Sometimes my clients transcribe our conversations when reviewing their recordings of them. It’s a great practice that deepens learning.

Last week an entrepreneur I work with shared his transcription of our dialogue. It sparked me to write a bit here about the topic we were Creating around: Sadness.

I’ve been listening to sad music lately.

I just love it. I love feeling sad.

In fact, I often listen to sad music when I write because I feel it deepens the power and impact of my writing.

At the same time, I am also the happiest guy I know. In fact, I even have a flag with a smiley face flying on the front of my house. (This is both a description and a creation which you can read more about here and watch a video about here).

To me, these are not in conflict.

I am such a champion for sadness because I think it’s as real as happiness. And I am a champion for being real.

In the following transcription of my parts of the dialogue with my client, you may see what I mean when I say that I can be both sad and happy at the same time.

 

“You are smiling as you talk about it, which is interesting. Because you’re not smiling on the inside. So can you feel that? Just the distance between the smile that you are speaking and the feeling you are having?

The only reason that you can ever hurt is because you love. The only reason you can ever feel sad is because you love.

If you’re feeling sadness, you’re feeling the backside of the same coin, you’re feeling love.

Feeling really, really sad is loving really really deeply.

Joseph Campbell famously said, ’The cave you fear to enter holds all the treasure you seek.’

And I think it’s important to remember that the treasure is not at the front of the cave. It is at the end.

You have to go all the way in, all the way through. It is dark until you reach the treasure.

Slow down to speed up. Everything that love could build, that it could create, will happen so much faster by slowing down to feel sadness.

In fact, the amount of love you come into contact with through slowing down to feel sadness is exponentially greater than love you find by reflecting from a place of never touching sadness.

You have sadness as very distinct from happiness and love. Sadness is the box you don’t want. Love is the box you do want.

I’m not trying to say that the sadness box is as good as the love box. What I’m trying to say is that they are actually the same box.

Are you open to the possibility that the experience of sadness as unenjoyable could go away? That you could actually enjoy feeling sad?

That you may enjoy feeling sad as much as what, right now, you may call love?

My offer to you is that sadness does not negate peace. Sadness is not necessarily the same as unease.

There is a possibility that you could be at peace while feeling sad. You could be sad without unease.

Unease – and lack of peace – might actually be the resistance to something you’re feeling. A primary experience.

Maybe unease is your relationship to what you’re feeling and not the feeling. A secondary experience.

My offer to you is that everything you want lives in sadness as much as it lives in love. And you can go and get it in both places.

And the more you do that, the more you realize that THEY ARE THE SAME PLACE.“

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Can you see or feel how touching sadness enables you to love more deeply?

If yes, where could feeling more sadness liberate more of your power to create?

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Explore this and so much more through dialogue with us in Creators Class.