Sadness is the Soul’s Way of Saying, “This Matters.”

a somatic practice to hear + honor the sadness inside you

Hello friends,

I have a post on the way for you paid subscribers (on my recent national parks trip and healing from sexual abuse), but I am practicing what I preach and giving myself space to share it on a day I feel stronger. Sensitive content like that deserves all the space. Instead, I’m hooked up to an IV¹ typing up a smaller, yet equally important, slice of my current story and one somatic practice to honor the sadness inside you.

CW: medical trauma

Sadness is the soul’s way of saying, “This matters.”

I first wrote that line a few years ago, when our friends Josh and Rachel moved away from Colorado to Arkansas. I had felt deep sadness for two weeks straight, and being able to articulate that my sadness was a way of honoring how much they mean to me gave me grace to befriend my sadness rather than fighting it.

Seeing sadness as my soul’s sacred speech has shifted how I see myself on shadowed days. I am not a problem to solve. And my sadness isn’t either.

Your sadness isn’t something to solve.

Your sadness is something to hear.

Sometimes I still treat sadness like something to fight or flee. Sometimes my reflex is still resistance. I feel like I have too many good things to do and see to stop to sit with my sadness. It’s so damn inconvenient to be a human with a heart that hurts, right?

Sadness can feel like being sidelined. We’re benched by our brokenness while others get to carry on scoring goals.²

Pain is a paradox. We fear it will pull us down to a place we can’t escape. So we shove it to the side out of fear of getting stuck, when really it’s our resistance that shackles us to shame…and more pain.

(Sadness, I hope you know, is a shade of pain.)³

Pain is a pause. Pain invites us to be fully human—to be more than producers and pleasers. Pain prompts us to pause our productivity and people-pleasing to perceive the still-sidelined and scared parts of ourselves that deserve honor and grace.

a photo from this week’s sunset walk into witnessing my own sadness

The aim of pain is your full and flourishing personhood.

I’m typing this from my infusion chair, carefully stretching out my arms to type so my catheter won’t get occluded and beep for the tenth time this morning. Thousands of healthy donors’ antibodies⁴ are making their way through my veins into invisible broken places in my body.