We often define melancholy as a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause. The difference between sadness and melancholy is that sadness is an emotion, while melancholy is a state of mind. We all feel sadness at some point, but it can easily pass with a little time. Melancholy is a gloomy state of mind that remains present beyond the initial emotion of sadness, fear, isolation, or loneliness.
The Italian writer and poet Cesare Pavese ended his life at 41 after a lifelong struggle with depression. Despite taking such an extreme measure, he left a diary that traced the origins of his depression. In his writings Pavese stated, “We never see a thing the first time, but only the second, when it has changed into something else. We cannot remember something unless we happen to think about it for a second time.”
Pavese might agree that melancholy emerging from nothing specific reveals the state of being woven by the tapestry of our emotional content. The first time we lived the experience that we can no longer relive creates a state of mind that captures the mood. In other words, we are experiencing the shadow of our trauma, and melancholy is sounding the alarm. Let’s listen to that warning through a whisper from spirit on melancholy:
Melancholy is sounding the alarm as a call to remember your true self through meditation, self-reflection, and contemplation. This allows you to recollect, sense, and explore the causes of your condition with the goal of reconnection to your spirit. Melancholy puts humans in a unique position to discover what hides in the shadows of the past.
In contrast to feeling depressed, melancholy is usually accompanied by bittersweet memories that served as a way to cope with the situation. There is no need to feel lost and hopeless because those blurred memories will gently take you back to experiences that were in your infancy, to be with them once more. Now you can face emotions coming up from the past with the maturity and awareness that were absent at an earlier time in your personal evolution.
There is an opportunity presented with melancholy, which is an undeniable truth free from limiting beliefs, depression, anxiety, sadness, and frustration. An acknowledgment of the strength and perseverance that became part of your growth, which was developed through the experience, is the energy that rewires the brain and opens the channels to the heart. It’s more than putting a positive spin on a challenging experience. It’s about lifting the spirit from the burdens of the past.
Acknowledgement, love, and acceptance provide the energy that turns frozen pictures of grief and sadness into warm, loving memories for the soul.
Bring joy, ease suffering and create beauty, then dance like you mean it!
Blessings, Russell
“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”
Soren Kierkegaard
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