“Tears have taught me a tremendous amount, and I know now that they often come bearing important gifts. There has emerged a half-baked spiritual myth that invalidates sadness, claiming it is beneath us if we are walking the path to true enlightenment. But surely one of the most powerful lines in the Bible is one of the simplest; “Jesus wept.” There is nothing enlightened about crying over the tragedy of human suffering; perhaps what is neurotic is how infrequently we do.
There is an old Buddist story about a monk who stood crying at the grave of his master. A traveller came by and saw his tears. “Why would you cry? I thought you were enlightened!” The monk replied, “Because I am sad.”
Our task is not to avoid painful emotion, but rather to transform it at its roots. And that we cannot do if we don’t go through the emotion authentically. Sadness has to be experienced in order to transcended. No situation can be transformed until it is accepted as it is.
The key to finding the miracle inside sadness lies in learning how to allow ourselves to BE sad. This is often harder than one would think. We live in a culture that mitigates genuine emotion of any kind, because it mitigates genuine ANYTHING.
In a culture of denial, those who do not deny the depths of their feelings are often branded as fools or hysterics.
Emotions not manipulated specifically for the purposes of selling something is seen as having little intrinsic value.
Crying is often viewed as a waste of time or a sign of weakness.
We no longer give deep cultural permission for the processes of grief; after all, it’s an inconvenience to the speedy wheels of the status quo.
Are you sad? Deal with it! Take this pill! Process it and hurry!
Grief that is suppressed will force its way to expression – whether we want it to or not. It often emerges in dysfunctional ways when not allowed its proper place in the psychic and social scheme of things .So it is that the modern mystic, when experiencing the heartbreak of life, does not avoid the heartbreak nor try to distance from it in the name of spirituality, mental health, or anything else.
Enlightenment does not consist of pretending to be where we are not; enlightenment means being in touch with where we are and being willing to learn what God would have us learn from it
Sometimes the purpose of a day is to merely feel our sadness, knowing that as we do we allow whole layers of grief, like old skin cells, to drop off us.
The wisdom that comes from having experienced heartbreak cannot be bequeathed; it can only be gained through experience. And having truly felt it, we are far more likely to have compassion for others. Anything that takes us closer to a true compassion takes us closer to what will one day be an experience of even greater joy.”

Taken from "Everyday Grace" ~ Marianne Williamson ~.