In my update for May 20th I asked for input on subjects you'd like to see me cover in a guided crochet meditation. So far, "Helping to Heal Sadness and Hurt" is the topic that is resonating with many.
It's a difficult topic because as a society we tend to have a negative view of sadness. It's something we seem to want to avoid experiencing, or at least get over as in the shortest amount of time possible. We conflate sadness with depression in a way that is neither helpful nor healthy in terms of understanding either state (and I say this as someone who has suffered from recurrent major depression).
Depression is akin to feeling nothing. A numbness. It's an anaesthetized state in which we just don't care or feel anything.
Sadness certainly isn't pleasant. It's painful! But it's also meaningful. When the situation warrants it, then learning to accept feelings of sadness, sitting with it and being present with it, is a necessary part of moving on. As the movie Inside Out showed us, it's adaptive behaviour.
But why? Why did we evolve this capacity for sadness? In Four Ways Sadness May Be Good For You, Joseph Forgas shares that sadness can:
improve memory
improve judgment
increase motivation
improve interactions
And crochet can help us as we process our feelings of sadness and loss. I wrote about that here, in How to Process Grief - Crochet as a self soothing activity, in which I share both my experience and that of someone in my crochet program.
I will work on a guided crochet meditation that addresses these themes and hopefully it will be something you find helpful. Feel free to comment here if there are any other guided crochet meditation topics you'd love to see me cover.