About Feeling Sad - The 3 Principles & You [Steve M Nash]

“Sadness Comes, Sadness Goes. Ho!”

Introduction

This page will attempt to help you with questions like: What do I do about feeling sad? What should I think about it, and where has it come from? (Quick answer: sadness is something everyone will experience in life, at some point or other. It seems to be one of the ‘costs’ of living. Learn to be with it, not make it wrong; hey, enjoy it even!…)

Another three minute guide to a common thought/feeling (a la The 3 Principles).

My Thoughts About Feeling Sad

As I say in the video (below) whilst I feel sad every now and then I don’t seem to be able to make sadness happen – unless I really go out of my way to think about something that makes me sad.

Shall I do that now, then? Yes, let’s… So, what makes me feel sad are thoughts like these:

I can think of several romantic relationships that ended that make me feel sad. Doesn’t even matter if they broke up with me, or I broke up with them. The sadness comes from remembering the good times that can be no more

The future can make me sad, too – or rather thoughts of the future. I may never be a father, for example. May never play football with my boy (or my girl) in the park. And may never share happy family moments around the dinner table. Hmm, this has not even happened but I still feed sad at the thought of it.

Ah, childhood… childhood memories can cause sadness to be stirred. The thing that makes me most sad, though, is remembering my younger self – how he struggled to find love, recognition or simple peace of mind. How the world did not make sense to him, and he wanted it to so much… This makes me feel sad for a little boy that had done nothing wrong 🙁

Hmm, not sure I recommend that particular thinking destination – for as much as sadness is just a feeling, it’s one I am still not that comfortable with sometimes.

(But can you see, clearly now, that sadness is a feeling that comes from thinking!…)

About Feeling Sad – The Inside-Out Understanding

Sadness is a feeling. We live in the feeling of our thinking. Sadness is a thought.

So feeling sad is really thinking sad thoughts.

That’s it. Game over. Time to go home.

(Add in awareness for good measure, if you like. So we can always feel sad, it’s just experienced in the moment that we’re aware of our sadness… until it passes, until something else gets our attention.)

So where does the struggle with sadness come from, why do we hide ourselves from this simple experience so? Well, I guess we don’t realise that feeling sad is normal. As normal as thinking is normal. I guess we think we shouldn’t feel sad. Or maybe we do…

Maybe that’s why we like watching sad films, when the tears get to flow, films like The Green Mile, 6th Sense, and Into The Wild to name but a few – it gets us to face our own sadness, perhaps next to others also feeling sad.

Maybe this is our wisdom speaking – a form of listening to ourself?

The thing is, sadness is a beautiful, understated feeling. It throbs inside of us, gently and calmly. Passing through us, almost ghost-like. Hmm, perhaps our sadnesses are simply our ghosts…

Sadness: an awareness of ghostly thoughts from our past/future?

Hmm, despite the poetic licence above, I usually just stick to being with a person’s sadness – treating it as a feeling – in my capacity as transformative coach and human being, and then I get curious about what comes next…