What if Melancholy was a Doorway into Deeper Experiences of Love?

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.” - Rumi

There is a certain kind of bittersweet beauty in sadness. An unbearable, devastatingly transformative power in despair. And a portal that can open within us during the experience of deep, heart-shattering grief, which can give us direct access to profound and unconditional love.

There is also a distinctive difference between adopting a victim 'poor me' mentality when visited by these dense sensations, and the choice to rather be brave; let go of control and let them exist as they are, let them visit, and let them exit.

We often avoid these kinds of overwhelming sensations out of fear of getting trapped there. Fear that the darkness will swallow us. But I find the option of non-avoidance often has the opposite effect. Letting ourselves be momentarily swallowed can be a transformative experience. And never, in my experience, has it resulted in eternal entrapment.

When we surrender into an experience of deep sadness and allow ourselves to dissolve there like a tear into the ocean, it can feel so much bigger than us. It can feel as big as the universe. There is comfort to be found in remembering that no feeling is exclusive to any single one of us alone. And that to be connected through sensation to something so vast and universal means we are not as small and limited as the container of our bodies presents us to be.

I experience melancholy like a frequency that seems to sweep through everything and everyone on some level. Sometimes we tap into it. It's only frightening when we resist it, and attempt to ignore the fact that yes, there is pain in the world, and yes, the pain exists inside of us too. No one is exempt.

But it is not bad like many raised in Western culture have been trained to believe any feeling other than happiness is. It can be expansive, powerful. When I experience melancholy, I get the exquisite sense that it somehow holds within it both extremes of love and pain, dancing and weaving around each other, blending into one.

It demands me to stop. Stop being seduced by mindless distractions presented by the flurry of movement in the world and remember that beneath it all, is a vast and sweeping stillness that carries within it the very beauty and aliveness sought from external reaching. Often, the external reaching can be trailed back to an avoidance of feeling uncomfortable feelings. Like melancholy.

Somehow, on these days when I feel the richness of melancholy present, I simultaneously feel my heart cracking open, wider, wider. The unconditional love that rests there, ever-present, rises richly to the surface, and the experience of being held by something divine becomes inescapable. Divine; only because I've also been visited by its extreme opposite in pain.

This exquisite experience of love can hold us in the pain, and it becomes less overwhelming. The experience of melancholic sadness shrinks back down to what it is; simply a sensation, moving through the body. It only stagnates there when we do not allow it to move.

Pain to me is simply one experience inside the spinning wheel of yin and yang. And melancholy can be an opportunity to surrender. An invitation for the tough exteriors we uphold to melt away so that we can become acutely present in the tender embrace of something so vast it has no name.

And it is in this way that melancholy can become a portal into deeper expanses of love.

Plains of love so vast they expand beyond sight, beyond reach, yet somehow, exist inside us, all within the sensory reach of the heart.

It is so fine.

Like dust.

A light mist drifting through still air.

I breathe it in and remember that nothing matters but this aliveness of the heart, and the interconnectivity with everyone, and everything in existence.

Melancholy is one of the veils we must pass through to drop back into the grace of oneness that knows both love and pain, and neither one of them at all. The oneness that leads to the sense of both nothing and everything at once.

Pain is the force that pushes us deeper into facing ourselves. Into healing. And ultimately, into Love.

Love is the fabric of everything. The blank canvas upon which we dance.