subject: What to Do When You Really Feel Sad - The Little Prince [print this page] What to Do When You Really Feel Sad - The Little Prince
Daily Insight from the Story of The Little Prince
What do you do when you feel truly sad? If you are overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness or despair, how do you handle it?
As the Little Prince allows his awareness to turn to the love of his life, the flower on his planet, his words are choked by sobbing and he is unable to say anything more.
The author comments, "The night had fallen." The expression hints at what mystics for a long time have spoken of as "the dark night of the soul."
The Little Prince doesn't actually experience the dark night of the soul because he represents our essential being. But his pilot friend will experience it in due course, as we shall see. In this night of sadness, the Little Prince shows us what to do when sadness befalls us, especially if this sadness deepens into a true dark night of the soul.
Often it's the breakdown of a love relationship in some form or otherfrequently a romantic relationship, but also family ties and friendshipsthat triggers the dark night of the soul.
At such a time, we are in despair, confusion, turmoil, not knowing where to turn for comfort. It feels like there isnothing that could comfort us, so distressed are we.
It can be truly dark in our world indeed at such a time.
Today there is a tendency to treat all depression as if it were an illness. While there may be forms of depression that involve chemical imbalance in the brain, the reality is that many of us go through sad periods in our lifeor may endure perpetual sadness in some casesfor exactly the reason hinted at in the word depression itself.
Likedepressing the clutch on a shift stick automobile, our inner beingour true selfispressed down. At some level, the boa constrictor wemet earlier in the story, whichcauses us to conform to what family and society want us to be, has us in its grip.
Our essential being exist in a state of joy. If we are in touch with our essence, even when external circumstances evoke a sadness in us, such as in the case of an illness or death, the joy of beingwhich we might describe as a kind ofblissnever leaves us.
At a time of illness or death we may not feel like dancing, but simply tobe is in itself a blissful experience. It isn't a state we have to generate, but is inherent in us. It's a characteristic of our essential being.
If you are a friend of someone who is going through a time of sadness, what should you do? As he tries to reach out, the pilot friend of the Little Prince finds himself feeling awkward and blundering in his words. He has no clue how to reach the Little Prince.When someone is deeply sad, we really can't help them. We can only be with them in stillness.
There is nothing wrong with such a time of sadness, nothing dysfunctional about it. There is a place in our life for deep sadness and there is a time to allow those close to us to go through such times in their own life.
Many of us become depressed precisely because we haven't been allowed to feel our true feelings over the years. We have had to put on a mask, such as the English "stiff upper lip" with which I grew up.
Not everything has to be "fixed." Some things should simply be allowed tobe, even though being around someone who is sad makes us uncomfortable. In such a situation we need to sit with our own discomfort, allowing it to be also, until whatever we are experiencing becomes integrated.
The pilot offers reassurance to the Little Prince. He will draw a muzzle for his sheep so that it can't eat his flower or put a railing around the flower. But as we shall see in due course in this story, we can never "fix" something of this kind. We have toallow.
Allowing, instead of resisting and trying to fix, is the way forward both for those of us who love someone who is going through a dark night of the soul and for the person who is in the midst of this dark night.
But it isn't a matter of wallowing, which is the result of a painful story we tell ourselves about our sadness. Even as we don't want to suppres sadness, neither do we want to turn it into a woe-is-me story.
An important aspect of dealing with sadness in the dark night of the soul is that the person doesn't talk about their sadness a great deal, going over and over what happened to them with their friends or family. Sitting in stillness, in the way we are talking about in The Compassionate Eye on the homepage of this website at the moment, is crucial if our pain is to be integrated and not become frozen in a lengthy depression.
I want to emphasize that the Little Prince isn't really in a dark night of the soul in the true sense. He is simply feeling his true feelings, because he has the capacity to do so. But the night falling on his usual cheeriness and feistiness foreshadows the dark night of the soul that the pilot will in due course enter into.
It's an experience we all must enter into at some point or other if we are ever to live from our truly loving, joyous, and peaceful essence. Our old surface self, the ego with its flip side that Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body, has to die. This is where the story will eventually take usand on into the rebirth of who we truly are and always have been in essence.
