I'll huff and i'll puff and i'll blow this house down...

Yesterday was a trying day.  I'd have to say it was the emotional equivalent of having my butt buffed repeatedly by a very coarse grade of sandpaper.  Worse, in some ways, because that could only happen without my personal consent, but the situations that were challenges for me yesterday required my sanction to even BE challenges.  And that made me mad and having become angry then I became disappointed in myself and feeling disappointed then made me sad and feeling sad then made me feel hopeless and feeling hopeless made me feel impotent and feeling impotent made me feel fearful and feeling fearful then robbed me of my joy and feeling a lack of joy made me angry all over again.  Sounds like a good time, huh?  Yup.  It was an awesome pity party for one and you should be very glad you were not invited!

As a consequence of all this, I began to think a lot about anger.  Often, I judge it so harshly when I see it in myself. I was forced to admit yesterday that my ego fervently believes that I should, by now, have so much personal control that I do not allow myself to become angry.  In truth, trying to suppress the swell and awareness of this emotion is as much, if not more, of a problem than having the actual emotion.  There is a great danger, with which I came face to face, surrounding anger when one has decided to be on the path of facilitating (one's own) emerging consciousness: which is that it becomes wrapped in most beautiful paper, silver-gilded with....Major Guilt.  The Voice (you know the one I mean...the naggy, critical voice of the inner ass) says "You should know better" and you feel like shit warmed over and the lovely spin cycle I described for you above,  begins.

So: let us process this all a bit.  Yes, I am roping you in, because you know what? We share this human condition and yesterday was my day to "deal", but today may be yours.  (And I am telling you right now, I will empathize but I will also be super glad it ain't my turn AGAIN today :-) ).

Here are some of my current, hot of the press, musings on the subject of anger:
1. It is just another emotion-no more, no less than any other

2. It is no crime to feel anger- and all emotions.  In fact, it is the mark of mastery to feel each in its entirety. Not to run from them, not to hide from them, not to bury them, not to medicate them away. To totally, completely, 100% FEEL them, down to the tips of your toes. And this goes for the ones which the mind judges as being "good" (like love) AND the ones we call "bad" (like anger and grief and emotional pain).

3. We need to stand in the recognition that sometimes other people, or organizations (made up of people) behave badly and  our anger is justified. 

4. There are times thus, when, having become angry for just cause, we need to take action. Case in point: Jesus got mad at the money changers, grabbed a stick and decimated their stalls inside the temple. (Oh maaan, would I have loved to witness that...assuming of course, I was not a money-changer!)

5. In my self analysis, I see (most regrettable is vision sometimes!) that nearly all of my anger is rooted deeply in fear. And this is true both of justifiable anger and let us call it, my irrational anger...those situations in which I feel slighted that may not have had anything at all to actually do with me personally!

6. When I take an action motivated by this fear-anger combo and I am all roiled up inside, THIS is where the issue is.  I may do the exact same thing, coming from a place of conscious action rather than reaction. However, the effect of the action will be completely different. The former takes me nowhere for sure, may take a bad situation and make it exponentially worse, or at the very least, be ineffectual. 

7. So, while there is no morality (for lack of a better word in this context) in feeling anger (or any emotion): there certainly is, in the action born out of it.  Another way to express the same: I don't believe karma is incurred by registering anger, only in "acting out" instinctively and unconsciously because of it.

There is no easy way out, along this journey of self-discovery. We all have to travel the road and do the work. Thank God,  there is grace to save us when we cannot save ourselves.  Thank God there are teachers to point the way, to show us the door- but here it is, the clincher: we each have to choose to walk through it.  The opportunity for salvation and sanctity does not always come with a Big Public Bang: mostly it finds us in the teeny irritations and pin pricks and annoyances of daily life.

So, today, having survived yesterday (barely, not super gracefully!), I stand in recognition of the gift each challenge 
brings to me. Every situation, big and small, is a barometer...revealing to me from moment to moment of an ordinary life, just where I am "at" and where I need to grow. 

Even when it is humanly impossible for me to "feel" grateful for the ream of crap presented to me at times, I AM, in my heart of hearts, grateful for it because otherwise, the progress of my soul would be impossible.  And that, I know, is why I am here now, in this time and space. To elevate. To take the mud and alchemize it into lotus. To bloom. So it is for us all.

I will end now with a very touching video on "anger management" (with a side salad of Divine Masculine facilitating Divine Feminine-another blog topic, for another day).  Happy Happy Happy Day. 

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Pene Shows What To Do With Anger

Posted by James Greenshields on Sunday, March 13, 2016