
She was talking it through with people, allowing herself to feel the emotion, and when necessary, taking action with direct confrontation and taking responsibilities away from this person when they demonstrated they couldn’t be trusted.
But she was still questioning, ‘should I be totally calm before I deal with this directly? Or is this energy safe to move through my system as I take action?’
I asked her what she felt after relaying all of the information to me, and she said ‘clear.’ And I had to reflect back to her that what I felt in my body as she was talking was just a clear, but palpable energy, no blocks holding or fixating anywhere in the body. So we discussed the potential value of this observation.
When we feel anger and it’s deeply gripping in our body, to me that’s a signal that it’s bringing up some old repressed anger that is worth seeing, working with, and allowing to release/heal/integrate. It’s not yet ripe to be simply about the situation at hand. In that moment, it’s more about our own freedom, than dealing with something with the other person.
But when it’s just energy moving on through, and we can see very direct and intelligent action being called for, perhaps it’s just that. Anger wants to move.
And like all energies, it’s not personal. It’s just a movement arising in reality, and if it’s arising, then it has intelligence to it. And if it’s clearly connected to action, then we can trust it will have benefits for all.
In this instance, we could see that this was a long-standing pattern with this person of shirking responsibilities, and it was having an impact on everyone around them. To shy away from the action this energy was moving her towards would have been resistance, or suppression of an intelligent life-force.
But many of us, especially women, are quite uncomfortable, and have negative beliefs about anger. It supposedly means we’re harming others, or we’re going to get abandoned by other people, by life, if we allow it to move through us. Or much worse, to speak while we’re angry.
So the first proficiency we need to develop is to notice what anger feels like, in all of its variations. Now, this may seem like a stupid statement. ‘Of course we know what anger is,’ you may say. But what I’ve found in my own experience is that when really deeply rooted anger tries to come up out of our system, and it’s been repressed for a long long time (and some of this stuff can be ancient), it can actually come up on surface feeling like depression (as one of my teachers, Kiran Trace says ‘depression is inverted rage,’ directed in on yourself), or resistance, or just a really really intense or stuck energy. So we have to learn to keep relaxing into the presence of the moment more and more, and allowing all the layers of sensation and emotion in our body to surface bit by bit. And when you hear a little angry voice down in the depths, you move toward it with loving curiosity. Then you can start to feel how all the flavors of anger move through a nervous system. Sometimes it’s helpful to visualize something that feels destructive, like a flame coming out of your mouth, burning down something you can stomach imagining. It’s different for everyone, but we can learn to work with this energy in a way that doesn’t deplete or injure your own body, doesn’t entrench the story on top of it even more, and allows the body to feel what it’s like for anger to express and move.
Then, it’s a hell of a lot easier to stay present in your body when anger that’s truly all about the moment at hand starts to arise. As I said to my client today: you might be the person in the room most practiced with allowing yourself to be a channel of this anger, so it moved through you. It’s in the field, and the field is a collective thing, but you have the capacity to move it through and bring an intelligent solution to what’s happening here. In that way, it’s not personal, but collective, and your action will likely be of benefit to everyone involved.
We’ll see what happens for her. I’d love to hear your thoughts.