Tears to Triumph:. Dawn Marie Daniels

in another way. One proud woman we spoke to who said she hasn’t cried in years over anything did say whenever she feels down or stressed, she eats. When we interviewed her, she actually had to take a moment and reflect on her own pattern and said she had to end the interview because she felt like crying!

      Some dream experts say that if you can’t cry in the light of day, you may just cry out in the night. The worry about your finances that you experience during the day and are unable to release can manifest itself in a dream. You may find yourself crying in the dream about the loss of your dog, but dream experts say it is likely that you are crying about your finances—they only look like a dog. Somehow your mind needs to release the negative emotions that you are feeling, and if you consciously don’t allow your mind to take a break, unconsciously your mind is so powerful that it will take over and do what it needs to purge itself. You can’t keep your guard up all the time, and the tears will come tumbling down sooner or later. Tears have been shown to have cleansing positive properties and can help stabilize our bodies after a traumatic event. Tears not only serve a physiological purpose, they have an even bigger purpose in helping to shape our lives.

      Tears to Triumph

      No matter if you shed tears or not, we know that there is triumph for everyone. How you use your tears and trials to create transformative breakthroughs for yourself is what matters. Remember, we must use our tears for a purpose. Cry if you need to reboot and consider new ways to look at and change the experiences in your life.

      II

      Creating Purposeful Tears

      Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

      —Helen Keller, American author and political activist

      Successful women don’t deny the pain of their past, they own up to it and use it to their advantage. Like a cloak of armor that shields us from future trauma, each of our unique stories creates in us a woman who is stronger, wiser, and more resourceful—not despite what she has gone through, but because of it.

      Your Fairy Tale

      Think of any fairy tale and we all think about the unattainable process of living happily every after, but if you think about it, those fairy-tale women might have earned their happily ever after. Each of them had to deal with some curse or trial that was placed on them. Goldilocks fled the grizzlies; Rapunzel had bad hair days and people using her locks as a ladder—ouch; Sleeping Beauty was afflicted with disabling somnolence; and so on. Those fairy tales might have been told only once and never again if someone had said, “There once was a girl named Cinderella. She was born into riches and then married the prince. The end!” It doesn’t work that way. We are interested in stories of challenges because they share a lesson. We know how it worked out for the Disney princesses, so let’s see how it goes for us.