Moving “straight through the center of yourself” This is Rilke’s description of the movement of sadness, in Letters to a Young Poet. I love this definition of touch: being a channel for feelings, not a reservoir for them or a victim of them. This makes me think that perhaps we are designed to process emotions. It is possible for feelings to pass through the center of us without harming us, just as it is possible for emotional experiences to hurt us in deep and lasting ways. Understanding the structure of your center allows you to know what your capabilities are. By knowing yourself, we know how much we can accept. This is especially important for sensitive people, because our sensitivity sets our capabilities and strengths apart from other people. When a person feels safe to allow themselves to be deeply moved by emotion, they can use this as a way to move towards growth and change. "Our sorrows [. . . ] are moments when something new has entered into us, something the unknown; our feelings grow silent in shy bewilderment, everything in us comes out, silence comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the middle of it and is silent.” Rainer Maria Rilke While sadness can cause changes in us, this too. can change and we become sad. This is because transitions can be so difficult, even if we are leaving something that no longer serves us or moving towards something interesting. Whether we are intentional and determined, or feel like we've been pulled out of our comfort zone, we are often thrown off when the situation changes. All change is a kind of loss, isn't it? And this loss is not only external. Change can make us feel like we are losing a part of ourselves or turning away from the path we expected and plunge into the journey of our life. Moments of loss, sadness and sadness create important spaces within us. We can experience severe and overwhelming sadness when we lose something important to us - sometimes when we're just thinking about how that loss might feel in the future - and the loss can take many forms, from canceled plans for coffee with a friend, to a layoff that changes our options temporarily or constantly. But it also seems that we can experience the sadness that comes with change as a vital kind of loss, as a feeling of being empty and ready for something new. Feeling "empty" may mean that there is a space in our hearts whose purpose remains undefined. For the new one. Or perhaps even that a new space is being created, awakening us to our wholeness. What if the feeling of sadness indicates the need for silence and stillness? How can we understand what the gaps within us are for? Sadness and grief are not moments, but processes. Dealing with the end of sadness swirling around an unpleasant feeling can be more difficult than practicing meditation and silence, and you need to let it work itself out. Each of us experiences this process differently. We cannot avoid sadness. If we understand our individual processes and characteristics, then accepting the fact that we can be deeply touched by both sadness and joy."Sadness also passes: a new feeling in us, a new feeling has been added, entered our heart, entered its innermost part of the sadness no longer exists - it is already in our blood. And we will not know what it was. We could easily force ourselves to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, since the house has changed, into which the guest entered. "Rainer Maria Rilke I wonder what we might gain by welcoming both sadness and joy as they move through us, with all their transformative possibilities?