The hardest thing that we face as a species is our habitual tendency to want to shove our emotions down. We are told in many ways that hard harsh emotions are not good. The solution has been to simply push them away. This winds up being a much bigger problem than the emotion in the first place! Psychologists all know about the idea that an emotion that is suppressed only comes back far worse later. This can lead each of us into neurosis-disease of the mind and emotions. The answer is simple and takes a shift in how you relate to your emotions.
Anger is a natural emotion, and one of the hardest for us to deal with constructively. It is also one of the most intense of our emotions because it is so driven by energy. Anger uses a lot of energy and when it is pushed down, you are pushing a lot of feeling down into your subconscious self where it only festers and gets worse over time. This can come back as emotional problems like anxiety and depression, or even disease over time. Suppressed anger can change your physiology in ways that you do not notice, small changes, but given enough time, can result in very real physical problems. Adrenaline and cortisol are two very powerful chemicals in the body that relate both to fear and anger. They can deplete the body of a whole range of very important nutrients. When this is allowed to go on for a long time, decades, the result is something that can emerge later in life as a chronic problem. It is important, then, to learn how to deal with anger constructively and not push it down.
When you get angry, let yourself feel the emotion. When you feel anger, remind yourself that the emotion is not you, it is a phenomenon like the wind blowing through you. Let it be like the wind and think of it flowing through you. What you do not want to do is to direct your anger at a person, because this can be hurtful to others. You also do not want to fall into the trap of defining yourself in relationship to your emotions because this means that you ARE anger. You aren't. Anger is an emotion that you feel. We call emotions because they are in-motion. So let it BE that for you. When you are angry, practice being clear with yourself that this is your reaction to outward events. It is not who you are. By associating so closely with anger, you allow yourself to be defined by it. When you do this, you are no longer the master, but the slave. Slaves will then complain about just how terrible the world is to them. I ask you: is this a good way to live? There is indeed a much better way to be.
Do not treat your anger as an entitlement. You are not angry because someone made you angry. No one makes you. You make you. You are angry because of your reaction to what someone else has done. Be clear about this one important point no matter how much you might want to make it the other person's problem. It isn't the other person's problem. It is yours. Own it. The world may be a terrible place with mean hard people, but without you, there would be no reaction to it. You are simply reacting. Own your reactions. When you are more mature and developed, you will grow enough to see that the world is the way it is for reasons that, if understood, would change how you see any "problem" in it.
By taking offense to something outside of you, you are trying to make your reaction someone else's problem. It isn't. The person who was short with you earlier and cut you off in mid-sentence may have had a drama playing out in their lives which you are not privy to. They might have been hurting inside from something that is happening in their lives, they might have been terribly late for their next appointment. it could be anything. Try not to let things become so personal. When you identify so strongly with "I" you have trouble. Most often, it isn't so personal as you tend to make it. When you can do this, you will find that your reactions to others is greatly decreased by owning your feelings and letting things go. The other side to this is that you wind up taking a banner against what angers you and you will very soon be using your anger to hurt many people, and you will wonder what is wrong with everyone around you. After all, your identification with your anger has blinded and blocked you.
Allow anger to flow but do not direct it at people. If you do, you will hurt them and then the effort of letting anger flow will have created more problems than they have solved. By letting anger flow, it will move through you and will not become subsumed within. Do not capture or trap anger or else it will come back in larger uglier forms later. Anger can build up like an account that you pay into each day. Later, the account will be so full that you will be paralyzed by the sheer mass of your anger and you will feel helpless to the power that you feel it has over you. Anger will lead to emotional blocks in your body and awareness that can have very troubling effects, from hampering your relationships to harming your physical health. You will also be very difficult to be around.
Children know very well how to deal with anger. One minute, they are red in the face, their eyes are filled with rage, and the next minute, they are completely different, wanting to grab your hand and get into your lap, smiling all the while. They are done with it, you see, and they do not think any more about what had just happened. This is how we should deal with anger, too. So let it flow.
By following these simple set of ways of dealing with anger you can allow anger to move through you without hurting other people, and you will not be harmed either. Let anger be a storm for you, a storm that will naturally pass as all storms do. When you do, the sky of your inner environment will be fresh and clean after this emotion has been allowed to blow through you. Most of the problems related to how we deal with anger are themselves the very root of our problems, so do not let business as usual capture you. Like every storm that comes, it will leave you feeling clearer and ready to feel happy again.
When we are confronted with the brutality of the world, with an unjust act made upon another, we often act with outrage, anger, and will often want to visit the same or worse injustice upon the person who has done such a horrible deed.
And its sometimes, often, a knee jerk reaction. I know that I do it, have done it, in the past. I still do. And yet, concurrent with this is also something that has been with me since I was young, which is a very different reaction or impulse....which is that for as long as we simply react with an eye for an eye, we never really ever get to the root of the problem that caused such terrible things to take place to begin with.
Today while coming across the story of the Goddess, I also was confronted with a terrible image of pure brutality of a child that had been beaten and raped by her father. The sheer rawness of this image was used as a way to drive home the point of something happening with one rather misled politician who has suggested that a woman's body has the power to fight of getting pregnant. I know little more than this because, quite simply, I do not watch the news or most of popular information out there. But it does filter in from time to time and I am aware of this flap that has occurred. The point here is that instead of feeling outrage as I have in the past, I only felt very very sad. I felt sad for the girl that this happened to. But I also felt sad for the man who did this to her. In our anger and sheer rage, we lose sight of the deeper issue that is true that will not get addressed as long as we seek an eye for an eye.
We have to get to the core of suffering and pain.
Now I know, its very hard to have compassion for a human being that so willfully seeks to do harm. But what I know without any equivocation is that this man suffers from something that is not native to his soul. I KNOW what the soul is made of and I KNOW the soul is love. I have always believed that people were good underneath all of this bad. But absent any good answers, we are left with just wanting to raise pitch forks into the air and join a lynch mob. Our own hurt and suffering drives us to strike back. But what we do in that moment is to record upon the heart of the world one more heinous act regardless of the reason for why we feel we are justified in doing so. Even if it is bad, or even evil. It still does not change what we ourselves have written upon the breast of the earth and which has now been burned into our souls.
No one in their soul self would do such a terrible thing. They wouldn't. So the answer is in becoming aware of that soul self so the love can shine to heal all our cracked, fractured, and even broken parts. We need a force that can such out the poison that has leached into our bones and that has turned us from divine into destitute and wounded amnesic angels. I ask you, which is better: to strike back at a person who had done harm so that it no longer lives in our world or seek to heal that soul so that no more hurt like that person? The answer inevitably is that we have tried to rehabilitate people and it just does not work. Just now I realized that my grandfather actually believed, I think, similarly. He was called upon to help fashion the parole system in the state of Virginia. As a result of this work he did, he was given the job of supervising a series of boys homes that were being created in order to address the problem of minors who were considered delinquents who had gotten into repeated trouble but who could not, because of the law, be tried as adults. My grandfather had the power to say what he wanted to see in terms of how these schools or homes were set up. He said he wanted each school to have land that could be farmed. He wanted these boys to farm the land and learn where the food came from. He wanted to give them a very structured life because he knew they had gone wrong through a lack of structure. He also wanted to have a system in place that provided a positive feedback for behaving, thus certain privileges were provided and boys would receive promotions within the system. What resulted was the lowest rate of recidivism of any correctional facility in the state. While it did not have a perfect record, it did show that there are ways to retrieve the souls of our youth and help them become the people that wont wind up in trouble again.
The problem that we have is that we say once a child has gotten to a certain age, 18, that its nobodies responsibility to try and raise them. Some people want this to fall upon some agency. Most often, though, people just get housed because the resources required are seen as taking away from other more important needs like education, roads, or health care. Besides, why would we spend any more than we have to on a lot of people who are the worst of the worst? The answer is that until we do, the cancer of this will continue to spread. Fathers will beat their children senseless because they were likewise beaten senseless and thus have no check on their anger. I grew up in a family where I lived in fear of an angry stepfather, and I know the rage and hurt that can live inside when these kinds of things happen, but long after that person is gone the hurt festers and remains. So who is hurting whom in such a situation? We do. We hold onto that hurt, that sense of justification in something that belongs to the past. I ask; what good does this serve? What good is served in erecting an altar to such pain and misery? And what does it solve? We tell ourselves that in memorializing the hurt, we remind ourselves never to have such hurt in the world. And yet, it never works this way. This is a false belief in how we think things will go. Instead, we keep the echo active and it bounces inside of us until we excise it from our hearts and souls. We do not cut it out, we do not even beat it out of ourselves. We do not do push ups or run marathons or become president to prove how much better we are. We merely use the rage to fuel other activities that never get us beyond the rage burning inside. We can use the rage to bring awareness, but at some point the rage has to stop and the real work begins. And this has only ever happened in my experience when we do one simple thing; we forgive. We let it go. This is nothing short of miracle work because it means that we let that person off the hook. We let them off the hook because as long as they are on the hook, so are we. Its true. It will always be like this. Always. So you get to the end of your rope with the rage and hurt and then what is left? There is nowhere to go. You have to let that rope slip from your fingers and you let yourself forget about it. Completely.
When this happens, a most amazing thing takes place. You feel utter relief. In that moment you suddenly see things differently. its like you have been holding something inside for so long that you forgot how badly it hurt. You feel so much better as a result. In this place, all of the old concerns and positions simply fade away as this thing in you becomes a distant memory. And this happens very fast. You pull a stick out of the mud and the water rushes in around it and in a few moments, it is as if it had never even been there.
But how do we address the suffering of others? Again, this is tricky because as long as we are on a crusade, we aren't really interested in reforming others. Reforming others is more a moment of inspiration. It is in fact, a gift from the Goddess that resides in each of us. She calls to each of us to listen if we will but allow ourselves. She takes us into her heart and it is her presence that will suck out all the poison in our lives. Just her mere presence will do this. But to feel it, you have to reach a place where you are ready. Its not even an idea or an imagining. It is very real and powerful. We don't know how real it can be because we have quite simply banished her from our lives. But she is returning, and she returns not on some cloud from heaven but within each of us, from the inside out. What she brings is grace and in that grace there is forgiveness. What you will discover in that moment when you are inspired by her great and nurturing presence is not that you need to forgive someone else, but that you needed to forgive yourself. Here, in this place, comes the recognition, the absolutely undeniable reality that everything that has ever happened, we have had a hand in. But we cannot and will not know or feel or see it for ourselves until we reach that place where we can feel HER. Her grace. Her nurturing and forgiving presence. IN her arms, we relax and utterly let go. And that is what she is about; letting go. She alone is capable of embracing the mystery. It isn't our masculine that does this. Its true. He is something very different, and yet each of these two forces were designed to be one. To work together. He can illuminate, but she can allow you to be comfortable with not knowing. Sometimes knowing only keeps the awareness active of what has been before. Let her drop down around you like a vast landscape full of stars and a slip of moon rising. She will quietly pull all the pain and poison from you as you slump into her arms, utterly incapable of knowing how to hold onto that old rope. Her presence will soften your grip as you fall....
We only will help others when we can inspire them to do the work necessary, I am afraid. We cannot simply right a wrong at the end of some pitchfork. We may continue doing it, but this does not mean that the condition of the world gets any better. At some point, we have to bring love into the equation because it was because of a lack of love all the way around that things have gotten the way they have. There is always a reason for why people do bad things, and it will always go straight back to love. A robber robs because he or she does not feel like they have enough nor do they feel like they have the means to get it on their own. Otherwise, they would. Somehow, they feel like they have to make a shortcut. Some steal out of desperation because they have not good answers to a very bad situation. It is a lack of love that will blind someone selling methamphetamine about the consequences of such an activity, for love will most certainly open you to the ramifications of such things. Acting out of our own unresolved rage, we hurt others never stopping to think what the result of acting on that rage will have on them. There is a better way; let the rage out but don't let the rage out on others. It does not belong to others, it belongs to you. let your anger and hurt out of you. Yell into the darkness, take a hammer and beat an old wooden stump to powder. Allow the echo of that hurt, all that nervous energy out of you. It is widely known now that such actions does have a result on our neurophysiology and can allow us to lessen and release those old blocks. And if it does not seem to help, keep on doing it. Do it each day if you have to. Pray before that old dead stump and explain that you are seeking to let all this junk ooze down into the earth where the grace of our Mother can transmute it for us. She can. And she will. But you have to be focused on wanting it gone.
I am not going to pretend that the world's problems will go away tomorrow if you do this. This is not going to be something that is healed in a twinkling. it will be healed person to person. But as each person does heal, it inspires others bit by bit. It changes the signal in the matrix of our collective human soul on the planet. And when the time comes, we will also learn how to cleanse the earth and rid ourselves of this old energy once and for all. But until then, the change must happen with you. Then, as each person does this, the energy changes. its a big hill we have to climb, but just as Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the hill his people had to climb to reach the promised land, his efforts did not go wanting. Things DID change, and it changed because people took it upon themselves to do so. Person by person. Person by person they locked arms as they took that now-famous walk from Selma to Montgomery Alabama.
We have a long walk, but each journey begins with the first step. We don't even need know the way, but trust that we will get there. What we need is someone who can inspire us, someone who has already seen the Promised Land. I know what that land looks like. I know its touch, its taste, and feel. Its the only place we need go or know in order to heal the wounds of the world. It is not a specific answer, but a broad pronouncement that there is nothing that hurts you that cannot be healed. If you come to HER you will be healed. Just get to the end of your rope and cry out for HER. That is about all you need to do. The world will conspire with you to get you to the end of your rope and it will also conspire to see to it that you also succeed in letting go.
I do a lot to support positive feelings and positive states. Sometimes we ascribe a negative connotation to emotions like anger. One the one hand, this is accurate, but its not the whole story. So today I am going to suggest a radical approach, but one that can work wonders for you if you can use it in a productive, not destructive way. Anger can be used in a very productive way to release a lot of feelings that you might not be able to do otherwise. There is a tendency to see anger as one emotion that is best left alone in spiritual practice, as though it is a coarser emotion that will somehow overtake us or ruin us.
Anger is a powerful emotion, no doubt about it. Behind anger is the sheer force of energy that is being expressed in what we know to be anger. Energy is energy, and how it is expressed is also how it is experienced. There is a very positive side to anger in truth, and it can be very cathartic. Its a strong force because of how it is being expressed, so I would say do not be afraid to feel anger, but like a loaded gun, consider where you are pointing it.
I have gotten very angry recently. I have allowed myself to just let the anger flow instead of keeping it pent up. No one else was around. I was not kicking the cat (I never kick the cat!), I was just letting it flow in a very empty house. Behind it, though, I could also feel a lot of nervous energy. Letting it out also let out a lot of pent up energy. That which is repressed gets expressed as dysfunction. Anger can be used in a productive way instead of its usual destructive way that serves to hurt others (because we ourselves feel like someone has hurt us for example...) and this anger is used like a violent flame that burns with great intensity but not out of control. Sometimes, anger can play an important role in healing. Arthur Janov developed an effective way to help people with this pent up emotion through his Primal Therapy (there is a link to his site on the side bar to the right of this post). This is what most people know as Primal Scream Therapy. You might think it silly, but it taps something that allows us to get to the root of some hard issues. Turns out my own mother used Primal Therapy years ago in order to get at a very old issue from her early childhood. It works because it admits that sometimes we are like a volcano with all this fire in us that needs to be let out.
When you deal with anger, you let it flow through you without hurting anyone by not focusing your anger on another person. This energy is real, and if you connect someone into that stream, you do them and yourself real harm by wishing to use such a powerful force on them. Even in their absence. All of this flows through the universe, everything is connected by this vast inner-net that is the All. So be careful. Be angry, yes, but own your anger and do not put it onto another. They will feel it in some form or another if you do. The feeling can help guide you to a still deeper issue or truth that is inside of you which is causing the anger in the first place. Until you deal with the anger, you are merely erupting over and over without getting deeper. I am giving you permission to move through the anger to go still deeper inside of yourself.
By doing this, I am also going to caution you not to go at this in a mental way. Let yourself go. Allow yourself to FEEL. Don't expect some outcome. Let the feeling be the end. If you do this, you will release your limiting mental process and become much more open to what lies beneath. I am going to suggest to you that its entirely possible that you haven't a clue what lies beneath. It could be an utter surprise. It could actually be incredibly peaceful, but you will never know when there is all of this magma lying atop it distorting the view deeper down. Remove, then, all thoughts of what might be or should be or expectations. Be in the moment. Be open, and be free. FEEL. Then let feeling guide you. Most issues are so irrational the mind isn't going to be of any help to you anyway. You see what I mean? Don't be afraid not to know. Be curious. Give yourself over to feeling. The anger is a force like wind blowing through you. If you see it in a positive way, your awareness will tend to move through it in a more positive way.
The positive character to anger is that it helps you to recognize what needs to change. It can be a powerful catalyst for helping you to understand what your own issues are. This happens most constructively when you realize that what bothers you is also what you happen to mirror in the world. You are not the victim in all of this. As long as we remain the victim, we turn away from the full truth of the universe, of our lives, and our own truth as sovereign beings here.
But it doesn't mean that you LIKE what you mirror. In fact, it can get you so mad and upset that you want to tear your hair out, stamp around and even scream. Maybe yell. See, all of the things you have shoved down inside get registered in your energy field, your nervous system, and they even nestle down into your physical tissues (this is what is behind Rolfing as a type of massage....it pushes that material out of your tissues). All of this is connected. Each body, from the energy body to the nerve body to the flesh body system, all are connected and deal with the load of this junk in their own ways. But its there. Its why movement is so important in healing energetic problems. It is why I cover it in my book as part of knowing how to alleviate these old problems. Chi Gong helps, massage can help, and even acupuncture can have an effect. But so can exercise.
Movement helps the body to find a way to dispense with these old issues recorded in our bodies. The violence of anger can also be the raging storm that cleanses the energy field and body when it is not directed on another person. You can let its powerful force move through you and clear out all the tension that has been built up. I would even say that movement that is akin to throwing a fit could very well be a fast and effective way to clear the energy lines in your body and all its represents as it reaches down through the vibratory frequency of the denser dimension of the physical body. The trick is to let your body move along with your feelings. You might need to go outside for this. Be careful; you don't want to break anything or be destructive.
So be angry. Get mad as hell, but admit that you are mad because you are unhappy with how your life has gone, not because you are some victim. If you keep the victim energy out of it and you keep others out of it, anger can be the flame that can burn in a cleansing way. We are often afraid to even FEEL anger, but it can serve a very useful purpose if we do not focus it outwardly towards another. Many fear anger as a force that can help to clear away stuck emotion. Many eschew anger because they have been taught it is to be avoided. By confronting your anger, in letting it flow in the most natural of ways without pushing it down or denying it, you face it and you flow with it. Let the energy be spent. Burn away the fuel that resides in you, let it burn itself out. Once this has been done, look and listen quietly within yourself for what remains. What lies beneath it? This is the promise that this path offers. It is a path you do not need to trod often. Do not make it a habit. Be honest with yourself and let the anger flow, do not bottle it up. When you bottle anger, it can devolve into depression. Like anything else, you can choose to utilize this force wisely or not wisely. Be natural. Admit how you feel. Go into the feeling not to marinate in it, but to learn to master yourself. There is a difference between letting anger control you and letting anger out. I know intimately what happens when anger is bottled up and allowed to vent. It is a slow burning fire that causes the container to bubble over.....over and over. I have known people who have put a lid on all of this without dealing with the source of the anger and this merely became a pot that would explode ever few weeks. This is going on even now as far as I know.....until its root cause is dealt with. To get behind the anger, you must confront the anger. Anger is a tiger that looks ten feet tall. It is a lynx that is only a fifth of that.
There is a great old method that feels pretty good to me that I think is rooted in my connection to the Native American path. In the old days people would dig a hole and they would then put all of their anger into that hole. They would just sit and yell and scream, letting all that energy bleed out into the earth. You might think that this might create a repository of anger into the earth that is not good for the earth. Ah, now that might make sense at first blush, but when you get into the energy that is Gaia, you will perhaps see how the consciousness of the earth is built on an energy of transformation. In her earthly core, she is molten. Her molten state creates a field of electromagnetic energy that penetrates through every living thing on the planet. And while yes, your anger is moved through those lines of force, it is also transmuted. Also, anger itself is not a bad thing. It is a very intense energy, yes, and it can be a hard emotion when we focus it on others, but when it is not focused on others, it is more like the molten eruption of a volcano. Stand back because it can hurt you, but if you watch what grows from a volcano, you will see it also has important life giving properties. A volcano while a force of destruction is also a force of creation also.
So let your inner volcano out. Imagine it like a pure flow of fire. Feel it flow out of your mouth as you scream. Let its lava flows move out from you, not AT anyone. Let its fire flow out into the very natural world around you. Let your own frustration and anger move out of you because if you do, this can lead to a place in you where the flowers can grow.At the foot of each volcano is an incredibly verdant slope. Just like real volcanos, our own inner volcano can leave room for new growth. The earth knows what anger is, for she erupts in the same way in violent forms from storms to volcanic eruptions, land slides, earthquakes and tsunamis. All of these things seem destructive, but are also at their heart creative. The difference here is that every time you have an issue, you don't immediately move to anger because that can become a crutch and can also be just destructive. Destroy, year down yourself if you must, but only you are the one being so reordered. Neither destroy out of self loathing or hatred of the self. Anger can help you to see that what you were angry about was merely inside of you. Anger will help you to eject all the pent up energy that you need to get out that wont ever be gotten out with matras and gentle songs. It wont. Here, you are destroyer, but a sacred destroyer. Let the vast force of earth move through you for a higher purpose. Shake off your shell, slip out of that constraining skin. Let anger work in the most positive of ways.
This might seem foreign to you. Scary even. I ask you, then to think about this a little differently. Think about how you feel when you are really hungry. Once you get food, you chew it up sometimes in an action that can only be termed violent. Eating could be seen this way, yes. It must destroy in order to create. We do not eat dirt, we eat living things. This is a fact, and no amount of vegetarianism will change the reality that we must eat living things in order to survive. So even the once alive plants must give up their existence so that we may have ours. Anger can be much like this, except instead of chewing up the world, destroying the world, we are eating those things inside of us that no longer serve us, that annoy us, that hurt and harm us. We are the snake that sheds and then eats its skin.
Another way you can relate to this is how you might feel when you are exerting yourself in a very physical way. Working out in a sustained way will most often bring about a state of anger, something that might be called body anger. We push through the pain and the fatigue in order to achieve some new physical goal. Maybe its topping a difficult hill running or on a bike. Maybe its 60 push ups. Maybe its lifting an extra 40 pounds on weight equipment. Maybe its hoeing a row of dirt in making the garden. We push through the difficulty in order to reach the goal. And this is in some ways how anger is. We push through it. We exert, we allow the body to burn and in so doing, we begin releasing pent up anxiety, fear, and all sorts of other things that are unique to each person. Anger is an increase in your spiritual metabolism for a very specific purpose. As in nature, very few events like this last for long. It is a violent action that serves to establish equilibrium.
The goal in this, though, is to remove the issue that is embedded in you. If you do not do this, you have only trimmed the bush, you have not dug it up. It will continue to grow. This is important because there are plenty of people who use anger as a relief valve without ever emptying the cask of its contents and starting anew. Because of this, the cask continues to build up pressure periodically and the valve is opened through a burst of anger that most often is directed at other people. This is not the productive way of dealing with this. If you are merely reacting, you are not learning to create in a new more productive way. Use anger, do not let anger use you. If you do this, you fall into the trap of suddenly being the victim. You are not the victim, remember? You are here to master this. Let anger be your ally in a controlled burst of emotion and then let it cleanse you.
I am not big on methods. I create my own sometimes on the spot in an intuitive way and they work very well for me. There is no magic in others' methods unless you ascribe that magic to them. Sometimes a method is very good at helping you to relate to a certain feeling, and in this way someone else's method could work very well. I know we like to have them from others when we think they will work for us. What I would like to explain is that your consciousness is naturally creative. If you can realize that any method that helps you to tap deep into emotion will naturally be effective. The way to fashion your own method is to find what works for you. What images help you to relate to anger? How can you imagine that anger erupting from you. Is it a volcano? A giant storm with thunder and lightening? Is it strong enough to break out the weaker branches in the trees of your awareness? Can this image help to sweep away al the dead wood of your being and bring you a feeling of freshness and cleansing? Or does a tsunami suit you better? Do you imagine it rushing up onto land, clearing the decks entirely and taking everything in its path back out to sea? Can you imagine this force in you so purely that you do not need images? If you can relate to the feeling in a full way, it is very likely to work more deeply.
Okay. So you let the anger out. Sometimes this will work all on its own. I am going to suggest that you also try after the storm has passed to become very calm and quiet. Sit quietly and ask yourself how you feel. Reflect into yourself now that the storm has passed. Can you feel something different now inside of yourself? With that layer of anger removed for the time being, can you peer quietly like looking into a crystal gazing pool more clearly? I want you to pretend that you are looking at a pond or pool or ocean depths after moving through this anger. Quiet and calm, reflect on what you see. What you see, though, will be what you feel. Beyond simply feeling spent, what have your found deeper still? Do you suddenly realize that what was making you angry was because of how you had allowed yourself to get yourself into situations that weren't good for you? Did you WANT to make someone else responsible for hurting you? Or maybe you do not understand why something happened that made you angry. Sitting still, asking yourself what the answer is, can you see anything float up into your awareness that shows itself? If you take time to pause and reflect, this can be a productive time to see some issues in a new light. But don't worry if you don't. Trust feeling. It sometimes offers answers not on our expected schedule but in its own time.
Now that I have said all of this, I hope that it helps you to see anger in a new light. By honoring it, letting it flow, you do not become a slave to it because its purpose is to cleanse you. Let it do its work. Maybe you do this with some physical activity. Perhaps you go out and find old dead branches in the woods and take an axe to them, chopping them up, letting your anger flow down into the earth. Do not be destructive in the old way, but harness the power for your own transformation. Sometimes yelling at no one in particular does the trick. And the trick is in not focusing it on another. In the movie Network, the character played by Peter Finch tells everyone to go to the window and yell "I'm as mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!" It turned out, the whole world had all this pent up anger about the way things were. In the clip below you might get a chuckle but also a view into how we can use anger in a productive way....
