Let me start off by offering sympathies to anyone who’s experiencing an overwhelming emotional display, whether it be uncontrollable crying or something else. In a situation like this there’s obviously suffering happening.
Having said that, it’s important to understand that any emotional experience and / or display isn’t happening by itself. Emotions and emotional displays are responses to thinking. Emotions always follow thought — always. Emotions are, in fact, physical body responses to thinking.
Here’s how it works:
First there is a thought stream (I sometimes refer to this as a story). What happens next is the thought stream, or story, is accepted as truth. Something bad happened to me and it shouldn’t have happened! Once the thought stream or story is accepted as truth the body responds to this “reality” by having a physical response that is typically described as emotion.
If you are crying uncontrollably you have accepted an upsetting story about your life as truth. If you didn’t accept this upsetting story as truth you would not be having an emotional response. You may say, of course your upsetting story is true. But is it? Is it really? You have certainly accepted it as truth but is it, in fact, truth?
What you have also done, on some level, is tell life that you know better than it does. You have rejected what life has brought you and are grieving because what life brought did not match your ego desires. You believe, essentially, that reality should be different than it is.
But should reality be different than it is? Is it really so that your ego desires are the best outcome? Or might it be that life — the universe, God, whatever you’d like to call it — knows better than you about what should happen?
Are you willing to accept life as it presently is? This is not the same as doing nothing to change life to your liking. You can take action to change life to your liking — I believe all humans have the power to do this very thing — but you cannot change what is now. What is now already is. You can’t change this now… but you may be able to change the next now to come.
When we come to accept what is, what is right now, then we alleviate our suffering considerably. When we argue with life and insist that what is shouldn’t be we suffer every time. Uncontrollable crying is one symptom of this.
