An Essay A Day For A Year
By Roe
Day 50, February 19, 2012
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If the sky rained human tears would we all become healed? After all, they say that tears are healing. I guess not, it would just contribute to the world’s seas rising. Over the years I have been learning a lot about tears. I have re learned that tears are a release and healing mechanism of the heart, and the way that we show and process pain. I say re learn since I was a pro at it as a baby and child, before it freaked out all the messed up adults around me that were uncomfortable with my tears. I have also experienced and witnessed countless times how tears can actually work in reverse, and become defensive. Tears can keep us from healing. It is a cliché that boys don’t cry, and an erroneous one. Little, healthy, sensitive boys cry far more and more often than little girls. But little boys are ridiculed and rejected for crying, and so they instead learn to cry with anger. A knuckle sandwich or roundhouse kick are defensive tears that are spewing out violently, and also to avoid real crying. Girls are more accepted with their tears, and these tears are hoped to be releasing and healing, but might in fact also be knuckle sandwiches and roundhouse kicks.
How does one know if tears are healing, or a maintenance, or defensive? The answer to that can only be felt by the tearer, for spectators know not of the heart of another or their pain. First things first: Crying is absolutely normal, essential, and critical. A person who cries easily and often and productively lives as a clear bottle of pure water. A person who cannot cry, or cries in maintenance or defense, is a bottle of charged seltzer water or champagne. When the cork pops off of our ability to contain our pain for a healthily crying person, it pops off gracefully and effectively. For those who cannot cry or fear their tears, the cork shoots across the room, seemingly as if it is going to destroy something or put us at risk. We are all full of pressure that crying is designed to release.
Crying is as natural and necessary as breathing, sleeping, eating, drinking, and evacuating what we eat and drink. Crying is the verb, and grief and sorrow are the feeling nouns that crying service. Crying is an action word, while being very sad or hurt, or in grief, is a state of being. It is possible to grieve and be in sorrow and pain without crying, but the action of processing grief and sorrow, even without tears, is crying. The action of crying for the human species is a design for healing, and for releasing pain.
Crying can also be an act of maintenance, where once the pre set limit of pain is reached, like a pressure relief valve, the tear ducts open to let out the pressure connected to the heart. When regular crying is used by the body as a pressure relief valve, pain and upset in the present can be processed by experiencing momentary soothing and assuaging of pain. But maintenance crying does not necessarily heal, as pain held within the system of the present sadness is related to much older and much deeper pain which maintenance never accesses.
Crying that is healing is like working ones way from the trunk of a tree down into the earth, and following the elaborate buried roots from the main stem in sight, down into the invisible ground of the very old tree. Crying that is healing releases pain that is connected to pain, that is connected to pain. When a person grieves or is in mourning, the feeling is felt globally all over the body, with the heart as center, and the eyes as the drain valve for pain. Crying that is healing links the moment with the near past, and deeper it goes until the prototype event of the pain is reached and grieved deep in our childhoods. “You hurt me, or you cheated, or I have lost my love”, are names of feelings that ring at the visible tree trunk, but in fact were first coined and spoken when we were newborns and infants and children.
Crying that is defensive works like anything else that is defensive. One person may have a temper tantrum, another smokes, another runs or jogs, everyone watches TV, most drink alcohol, and on and on and on. Crying can be defensive. Defensive behaviors are used by the body to keep one away from the roots of our tree, and to keep from feeling the pains that are tied to the pains of our present. Many people cry, especially women, not as nature’s natural healing mechanism of grief, but to keep from feeling deeper pains. Many people cry, especially women, not as maintenance to avoid deeper pains, but as a tool to cause one to feel grief as a decoy away from actual grief. Many people cry, especially women, as a tool for cause and effect, from manipulation to threat, to get others to behave or react in a certain way.
When one cries deeply and effectively back in time and importance, and when one cries effectively and completely, the pain is felt and integrated, and the person emerges shifted and changed. Whatever was hurting or upsetting in the present no longer feels or hurts the same after an effective healing cry. When crying is a maintenance, the cry will be repeated in a myriad of different manners forever, and the source never actually grieved. When crying is defensive the tears actually prevent healing or reaching the pain driving the malaise, no different than any other defensive behavioral pattern.
Natural and healing crying that processes and integrates pain into the whole body system creates growth and change and evolves the self. When we cry effectively we move up and on and out towards our life and reclaiming who we are and were meant to be. Maintenance crying allows us to cope, and we remain who we are, where we are, when we are, in a stasis of keeping things in order. Defensive crying freezes the self in pain, no different than substance addiction or workaholism, or any other compulsive behavioral act.
Crying about starving babies in Africa and the cutting of trees, and the poor people out there without homes, may be a compassionate act of self that follows on a healthy self properly grieved. But nothing can heal the starvation of our own child’s heart and the cutting of our hopes, or the homelessness of our hearts that long for Love, except crying about the truth. Only crying directly about our own starvation and cuts and emptiness of our childhoods can heal us. Crying about everyone else can in fact hide from us that we are suffering and need to cry, and we can cry about anything and everything, rather than admit the truth to ourselves that we need to cry into our past.
If the sky rains tears, let them be real tears about the truth of our missing selves, buried somewhere down there in the earth of our past, where children can still cry and grieve.
See you tomorrow.
yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com
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