Why I cry at movies

Tears have the amazing power of healing us when we are in pain. When movies make us cry, it is not because they are creating pain within us, but because they stimulate tender spots within us. Places where we have been injured, but have yet to fully heal.

And that which we have not fully healed, we carry around with us. It is a lot to carry, and the tears will keep looking for chances to come. Every time we have an opportunity to cry, we have an opportunity to heal pain and become more alive and present in all that is good in our lives and the world. If we keep trying to push back the tears, we push away healing at the same time.

How strange that we should push away healing.

Except that to cry is to acknowledge pain. And pain is something that we tend to try to avoid. Seeking happiness and the avoidance of pain.

The problem is, we often confuse the avoidance of new pains with avoiding things that bring out the unhealed pain that all of us carry. Each one of us has our own unique bundle of things that we’ve experienced that were to overwhelming to feel all the way through. One of the great gifts of things like movies, music, art, poetry, dance... whatever moves you, is that it often has the power to open up old wounds so that they can be healed through crying. And as scary is it can be to open up those dark chambers, the end result is that we come through more awake, alive, and present than before. It happens one piece at a time.

Or, we can push back the tears, and keep trying to avoid those things that stir up pains from our past. We can avoid reaching for success and thus avoid the potential pain of failure (or the pain of failures from the past.) We can avoid trusting people and thus steer clear of reliving the pain of times when people have betrayed our trust. We can avoid being close to people for fear of being left, abandoned; avoid loving people for fear of having our hearts broken.

All the greater things in life require a lot of vulnerability to experience fully. Without opening ourselves up that vulnerability, well... perhaps we can get by, for some time at least, but life just isn’t what it could be.

By crying, we help heal the pains that we carry around. Tender pieces of our being that we try to protect by shying away from the world. If a scene from a movie stirs up tears within me, I try to let them flow as best I can. I try to pay attention to what it is that it is waking up in me. It can be really hard sometimes. (Especially if there are other people around.) But I do my best to be strong and let them flow. I have absolutely nothing to loose, and nothing less than my life to gain.





movie watched tonight: Into the Wild
my rating: five stars out of five possible