What’s your relationship with anger?
Do you tell yourself that “I’m just not an angry person”?
Do you have out-of-control explosive anger?
Something in between?
Maria talks about her profound journey with anger here:
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!
I just finished the Rage on Annihilation and my life has been forever changed in the best way possible.
Not the easiest, not the least painful, but the best for my life.
It is so obvious now that all the “stuff” I’ve been feeling for decades and decades is anger. Just like you I was proud of my lack of anger.
I’ve convinced myself that my anger is hurt, or sadness, or something else acceptable.
As a kid I was sent to my room and not allowed out until I could turn my anger into happiness. Even if I displayed anything close to anger I was sent to my room. Obviously I spent a lot of time in my room until I was old enough to learn how to shove that energy down and put on a smile.
After working with the Rage today and energy is coming up I’m realizing it’s just anger. And when I’m able to acknowledge it truthfully as anger … this tremendous peace comes over me. So deeply profound I have no words for it.
This new ability to reprocess energy just might be the best thing to truly let me live a peaceful life. A life I had given up hope on having.
Such a profound realization and wouldn’t have happened without you and Rageheart.
As always I stand in awe of the work.
I’ve written about anger before (here, here, here and here) but this story from Maria gets to the heart of it.
Depending on how we were raised, we may have learned that anger is bad, wrong, evil, immoral or unspiritual.
If we unconsciously believe anger is bad or have some kind of negative association with it, we’ll suppress our own anger simply because we don’t want to be bad.
Then we believe that we’re “just not an angry person”.
That was me.
The problem is…
Our anger (or rather, our healthy aggression) is the same energy that gets us to push through resistance and fight for what we believe in.
In other words, if we can’t feel our anger, we’ll struggle with motivation. We’ll procrastinate more. And when fear, doubt and resistance show up, we’ll submit to their control instead of kicking their pretty little asses.
We’ll find it harder to stand up for ourselves. It’ll be harder to set boundaries (or know what our boundaries are).
If this anger goes unacknowledged and unexpressed for long enough, it can turn into self-hate. That is, since the anger isn’t getting expressed externally, it eventually expresses internally.
What does it say?
You tell me…
If you were furious with someone, what would you say?
Maybe you’d tell them that they’re a piece of shit or that they suck or that they don’t deserve to be happy. You’d tell them that they’re an asshole. You might scream at them
So what happens when suppressed anger expresses internally?
Negative self-talk, of course.
You suck.
You’re a piece of shit.
You’ll never make it.
But that’s not all…
There’s also the fact that anger keeps your body in fight-or-flight. That means you’ll feel perpetually “activated”, or to use the more common term, anxious.
Anxiety doesn’t necessarily indicate fear.
Sometimes it indicates unacknowledged and unexpressed anger. That anger jams up your nervous system and keeps you in fight-or-flight. The symptoms of anxiety – racing heart, funny feeling in your stomach, hyper-vigilance, etc – are just symptoms of being in fight-or-flight (aka. Survival Mode).
That’s a bit about why suppressing anger leads to problems.
Now let’s look at what happens when it’s freed up to be felt and expressed…
All of a sudden, your energy increases.
You’re more motivated. More driven.
You’re more likely to stand up for yourself and fight for what you believe in.
You finally realize that you have boundaries… and that your body tells you what those boundaries long before your mind does.
You procrastinate less and get more done.
That project you’ve been thinking of for a while but haven’t gotten around to doing it?
You finally get it moving.
And now, that weight that was on your shoulders ain’t there no more.
You feel lighter. More free. More empowered to do whatever the hell you want to do.
You start sleeping better, what… with less anger in your system keeping you in fight-or-or-flight, your nervous system can relax and you can actually sleep the night through.
That means you have more energy when you wake up in the morning. More excitement and joy for the day ahead and without slamming your system with caffeine.
You’re more confident… more assertive… stronger, tougher and more unfuckwithable…
…not because you don’t feel but BECAUSE you feel.
In other words…
This feeling thing that I’m on about doesn’t make you weak or soft or broken. It makes you STRONG. Stronger than you can imagine.
As for where to start…
Anger is powerful and it’s not usually where this nervous system journey begins.
First, we need to increase your capacity and knowledge… and that starts with these emails. Learning about the nervous system after a lifetime of being in the dark. It always starts there, with the map of the territory.
Then as the map starts to make sense, next come the techniques. Orienting to the safety in the environment. Using sensations of ground, environment and breath to drop your awareness into your body. Using movement to further ingrain deep embodiment and integrate the practices. Sound. Kidneys. Adrenals. On and on it goes.
And then, when something arises into your awareness (like it did with Maria), now you know how to be with it without suppressing it, controlling it or changing it in any way. Now you can finally give yourself what you’ve wanted your entire life:
Unconditional presence.
Some call it love… but we can also call it availability.
Being truly, totally, wholeheartedly available for whatever wants to move in your experience, no matter how challenging or difficult. Not mentally available, where you think about it. Experientially available, where you’re ready and willing to feel and experience and taste whatever appears.
That’s what Rageheart is all about.
With that in mind…
If you’re a member of The Rageheart Academy, consider doing another Rage today. Every drop counts.
If you’re not a member yet, then play with the techniques I mentioned. Start to bring more awareness to your environment today. Can you also pay attention to the ground at the same time? What if you focus on your breath and the ground? Or the environment and the sensation in your hands?
Pay attention to what happens in your body as you do these things… and remember to have fun and enjoy the process.
As I say in The Rageheart Academy, the more you play, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you unleash that sexy ass beast inside you.
Alright, that’s enough from me.
Happy Friday!
Beast wishes,
John