Ep.32: The Vibration of Sadness

Robyn:                    Hi and welcome to Episode 32 of Your High Vibration Life. I really appreciate you being with me today. It’s gonna be a very different topic and a very personal one today. Something that’s been on my mind a lot, and I call it the Vibration of Grief. So let’s talk about feeling sad, shall we? We all feel sad from time to time and I’d like to put this in the context of what brings us together on this podcast, and that is our mutual love of up [leveling 00:00:53] our life, of living at higher vibrations. So is it a contradiction for happy people to feel deeply sad sometimes? That’s the topic today. The vibration or the frequency of emotions is something that I think about daily. If I’m feeling anxiety or anger or frustration, I try to tune into it quickly and ask myself where I’m feeling it in my body, and do whatever it takes to move through those stuck or kinked or twisted energies, so I can get back to flow. We’ve talked about this in earlier episodes.

But today, I want to talk specifically about what it means, what we do, how we work through the vibration of sadness or grief. I want to suggest to you that while it is not a high frequency, how we feel when we are sad, it’s in fact a low frequency. I want to suggest that it can be a really grounding energy and that it’s good and important and necessary. And allowing ourselves to really embrace it, knowing its value, really ironically does help us live a high vibration life. I kind of want to think about music for a minute as a metaphor. We need the whole choir don’t we? A choir can’t just be made up of sopranos, the higher pitches. Sure, there are soprano groups, but if that’s all we listen to, if all the music we listen to was the soprano tones, it would get boring. We need the altos too. In a symphony, we need the strings, not just the brass. We can’t be happy and excited all the time.

Sometimes it’s rainy outside and it just kind of feels good, doesn’t it, to be melancholy and revisit things from our past that maybe we don’t feel we’ve quite resolved or learned from what we’re suppose to. I want to explore today why there are low vibrations to sit with, to not rush through. Lower vibrations that are part of the human experience, and if we miss them or if we rush them, we wouldn’t have the full symphony. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the pursuit of a higher vibration life means that we aren’t ever sad. I have a friend who told me years ago that everyone should go to a funeral every six months. And it got me thinking, why is that? What is the learning that takes place at a funeral? In an earlier episode, I talk about a dear friend who died last July and what I learned from it, as I sit with my own grieving process. What I learned from watching his wife step into that grief and embrace and feel everything and gain from it. We’ll put the link to that episode in your show notes.

But if you’ll recall, if you listened to that episode, she was given some amazing advice right before her husband’s viewing. She was told to drink it in, to have the entire experience, to not lean away from any of it, to feel everything, see everyone, have the entire experience. She was told that by another widow, and it really struck me. Low vibrations aren’t always bad. And the vibration of sadness can be one of the most grounding forms of energy there is. Not so much an energy we want to stay in, right, because that’s when it starts to feel like depression. But the reason it’s been on my mind lately is that a few weeks ago, I lost my little cat, Daphne. If you were bored, you could go look on my personal Facebook page to see pictures of her. In her first year of life, she had two surgeries, and I don’t know if she picked up an illness while she was away at the animal hospital, or in the second surgery, if having her gut sliced open caused scar tissue to eventually kill her. The second surgery was when she ate a big silicone straw.

It was a company who wanted me to try their products and I saw her chewing on this silicone straw, but it never occurred to me that a cat would sit there and completely eat a silicone straw. So when it stopped her digestive system and she nearly died from that, we had to cut her open spend almost $2,000 getting that out of her. And I thought that she had recovered, but a few weeks ago, I had to make the decision to instead of letting her continue to slowly die, to go in and inject her with a toxic chemical that would instantly stop her heart so that her suffering would end. At the last minute, my son, he’s 16, chose not to go with me. I think that it just seemed too hard for him, and I was a little bit panicked that morning because after I had the appointment with the vet with Daphne, I had to be on a podcast two hours after our appointment, doing an interview on someone else’s podcast. It was actually Kristine Carlson, and then I had to head to the airport on a business trip.

So the trip to the vet, could not wait. It couldn’t wait because I didn’t want to leave for this business trip and potentially have Daphne pass away when my son was home alone. But oh my gosh, I did not want to put her in a carrier for her last 20 minutes of life. And so, when my son chose not to come and decided to go to school instead of coming with me to the appointment, that was my choice is what do I do with her? She hates that thing because getting in the carrier means that we’re going to the vet, which means being in there for a few days, and it’s scary and she has surgeries. And so it was super important to me that I hold Daphne in my arms while we drove to the vet. But how could I drive and hold and comfort her at the same time? So just minutes later, after my son decided to go to school and not come with me to say goodbye to Daphne, a neighbor, she’s just a lovely person.

And she must be finely tuned to the vibrational needs of others, because she got in her car and drove over. And she showed up on my porch, right as I needed someone to take me and Daphne to the appointment at the vet. I cried all the way to the vet. I cried all the way through their putting the needle into the port and injecting my sweet little kitty and then watching her immediate death. My head was down in my arms and I sobbed for a little while. And when I looked up at the vet, she was crying too. She didn’t have misty eyes. She was full on crying, and she said to me, pointing at Daphne’s body, “There are worse things than this.” And then we hugged and we talked about pain and suffering and loss and watching people you care about suffer. We talked about our kids, and I wondered what it’s like to have her job, to watch people say goodbye. That’s- that’s only my second time I’ve ever done that.

It’s my first time putting my own pet down, but I was there with a friend and saw there and held her hand while she put her dog Zeus down years ago. Really my second time in my life, but this vet, I was thinking about how she has to watch people say goodbye almost every day to pets they’ve loved for years. I wondered if she cried with every pet owner, like she did with me. So I had to get on a plane a few hours later and I didn’t wear any make up, even though when I got there, I had to go to a business event because I knew that I’d cry all the way to San Diego. So I was at a business conference for three days and I found myself looking at videos of my cats playing together on my phone, with the sound turned off, while I was suppose to be listening to a lecture in the event, and I cried. And my CMO, Kristen, put her arm around me and hugged me.

I went to a party that night in Southern California and I cried when a few friends there came up and talked to me about it. I cried and I cried. I cried for about a week and a half, and now I’m feeling my way through it enough so that I can talk to you about it. I wanted to share some things about what I learned from grief, because you have periods of grief too. Nobody gets through this life without losing someone. One thing I learned is that, if I resist grief, if I find ways around it, if I stuff it, if I refuse to talk about it or give it expression, I’m keeping myself in this stuck energy longer than necessary. So I knew this and therefore, I let the tears flow. Like I said, I got on an airplane knowing I’d be crying a river regardless of whether I’d suppose to be in a business meeting or not, regardless of what anyone thought. I didn’t apologize for it at the party, or at the conference sitting next to my CMO with lots of people around.

I even went on Kristine’s Carlson’s podcast two hours after putting Daphne down. And while I didn’t dare talk about my cat’s death during our interview together, I did tell her about it afterward. I learned from this experience to lean into my grief, and to, as they say, let it out. I don’t think that venting criticism of others or venting about negative events of your day, or rants about things that we don’t like really usually serve to resolve issues. We talk about getting things off our chest, right, but I think usually that doesn’t happen with angry vibrations. But crying really does knock walls down in so many ways. It’s cathartic and it’s necessary. So I have a strange story for you. I didn’t cry for seven years. I cried for three days straight when my former husband got married, his second time. I dated someone for a couple years after that. And then the aftermath, the breakup, even though I’m the one who ended the relationship, I loved him like crazy and I literally cried for a year after this breakup. And then, I can’t really explain it, my crier broker.

So I cried for three days when my former husband got remarried, and it wasn’t because I wanted to be married to him. I’m the one who ended my 20 year marriage. It was other things. It was, “Wow, look how fast you’ve moved on. As you move on, I’m sort of keenly feeling my aloneness.” It was other things. It was other reasons that I cried for three days and then cried for an entire year after a breakup. I don’t know why my crier broke, but I literally never cried again in seven years even when I should. Even when someone I care about was telling me something super sad, or when I watched a sad movie, or when I went through a completely overwhelming stressful situation for several months, okay? Something that would make anyone cry, and it would of just been so helpful to cry. I wanted to and I just couldn’t. So last summer, my friend Sue, we were away in Switzerland where I take Green Smoothie Girl readers every summer for a liver detox and a retreat. It’s the most amazing week of my whole year. Hope you can come with us some day.

We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. We’re going June 4th to 11th here in 2017. My friend Sue came with us and I was going through something then, and I told her I haven’t cried in seven years. And she is an emotion code energy worker, and she said, “I’m gonna do some work.” She said, “You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to say anything.” And she told me that she had released some energetic blockages, and here’s a crazy thing. That was nine months ago. I’ve pretty much been crying ever since. I mean not constantly, but often when it’s appropriate when I encounter sadness. Crying is part of life. And I’ll tell you, as a person who didn’t do it for seven years, it’s good and it’s healing, and it’s not just for girls. You obviously are releasing healing hormones when you cry. And without feeling sadness, how could you cry? So obviously spending small amounts of time and really however much time it takes in these low vibrations, has a purpose. Now, why I wanted my crier fixed, okay? Why would anyone want to cry?

Well energetically, it’s like releasing a flood gate. Not only has my crier getting fixed made me healthier. As strange as this sounds, it also made me happier. There are highs and lows in life, and in emotion. I mean look at our topography. While we’re touching on all these different … What I think are beautiful metaphors, let’s look at geography. In our topography, we have mountains and valleys. We have shadows and light in our day, in our lives. We have darkness and sunshine. There too must be sadness in order for there to be happiness. And when I fully said goodby to Daphne and I cried my face off, and I didn’t really care who knew it and I talked about it to my closest friends. The night I told Tenisson that the vet said she recommended we let her go, rather than another surgery, or hospitalization, or test, he saw me cry in a way that I’m not sure had. I’m fairly certain my 16 year old son has never seen that before from me. He wrapped his arms around me and he let me cry it out.

I don’t think that in order to be strong for my children, which is important to me, that I can’t show when I’m heartbroken. In fact, quite the opposite. We are strong because sometimes we go to the extremes. We love and we laugh, and we make big plans, but also we cry and sometimes we feel like we’ll break. Another metaphor that’s been on my mind a lot, as I think about the vibration of sadness is the seasons. We shouldn’t expect that we should green growth in every season of our lives. This is a law of nature, and energetic laws being laws of nature, it seems to me that they float together. I know that in my professional work, since I rent a company and I write books and I speak and I research, everything I do, depends on my creativity and my energy. I have seasons of incredible bursts of great ideas and I’m executing like crazy, and I’m probably driving my 20 employees crazy. They’re having to work hard with me too and then I have seasons where I couldn’t come up with a good idea to save my life.

And I’ve learned that this is simply a pattern and that it’s okay. And that just because I’m not really that productive today or this month, I’ve had a few times where I was not super functional in my work for literally a few months at a time. I’ve learned to be at peace with it. If I get very quiet and figure out what I’m suppose to learn that has pushed me into lower vibrations, then I find I move through it with grace and ease. In the spring, things grow. In the fall, things die back. In the winter, things are dormant. We really can’t expect life to always be spring and summer. So when I think about grief and periods we all go through of die back and stripping things down and feeling lost, I think about these metaphors and the world of nature, of dying leaves. The cycle of death and life composting, where the dead becomes living. The remains of living things become fertilizer for new life. And this for me, becomes an important metaphor for the meaning and purpose in grief, the meaning and purpose in sadness or melancholy.

Periods of being still, regrouping, and making meaning of past events. Now, losing a cat is not the hardest thing in the world, I know that. Some people lose a husband, a wife, a child. Knock on wood. That’s hard to even think about, but another gain of allowing myself to go to the vibration of deep sadness is the compassion that I felt since then. Where all these people around me, experiencing losing their beloved pets or am I just more finely tuned now into this frequency, because in the past three weeks, I’ve had several friends who’s cat or dog died and they had to choose to end their pet’s life. And I’ve been able to comfort and talk through it with them, and I’m not afraid of it. And they want to talk to me versus someone else, because they know I can go there with them, you know, go there. The energy is of compassion. You know this. Have so much character and depth and beauty to them, I don’t think of compassion as a frequency, I think of it as symphony.

And think about it, the symphony of healing, releasing, flowing frequencies, it’s not possible if you’ve not experienced the depth of sadness yourself. Remember when you learned the definition of empathy in school? How is it difference from sympathy? Empathy is when we feel it. We feel some of what another person is feeling. So my conclusion in all this pain that my son and I’ve been going through, is that this loss gave me a really sweet connection to my son. He told me this past weekend, as he came home from a baseball tournament out of town and his prized $300 bat that he’d been coveting and earning the past couple of months, had arrived in the mail. He put a big piece of tape around it and he wrote, Daphne on it with a Sharpie, so he could dedicate his big hits this season to her, and all the love she gave us. It gave me a sweet connection to my son that really deepened as together we lost her. It gave me more compassion for others.

Now, I know what someone is going through when they have to choose to put a member of their family down. That’s what a pet is. And I don’t think my deep and compassion ends there. I think that there are more gifts in the loss. I think that the depth in our vibrations means we experienced the full range. So what I want for you, isn’t to be shiny, and happy, and high all the time but rather to recognize those great moments of flow or of happiness, joy, gratitude for how beautiful they are and really love and savor them, as well as the low grounding vibrations of sorrow and grief, as part of the human experience. I sure have loved on my other cat, Charlotte Main a lot since Daphne’s death. It was so obvious that he missed her too. He would box her head and try to play with her, try to wrestle with her those last few days before she died, and she couldn’t play with him. She was too sick and too weak, and then she disappeared, and he didn’t understand it.

But the variety and depth, and character of our emotions are what make us deep and loving. The deep well of sorrow and joy, knowledge and experiences, thoughts and emotions. So as you can see, I’ve been really reflective lately. I did get my joy back. I’ve laughed. I’ve had fun. I’ve enjoyed my work. All the good stuff is back, even though Daphne was an amazing, loving, accepting friend to me. She was there for me recently through a hard period of time for two months. She sat in my lap, while I wrote a 90,000 word book and I miss her still. And when I think about her, I’m reminded that life is good. I have an aunt named April, who when she was 32 years old, her husband, who is my Uncle Gerald, diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, and he did chemotherapy and radiation, and 18 months later he died, leaving her a widow with three small children who were two, six, and eight years old.

And shortly after my uncle died at the age of 33, my aunt April’s only son, Chip, who’s really named Gerald Jr., was away at Scout Camp and he was in a terrible accident. And he ended up in a coma for six months, and to this day, is disabled. Shortly after that, my aunt’s beloved father, was driving his truck and had a massive heart attack and ended up dying. She only has one sibling, her sister. And right in the same period of time that her husband died, her son ended up in a coma and permanently disabled, and she lost her father. Her sister died in a diabetic incident. So many tragedies in one person’s life. And in just a few years, my aunt lost her beloved husband, her beloved father, and her only sister. In addition, her only son ended up disabled and in a scary six month coma. And many years later, I asked her, what was that like for you and what did you learn from it? I said, “What is it like to be you?”

My aunt said, “The big thing that I learned from this experience in my life, which really shaped me is to feel massive joy and gratitude every chance I get.” She said, “I notice when life is good, when times are good. When something good happens, I don’t let it pass me by. I absolutely embrace every little good thing.” I love that story that she told me, and it’s probably been 20 years since I’ve asked her that and I have never forgotten it. I hope you’ll reflect on sorrow and grief, as the low the grounded frequencies that they are. And I hope it’s meaningful today to you, to share a bit about why I think these places we go in our heart and soul are good places. They’re important, they’re instructive, and I feel like a better human being for experiencing them. Here’s to your high vibration life, and I’ll see you next time.