Ascension Shenanigans – Episode XVII: A Sad Episode …
my unfinished visual take on “innsaei”
This episode is dedicated to all who have, most likely through trauma, a special relationship to sadness. I am one of you. Born a month early in 1969, when the dominant medical opinion was that the worst thing that could happen to a new born were the unhygienic conditions associated with mothers - fathers were not even under discussion - I spent the first six weeks of my life in a hospital ward with other infants, being fed artificial milk …. Six weeks that shaped much of who I am today. And plenty of opportunity to get acquainted with sadness, a relationship later deepened through living with a parent suffering from depression. Excellent material for a tear jerker, I know.
But this episode was not inspired by my past, but by a music video posted by a dear soul in a group I am in, called “Innsaei”, which is the Islandic word for intuition and literally means “the sea within”. This caused a bit of an epiphany in me.
But before I come to that, I want to make clear that I am very much aware of my special relationship to sadness being based in abandonment trauma. Sadness to me is a kind of safe place, emotionally. It is like the foster parent on whose breast I fed solace when there was none. I am also aware that not everybody is like that. Nevertheless, it has gifted me with a very deep and immensely valuable connection.
It will be easy for you to imagine intuition as a sea, a vast ocean that does not end with individual borders but, in its depth, is a collective creature … Here all memory is stored, human or other. Here all feelings are imprinted till kingdom come, all tears fall into this very ocean, as all tears rise from it. Here you see that the see of intuition and the sea of sadness are very alike.
You would, indeed, most people do think that sadness is a low vibration, and so it can be, particularly when connected to other low vibrational emotions like sorrow, dejection, loss. But sadness actually has the ability to raise itself towards beauty, to be a feeling, which, according to C.G.Jung, is a conscious emotion. Sadness can express itself in song, poetry, painting, and become something exquisitely beautiful. You don’t see that? Then you cannot see something that was more than obvious to my infant self: Sadness can never be alone.
As I lay in my cot with all the other infants left behind without solace or nurture, I breathed in the sadness and desperation that was us. But desperation would have been death and, at least, we had the spirits, the entire universe to look over us, even the dead, sometimes … We were not alone. We had no concept of self and therefore no concept of being alone. We were us, and if something was clearly not right we were waiting through it, together, so many little hearts quietly shining their lights and waiting. Coming and going.
And though sadness was my mother’s milk, it was still nurturing me, because it sprang from the great sea within us all and I was not alone. Nor did I ever understand the aloneness that some people experience in their sadness. I saw it often, but I could not understand it. I saw them locking their sadness in, making it a secret, which it can never be, making it personal, which it never is. I marvelled at the energy they spent on locking their sadness into the prison of their separate self.
My mother could not understand that I, and later we, were feeling the sadness too. That my father was feeling the same sadness, even if he had no name for it. She guarded it almost jealously as the flag of her victimhood. She thought that sadness was something other people made you feel and then that made you right. And that you actually had to go out of your way to make them feel your sadness.
And to this day it baffles me. It even makes me angry sometimes. To see people wallow in their sadness, as if only they could feel it. At how they lash out at any attempt to connect from others. At the entitlement involved, the energy endlessly falling back upon itself. The pain and suffering. Then I draw back and remember that we all have these loops in us, in one way or another. That we all came here to heal them. And I let them be.
Rereading the “Gene Keys” recently, I found much hope and resonance in the fact that Richard Rudd describes suffering as our shared human experience, and much like sadness, it only becomes such a negative experience because of our self-concept as a separate human being. From each other, from other creatures, from the Earth herself. The ego can take two ways here: assume that its sadness is only its own, or cut itself off from sadness or suffering. (I do not have to add, this is worse, do I?)
When we are sad, for a reason or none at all, we have the unique opportunity to check into the sea within, to sing its sadness, to write, to paint or dance its sadness, feeling our home in this, admitting to our at-home-ness in this. Because, if we do, and surrender to its ebb and flow, to the tides that we share with all others, it will transform itself into the eternal sea of love.
In your tears you are never alone.
In your hearts you are never alone.
Blessed be our cosmic heart YeaShéT’A