I used to get angry easily and often. as a matter of fact as I look back and recall, I see that I was always slightly angry; i had a rough and raw edge about me that I wasn’t even aware of. It was so constant and normal I didn’t see it.
With enough awareness work, I have found that today I’m rarely angry and its not from suppressing or denying it-when I used to do that, I’d explode unpredictably with rage. I haven’t raged in a long long time.
When I begin to feel angry or irritated, frustrated etc, I stop and breathe and then lower myself into the more accurate feeling; I am scared. I believe that under anger and grief and other uncomfortable or debilitating feelings, lies fear...always fear. Fear of losing something essential to your well being or survival. Fear of not getting, or never getting what you want and think you need. Fear of yourself; self criticism, self shaming or that you will never figure out how to truly accept life on life's terms, i, e; reality and achievr a sustainable equilibrium and serenity.
But I’ve even learned how to let go of fear because each time it arises it challenges my faith in a loving higher power, a power that I trust will continue to provide me everything I really do need (as it always has). It’s not always easy to trust the universe. But when I am in pain, anger, or fear I am clearly resisting and rejecting some aspect of reality be it, weather, other people’s actions, politics or even more insidiously, my own feelings and thoughts-I can be rejecting me and that is perhaps the scariest fear of them all.
So what I mostly work on today and I must it is conscious work to detach with awareness, is my own self rejection based on this idea that before i can relax and love and accept myself fully, the world must be or I must be a certain way.
I have found for myself that anger does have it’s positive place as a catalyst to awaken me to a real threat; either physically or emotionally. The response to that anger is the same as the response to putting your hand on a hot stove; you remove your hand. And in the case of anger, I have choices of how I am going to protect myself from that “heat”. It may mean changing locations or relationships or my own attitude. But I’m not a powerless victim of my anger; I can explore it and follow it to it’s real source and then resolve it by loving and taking care of myself.
