its the early hours of the morning and your partner and all your friends are asleep, and you need a darn good cry, or you didnt know you needed one but a sad news story caught your eye (with me that would be the one about the dog who waited by his dead master for x number of days..you get the idea!) and you read it, and you cried and you followed more links and found more tears to shed, and suddenly you felt, well if not better maybe less uptight than you were before.

Sorry just passing through and thought I’d add my twopennorth worth

Just read your break-up story. Like what you said “but I knew that first and foremost I had to take care of me. ” Yup. We all do. Only then can we experience our full place in the universe – and as a result truly help others. It’s something I’m still working on. (-;

and funny… just read your boyfriend story.. I wrote a similar one this week too!!!!!!

Slight tangent…you remind me of a break-up many years ago with someone I was madly in love with. It was a hard one for both of us, and during that talk we laughed and cried for hours together. I thought it went so well…in fact, I felt great for a week or two. But then I found myself depressed and also developed horrible physical symptoms that went on for many months. Finally found a marvelous therapist who helped me understand that my reactions – including the tears – were about a lot more than the break-up. So often the case. She helped me link the tears to what was really going on and the symptoms disappeared. It wasn’t about Paul so much after all. But the tears had to come out regardless.

I feel better after a good cry. I feel it’s a way of purging all the stuff that gets bottled up in daily life (note: I’m a notorious Bottler of Feelings, not a good habit). When I was in grad school I found myself crying hysterically at movies and commercials; during finals week I watched “A.I.”, that movie about the robot-boy who wants to become real, and on went the waterworks for about an hour. I’d even seen it before and not cried at all the first time. But with all the stress from school and life, the tears were already waiting in line.

I read somewhere tears actually have healing properties; they are salty, and salt water is used to fight infection, yes?

I find it’s easier to laugh after I cry. Sometimes I do both at once.

Hmmm…I see in my question that I am giving myself way too much pressure by setting impossible expectations – and by worrying too much about how it all looks to others on the outside. True…society – and often friends – really want us to gloss over the pain and get that smile back in place. But we certainly shouldn’t shove the feelings down so deep it gets stuck. I agree that it must come into the light so we can deal with it.

But we don’t have to make it who we are. If we can find and nurture that solid center of peaceful harmony within us, the pain, frustration, anger, etc. only passes through. We can acknowledge and examine it…and then let it move on. And we also have to honor that some pain – such as the loss of a loved one – never leaves. We just learn how to live with it and even make friends with it so that it morphs into something gentler, such as linking the loss of a loved one to sweet memories.

Only by confronting what we really think and really feel can we know who we really are.

If we ignore the sadness and pain… the real deep sadness and pain, it doesn’t simply go away… it lodges in our bodies and our spirits.. and it will come out, be it in subconscious punishments (like never succeeding where you were born to succeed or never allowing ourselves to have the relationship we yearn for) or physically…. or in a myriad of ways.

As socrates said… a life unexamined is a life not worth living.

As Deepak Chopra said on Bill Maher two weeks ago (in response to “the Secret” and I paraphrase) it is very stressful to be positive all the time. When will people understand that there is great spirituality in feeling all of our feelings.

I deeply believe that the truth of our feelings.. no matter how ugly or scary or uncomfortable at the time… will always lead us to the light.

Great soul wrenching cries, loud music, nonstop unedited writing and large pieces of paper with messy charcoals go great together. And listen, a reward of chocolate after a good cry is also worth the cry.

Seriously, in many ways, how could you stop crying?

I know I have read articles and thoughts and news on why we must stop crying, with the tragedies in the world, as you say Ronnie, we would never stop and become incapacited and then not be able to help anyone.

Maybe first though, we must help ourselves, and be true to our grief or any emotion that provokes our tears, and then when the tears decide they need to go cool their feet and replenish, maybe, just maybe, we feel slightly better and give something in the moments in between we could not give if we had not cleansed ourselves with tears.

The measure of tears has no universal value, it is singular, personal and not to be judged.