Sitting with Sadness.
BY HEiDI PRAHL
Lover of Jesus, my family, really good coffee, and all things Chicago. I’m a living, breathing paradox.
It’s no secret, I run from pain. I run and hide and try to never look back.
Maybe I’m not alone. Maybe you’re a runner, too.
Several years ago I experienced the most pain I’d ever endured in my life. The kind of pain that envelops you, holds you just under the water while you gasp for air. It wasn’t a single incident, rather a series of events over the course of several years. My world felt like it had crashed in around me, and I knew my heart would never be the same.
I visited my doctor during that time and told her all of the things physically ailing me. Weight gain, adrenal issues, and sleeplessness to name a few. She agreed to run some tests, but said, “Mostly, I’m worried about your broken heart.”
She could see it. The look on my face and the sadness in my voice said that I’d been run over by life and was just about out of steam.
It’s not a lie to say that season is so vividly etched in my mind in ways I can’t unsee but also buried under layers of fog, blurry at best.
Afraid that grief would swallow me whole, I ran as far as I could from feeling any of it. And I’ve been running ever since.
When life comes at you with an intent to destroy, you slip into survival mode. Undoubtedly that is what got me through, however, the problem has become getting *out* of survival mode.
Those years are behind me, that season is over, yet my mind and body live in constant fear of having to live through something like that again. Convinced that grief wanted to take up permanent residence in my heart, I devised a plan to outrun it. If I could just stay moving, stay busy. Don’t stop. Don’t feel.
Life in an urban area allows you the luxury of staying busy under the guise of enjoying all that the city has to offer. Restaurants and theaters, festivals and farmers markets, rooftops and museums. I embraced it all. Took every single bit of it in, avoiding the silence, avoiding the memories that might sneak in when the music stopped.
But I couldn’t keep up. You can’t outrun your broken heart. My body and health were evidence of this. I’d gained enough weight that I had to recycle my wardrobe several times, and my annual blood work showed signs of the toll all of this had taken on me.
Having tried years of counseling, prayer, Bible study, diet changes, journaling, and workout programs, I never found any lasting success in finally being able to set my own damn baggage down without picking it back up.
I’d pretty much accepted my fate - this is who I am now - until I stumbled upon an article by a friend. I was familiar with her story, not so different from my own - a season of trauma that resulted in a broken heart and the accompanying physical symptoms. She spoke of the healing she’d received by something that, on the surface, seemed so simple. She started attending yoga class but showed up week after week and just sat cross legged on her mat for the entire class. That’s it.
This stood out to me for many reasons, not the least of which was that in previous months I’d commented to my husband how difficult it was for me to sit cross legged for any length of time. Studying yoga and the human body had taught me that we store emotions in our hips, so this was no surprise that mine were beyond tight and any amount of stretching proved painful. The other thing that stood out was that everything else I’d tried involved *doing* something, being active. Whether it was talking in therapy, journaling, or researching new diet plans. But this wasn’t doing. This was stopping. Being. The very thing I’d spent years trying to avoid.
The thought of this intrigued me but was also unnerving. Could I do it? Could I surrender to the pain; the physical pain of muscles be stretched beyond their comfort level and allowing whatever emotions or memories might arise if I simply stopped?
Because the physical body is so closely tied to our emotions, I knew this could be powerful.
The first day I set my timer for two minutes and sat down. My hip muscles pulled and I struggled to sit still. Nothing super magical happened, but afterward my body felt slightly less tense.
Every few days I’d add another minute or two to the timer. Some days a flood of emotions would rise up and I’d simply allow it. If I felt tears starting to form, I didn’t fight them. Other days my focus was solely on the stretching of my tight, very tense body.
One thing I’d learned about meditation is that, when thoughts come up, acknowledge them, don’t judge them, and let them go. This never made sense to me prior to this experience, but I realized the point is to teach your body to allow all of the pain, discomfort, emotions, and fear to arise - without feeling the need to have a reaction to it - physical or otherwise.
This was a slow magic. I was learning to trust my body, and it was learning to trust me again. Pain didn’t have to swallow me up. I could surrender to the tears in that moment without losing my whole self.
Mostly, what I’ve been learning is that it’s safe to stop. Safe to feel. Physical pain. Emotional pain. The things that happened are part of my story, but they’re not my whole story.
Ironically, I’m finding healing in the thing I’ve spent over a decade running from, showing up each day and unlearning old coping methods. Bit by bit my heart is being stitched back together, my body is on the mend, all from practicing the simple art of sitting still.