the students said, "But master, why are you crying? You told us that death is only an illusion" The master looked up, his tears still streaming down his cheeks and replied, "I am crying because I am sad."

I am a grown man and sometimes I cry.

I remember a time when I was with a man, and he was trying his best not to cry like a baby, and I just leaned over to him, and said, “You don’t have to be strong; it’s okay to feel this pain.” And then he fell apart. He told me later, “thank you,” and how much it helped and how good it felt to let it out.

Life isn’t always butterflies and roses. Sometimes there will be death and thorns, and those have their place. We should not try to deny it. It is not comfortable dealing with grief and our sorrows and our disappointments. It is sometimes the hardest thing we are called upon to do. It seems like we are not called to be comfortable.

There are many things that come up that make us sad. I could make a list and you could too, of losses that affect us deeply. We usually apply the idea of grieving only to the idea of recovering from the death of someone close to us. But, grieving has many applications. We lose our health, our strength and vitality of our youth. We lose our jobs, our income, our source of security. We lose our innocence, experiencing all the evil and meanness in the world around us. We lose friends. And it hurts. Sometimes it is devastating. And all you can do is cry. Sometimes we need time to grieve.

It is right to grieve our losses, to mourn the space they once occupied, the emptiness inside. It is also right to celebrate the love they gave. To deny yourself time to grieve is to deny yourself the chance to heal. You can try to suppress it, and swallow it, try to ignore it or cover it up, but until you properly grieve, it will still be there, somewhere inside, like a cancer. The old saying ‘time heals everything”…not so true. Time, along with proper grieving, changes the depth of the hurt. I would encourage you to stay honest with yourself and your emotions by allowing them an outlet.

Eventually you come to a point where you can talk about your loss. You can step into your pain and talk about the heart breaking, the soul aching and the flesh wanting. And when you do, you will feel the pain releasing. As you lose the pain, you gain strength. You reach a point of strength that once you thought you would never have again, where you can remember the source of the pain and not experience the pain. You can celebrate the memories and remember the joys and the good times. Finally, again you can smile.

A four year old boy had a neighbor, an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went and climbed into the man’s lap and just sat there. When his mother asked what he had said to his neighbor, the little boy said, “Nothing, I just helped him cry.”

Wishing you the best....Ric