I've described before the way I'm so shut off from my emotions, and how I find it so hard to cry.  Therapy is helpinjg me a lot with that, since my therapist is "teaching" me how to express emotions he can sense I'm holding inside, by "modeling" these for me.  But it's still so hard to connect with my emotions sometimes, and sometimes I feel apart from myself and dissociated as if I'm watching someone else.   I tend to intellectualize everything to death, including my own emotions.  (This sort of dissociation is due to complex PTSD and other things too).    Being a person who derives incredible pleasure from my own tears, not being able to cry kind of flies in the face of that, and it can be VERY frustrating!  I'm still waiting to cry in front of my therapist....I cannot wait. 
In my sessions, I'm so, so aware of the emotional blocks that manifest as large knots that plug up my throat, heart and the pit of my stomach, behind which decades worth of tears have been dammed up.   Sometimes their inability to push their way past that emotional wall leads to a dull ache in these parts of my body....I can certainly understand why holding back tears can lead people to develop cancer and other diseases.  

Since my last session, I've been feeling sad...and worried about a few things happening in my life right now.   Being nostalgic can make me cry, and music in particular is a powerful tear starter for me,  I was feeling a bittersweet longing for the time in my life before everything went wrong...and played music that reminded me of happier times.   Then I lay down on my bed and covered myself with a thin blanket (for the womb-like environment I subconsciously crave.)  and just tried to relax into my feelings and focus in on the blockages.   This is very much like chakra work; in fact it really is chakra work:  my blockages are in the solar plexus (upper abdomen), chest area (heart chakra) and throat (6th, or throat chakra).    

The poignant music has a way of melting the hard areas that hold in all the tears, and when I focus on these areas and think about the emotion (or emotions) that are trapped in these places, with the waves of music enhancing these emotions and making them overwhelming enough that my body can no longer contain them.
This is what happens in your body when it gets ready to have a cleansing cry (other kinds of tears work a bit differently depending on the reasons for them) and I could feel it happening to me.

I foused on the physical changes my body was undergoing--and crying doesn't just involve the face and throat and eyes, a cleansing cry involves the entire body.   I felt my breath quicken, and as the first tears began to burn the backs of my eyelids I focused on them beginning to flood my eyes.   I blinked and thick, glycerine-like tears (those caused by emotion)  coated my lashes and as they accumulaed, began to fall slowly across my cheeks. First there were only two tears from my left eye and one from my right.  I felt their warm wetness as they spilled across my cheeks toward my ears (I was rolled over on my back) and I imagined them to be a gentle mother's touch.  My tears were a beautiful gift of self-nurturing and a way to nurture others using tears to show empathy.  I'm not ready to share them yet (except in these obs and the two photos I posted today) but I can enjoy the way they provide both comfort and release.  

I rolled on my side and the tears came faster, dripping steadily from both eyes.  My nose was red and running but I didn't care.  Because I was rolled on my right side, the tears from my left eye pooled  in the crevice between the corner of my eye and the bridge of my nose; when about 10 or 12 of them had accumulated there and formed a large glob, they suddenly spilled all at once across my nose and into the pillow and some of my hair where the right side of my face rested.  I didn't wipe them away but cherished them.   This happened several more times.  My breathing now was deep, steady but ragged, the precursor of real sobs, still trapped inside but getting closer to burst forth any time now.

Every so often I'd hold myself and rock myself with my knees pulled up to my chest, feeling the streams of tears spilling in different directions across my face as I rocked back and forth, my knees pulled up to my chest.  Exhausted but feeling amazing, I fell asleep for about a half hour.  When I woke the tears had mostly dried, leaving salty tracks on my face, except for two small droplets that had not yet dried on my cheeks.  
Feeling overcome with all kinds of emotions all at once,  fresh tears welled up and spilled.

This entire process lasted about 3 hours today.  I must have shed at least 100 tears.  
It sounds incredibly weird to say this was one of the most spiritually profound -- and highly arousing-- experiences I've had in a long time.
The pictures are posted under Member's First Tears Photos.  I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to link to it or not.