Recognizing the sorrow of oneself

Now I would like to talk about how we internally experience our sadness. You can begin to experience sadness or grief by looking at the face of Betty Shirley or the boy from Tuzla. If this happens, then take another look, and if you have begun to experience an emotion, then let it amplify so that you can consider the reactions of your body. If you didn’t feel sad when you looked at these pictures, then try to look at them again and let those feelings appear. If they do occur, then give them the opportunity to reach maximum intensity.
When you look at the photographs, you may recall a time when you yourself experienced sadness at the loss suffered, and this memory triggers your sadness. For some people, the sad event was so important in their lives that they are ready to easily remember and relive it, to feel their overflow with these sad feelings. Their sad story is waiting for the opportunity to be played again. Such people are very subject to sorrow; they have the need to experience it again, because the sadness they experience is not fully experienced. Some types of experience gained have such dire consequences - for example, the death of a beloved child that sadness can never completely disappear. A person who has experienced such emotional trauma can easily burst into tears and be very vulnerable to any hint of other people's suffering.
If you still do not feel sad, if the photos do not cause you empathy and if you do not have any spontaneous memories, then try to ask yourself: was there a time in your life when you had sadness after the death of a dear person? If so, imagine this scene and let your senses express themselves again. When this method begins to work, let your emotions grow and pay attention to what you feel face and body.
If you do not feel sad again, try the following exercise.

Repeat the movements of the muscles of the face, allowing you to reproduce the expression of sadness shown on the face of Betty Shirley.

(You may need a mirror to monitor the correctness of your movements.)

• Open mouth.
• Lower the corners of the lips down.
• Keep the corners of your lips down, try to raise your cheeks, as you do when you squint. This movement will pull the corners of the lips in the opposite direction.
• Keep this tension between the raised cheeks and the lowered corners of the lips.
• Direct your gaze down and lower your upper eyelids.
• If you still do not feel sadness, try to give the eyebrows a position like that of Betty Shirley. For most people, deliberately performing such a move is much more difficult.
• Pull the inner corners of the eyebrows up only in the middle part, and not all eyebrows.
• It will be easier for you to do this if you bring your eyebrows together and raise them in the middle section.
• Direct your gaze down and lower your upper eyelids.

Our research shows that if you perform these movements on your face, then you cause physiological changes in the activity of both the brain and the organism as a whole. If you succeeded in doing these movements, then let your senses become as strong as possible.
If you were able to feel sadness or grief, looking at a photo of Betty, remembering a sad episode or following the instructions for performing face movements, try to achieve this result again. Concentrate on how these feelings are felt. Pay attention to what happens when emotions just start, how these emotions are displayed, what changes occur in your body and your mind. Let the senses grow and become as strong as possible. Watching what is happening, notice how your head, neck, face, mouth, back, arms, stomach and legs feel. These are the feelings that you experience with sadness; they are very unpleasant. They can become almost painful if they prove to be very strong and will last for a long time.
Your eyelids can become heavy. Your cheeks may begin to lift. You may feel pain in the back of your throat. Your eyes can be moistened with tears. All these are normal reactions in a state of sadness, and they can also be considered normal when looking at a person who is experiencing great sadness. Reactions of empathy are quite ordinary, and they serve for us as a means of establishing communication with other, even completely unfamiliar to us people. These feelings make you pay attention to Betty or a suffering Muslim boy, and they also make you want to help these people. Betty Shirley is experiencing the most terrible misfortune that only can fall to the lot of the mother; the boy has the strongest fear a child can have.
Looking at a photo of Betty, or evoking a sad event, or performing specified muscle movements, most people experience sadness, not grief. If the feeling of sadness becomes very strong or prolonged, then it can turn into a feeling of grief. By learning more about these feelings through reflections on how they are felt, you get a better chance of recognizing them when they are just beginning, that is, when you begin to realize that you feel the weight of the loss suffered.
I described the most typical feelings experienced in a state of sadness, or, if you like, the theme of sadness, but each individual has his own variations on how sadness or any other emotion is felt. Almost every person believes that his way of experiencing emotions is the only correct one. But people differ in how easily they may have a feeling of sadness, how quickly sadness gives way to grief, and woe to sadness and how long the sadness that they experience usually remains. Knowing your style of experiencing emotions and how it differs from the style of experiencing the person you care about can help you better recognize the wrong communications and misunderstandings that may arise in your life because of this emotion.
Some people may enjoy being sad, though not as strong as Betty Shirley's. Such people read novels, sometimes called “squeeze a tear,” go to the cinema for sad movies and watch sad TV shows. But there are other people in whom sadness or grief causes absolute rejection, who are ready to avoid situations at any cost, which are fraught with the emergence of such emotions. They can consciously prevent deep attachments, since caring for other people makes them vulnerable to inevitable losses and sadness.

See also