How to Sit With Sadness

Sadness, when it arrives, is usually unwelcome. We have been taught to treat it as a problem — to push through, to keep busy, to "stay strong". The result is sadness that has nowhere to go, so it stays. Often for years.

There is another way. You can let the sadness be felt. Not endlessly. Not dramatically. Just for ten minutes, with attention, in a chair.

The practice

Find somewhere private. A chair, a couch, the floor of a bedroom.

Sit comfortably. Take three slow breaths.

Bring to mind whatever the sadness is about. The person you lost. The thing that ended. The disappointment you have been carrying. Don't dwell on the story. Just let the feeling come into the body.

Notice where you feel it. The chest, almost always. Sometimes the throat. Sometimes the stomach.

Place a hand, lightly, on that place. The way you would on a child who had been crying.

Then, silently, say:

I am here. You are allowed to be felt. I will not leave until you have been heard.

Stay there. Don't try to fix anything. Don't try to make the sadness leave. Don't try to think your way to a resolution. Just sit. Breathe. Feel.

If tears come, let them. If they don't, that's also fine. The point is not catharsis. The point is companionship — being present at your own grief, instead of routing around it.

After a few minutes, the sadness usually softens. Not because it is over. Because someone — you — finally sat down with it.

End with three slow breaths. Stand up.

Why this works

The mind tries to think its way out of feelings. This almost never works for sadness. Sadness is in the body, not the head. Thinking about a sad situation is not the same as letting yourself feel sad. They use different muscles.

What sadness wants, most of the time, is acknowledgement. It wants someone to know it is here. When you give it that — by sitting with it for ten minutes — it does not have to keep tugging at your sleeve all day.

The unfelt sadness does not disappear. It just goes underground, where it leaks into other things — into a sharpness with the people you love, a heaviness in the morning, an inability to be moved by anything.

A small note

This is not therapy. If the sadness is large — grief, depression, the kind that does not lift — please find a person to sit with you, professionally. This practice is meant for the ordinary sadness of ordinary weeks: a friend disappointed you, a small loss, a tender weight that has been on your shoulders.

That sadness, sat with for ten minutes, will quiet considerably.

Try it tonight if a difficult feeling has been with you all day.

You may, at the end, find a small sentence has arrived: I am okay. I am sad. Both of these are true.

That sentence is the practice working.