"There is no creativity if there is no chaos." ~Osho

Every experience in life has a purpose, a reason and season to it. There is a time for sadness, and a time for joy.  When you truly can let your tears flow, and allow the deepest sadness within you to rise to the surface, it becomes a powerful source of healing that brings profound realizations to your life.  By allowing your deepest possible sadness to be felt and experienced, that energy opens a humility inside you and a vulnerability that touches the core of your being.  It pulls you down to bottom of your emotional ocean where  you find the easiest sweetest surrender to the very source of who you are. 

A life without tears is always a very dry, stuffy and controlled existence.  If your emotional rivers are not allowed to flow, a dam builds inside you which will block out the joy and ecstasy your life contains as well.  Feeling your sadness is essential for anyone who wants to become a fully alive real mature human being and it is the first step to finding emotional freedom.  Releasing even a few tears are a way to soften, relax and instantly release the stress, fear and anxiety of dealing with your world.  Crying is how we cleanse ourselves from built up tensions and past emotional turmoil. It helps you to stop holding on to life too tightly. As the deepest Ocean of emotion flows through your heart, it purifies, detoxifies and liberates you from old wounded thought patterns that are needing to be healed, forgiven, or loved.

When your deepest sadness is welcomed and fully felt, it can empty out your entire basement of horrors.  All the incomplete feelings you've had in your life of being abandoned, betrayed, lonely, lost, or isolated can come flooding through.  This is why some people stay far away from feeling their feelings, if they open them up a crack, they might get lost in them.  The truth is that emotions come and go like the weather.  When you feel your deepest pain, you start healing these old painful wounds and start trusting they can be healed.  By opening up to your emotional basement you bring the light of awareness into the darkness. 

As the light starts shining in, you can finally see what's down there and really relax about it.  Then you can truly be quiet and experience the very still calm center of who you are and who you are not.  When feelings are felt to the core, not only does your basement get cleaned out, yet every closet, cabinet and cupboard in your house feels more relaxed and peaceful. The silence in you grows everywhere, becoming a natural, easy and free feeling that is ok with any fear or insecurity. 

 Because sadness is such an intoxicating, healing and powerful experience, sometimes it happens that the mind may turn to it like addictive drug. If the brain is constantly dowsed with sad thoughts, memories and emotions, "sad chemicals" are continuously released throughout the brain, and it becomes harder to get beyond the "gloom and doom" perception.  We end of feeling powerless, and crying or feeling hopeless about anything that happens.  Sadness becomes the norm instead of the occasional medicine, and when it becomes your automatic "safe" response to whatever situation you're in, it can hypnotize a person end up playing a victim role their entire life. 

The emotional cocktail we create in the brain is extremely powerful, and when we become comfortable with a certain cocktail we tend to repeat it.  If sadness becomes like an old friend that you don't ever want to leave, its time to look for another exit.  You must find that which brings you true unbounded joy, a river of bliss that makes you want to dance on the ceiling.  This my friend is the door to laughter.

"At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities." ~ Jean Houston

Its important to know that we are not trying to get rid of your tears, that would never do you any good.  This is about finding that which is beyond sorrow and untouched by it.  This is about letting the pendulum swing to the full extreme, so that your deepest pain is felt as well as your greatest joy, and then dropping them both.  The first step is learning how to relax your body and open your mind throughout the day.  As you're doing your daily activities (or even if you're stuck lying around all day depressed on the couch), practice letting go of the mind, by relaxing every muscle throughout your body. 

Right now, really scan your body and see what tiny little muscles are still holding on inside. Relax into any tension you find inside you.  Relax your breath so that the air moves through you fluidly and without any constraint.  Feel the body how it is, and accept it through relaxation. Notice the holding patterns going on inside, yet don't judge them.  Give all your love and energy into relaxing as deeply as you possibly can.  Let everything go and be truly relaxed in your body as if it was for the very first time in your life.

After your body is relaxed you will notice that the mind softens and opens.  Then the mind becomes even more creative, flexible and able to manifest the reality you want!  If you can totally relax your body you can learn how to laugh about any perceived "gloom and doom" reality.  When you can take one tiny step back from the saddest situation in your mind, you give yourself enough space to eventually be able to let go, see the bigger picture, and laugh about it all.  The sense of space gives you a feeling of freedom, a choice that allows in more awareness to choose how you want to respond. You become a more conscious being, who can welcome all your heaviness inside, and yet not lose yourself in it.  Through awareness you can get beyond any pain, and take the lighter path. 

Let's experiment with something here.  Allow yourself in this moment to feel all the space around you. Not just in your room, feel what is beyond these walls into the infinite Universe that is all around you right now. It is above you as well as below you on the other side of the planet.  There is sooo much space on every side of you.  It is infinite in all directions.  If this little planet was not beneath your feet, you would feel the vastness of the cosmos instantly.   When you give yourself permission to feel this spacious Universe we are in, it gives you a broader understanding of yourself.  You become more conscious and can choose what are the juiciest experiences in life that you want to create. 

Through getting in touch with the infinite Universe, you discover that you are the center of it.  You discover your natural ability to decide what you truly want to focus on in each moment.  You can see that you are creating every moment of your reality. You understand that whatever you focus on IS what YOU become.  Eventually with practice, you will begin to laugh about it all.  You will start to laugh at yourself and the ridiculousness of all the suffering you've creatively allowed to manifest in your life.  You are laughing not just because you realize that you are an all powerful being who has nothing to be afraid of ever again, you are laughing because you realize that you created it all for your own enjoyment.  This level of laughter paves the road to freedom and eventually into the experience of enlightenment.

"Your body cannot heal without play. Your mind cannot heal without laughter. Your soul cannot heal without joy." ~ Catherine Fenwick

Learning to laugh at yourself is one of the highest and most evolved things you can do to heal and deal with your inner world.  Once your laughter is big, real and true, it liberates the mind from trying to fix, heal or micromanage yourself.  You then begin to really relax and truly enjoy this life you are living in. Through laughter you can relax about anything that arises.  You can move beyond the serious stagnation of the ego.  You've discovered a path of lightness and love, which is the easiest path to transcending the ego.  If you can truly laugh at your ego from a place of joy and insight, you have grown beyond it.  Then you can instantly turn the deepest pain into a wild roaring spontaneous cackle. 

The secret to rip roaring laughter is feeling into the bigger picture of your Life while seeing how ridiculous this little narrowed mind can be.  It is quite ridiculous how much suffering we put ourselves through, and all for what?  The mind continues to make up another story, one after the other for you to believe in.  Through seeing how creative and untrue the mind can be, it forces you to step back from it and find a place of real release.  The release that comes in the roots of pure joy and freedom is vocalized as laughter.  When you've stepped back from it all, and are seeing the global perspective on your Life, compared to what's happening to the other 7 billion people on earth right now, its hard to take your life soooo seriously.  When the mind stops being so narrow you begin to wonder, and eventually know how this life is meant to be a liberating dance and ecstatic celebration.

By remaining connected to the spaciousness of the Universe, you can always find the feeling of freedom.  You start to dance inside, and explore the many other dimensions to life.  When real freedom is present inside, your tears instantly turn into laughter.  You cannot hold onto any old sad story.  You may still FEEL the energy there, yet you cannot identify with how small, powerless and sad your situation actually is.  When you see the bigger picture, you start seeing the difference between something that is truly an elephant problem or another little mouse problem.

 With a bigger perspective, you won't get so quickly wrapped up in reacting to small stuff, because you'll know that its all small stuff. When you can step out even further from a global understanding and get into a galactic perspective, realizing there are billions of other plants beings and lives out there in the vast infinite Universe, and you'll see that our whole planet can let go, relax and not take things in such a serious manner.  Anytime you can take on a bigger perspective do it!  You will be more exposed to the real truth.  You'll start understanding yourself as an infinite soul, on an eternal journey through this experience called life.  Knowing this, you remain cool, centered and at peace with whatever arises.  You'll discover your natural ability to sit back, enjoy your life deeply and laugh at it all.

As you retrain the brain to see your daily life in a humorous way, it becomes very hard to take anyone or anything seriously anymore.  You may meet people in a sincere way, have compassion for their struggle, yet you never fight with them and lose your lightness in their pit of serious feelings.  You simply know its a trap based on an illusion.  Seeing everything as non-serious may sound insincere, superficial, and be an escape from intimacy, yet when you are in touch with the depth of your pain you can laugh a huge blissed-out belly laugh when you find yourself on the other side of it.

"A sense of humor is needed armor. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life." ~Hugh Sidey

This week I invite you to try something totally new.  Trick yourself into laughing everyday.  Fake it until you make it, pretend it until you transcend it.  Make yourself giggle at things, eventually it will feel real.  Get your laughter engines started!  One day you'll have an authentic smile from ear to ear about the exact same thing you were once perpetually sad about.  You'll see that you always have the choice to laugh at yourself and your life.  Laughter is always an option.  It is possible to see anything as humorous.  With a minor shift in perspective you can turn a graveyard like conversation into a place of healing and lightness. 

The people who cannot laugh at themselves are missing one vital point.  That we can see the farthest, clearest, biggest picture of life from the top of a mountain peak, and you can feel your deepest, darkest most sensitive feelings at the bottom of the valley.  If you want full clarity from all confusion, climb the peak of laughter.  If you want to become more sensitive to the depth of your soul, hang out in the emotional valleys.  There is nothing wrong with the valleys, they just don't allow you to see the vast unlimited being you truly are.

The experience of laughter is similar to sadness in the way that it heals and liberates us from the controlling grip of the mind.  When you laugh, the brains chemicals become more receptive to the new, unknown, the unusual, and you open to the feeling that anything is possible.  With laughter you can feel unstoppable in whatever you want to manifest in your life. Many scientific studies have been done on the healing benefits of laughter, and they've found that the people who laugh constantly throughout the day are less likely to contract a serious illness or disease.  In fact, there are "laughing healing centers" where people who are battling cancer and other life threatening diseases, are being cured by eating a raw vegan diet, and surrounding themselves with positive happy people and entertainment they find hilarious and funny.  Laughter is the highest path to healing, and breeds the most positive long term benefits to deal with this wild and crazy world.

I personally feel that the most enlightened path of all, is to discover a healthy balance between laughter and tears.  The combination of them both together will bring you to the ultimate peak of consciousness and the divine experience of being human.  Whenever we are moved to tears of joy, we are the closest to God.  There is nothing more touching to the heart than something that brings soooo much joy inside you that it makes you cry.  Of course, not every life experience can bring you to tears of joy, yet when your typical week flows evenly between laughing and crying, allowing the free flow between both paradigms, you'll drop even deeper into the essence of your being and discovered the most healthy, healing and enlightening path of them all.  At this place you've become a real human being, who is sensitive enough to feel life to its extremes without getting attached to either side.

To find the balance between laughing and crying you must travel deeply inside yourself, and rest in the silent source that is at the core of who you truly are.  You must be willing to relax, let go of all your old comfortable habits, and drop into the "unknown zone".  The most healing feelings in the Universe are found here.  This is the greatest journey a human being can take in their lifetime.  When you are truly free to swing in any moment from laughter to tears, you will be able to blend them and discover that tears of joy naturally find you. Then you have found the greatest gift that life can give, an infinite source of peace.  Your emotions cannot take you hostage anymore, and you discover that every ordinary moment in life contains that which is sacred and divine.