At times, blazing rage will push its way into your conscious awareness. A valid and sane response to abuse, neglect, and boundary violation . . . a natural reaction to narcissistic injury and a deeply misattuned environment. A part of your soul is aching to be heard, to be included, to return home.
Can you touch into this aching rage with intentional presence. Can you be a sanctuary within which this very alive part can embody and express as emotion and energy? Can you engage with and listen to the angry one? Can you speak with them? Offer them your attention and focus? Can you feel what they are feeling, see what they are seeing? You know the tragic effects of disavowing your rage. Repression, denial, diminishment of your intensity and relegating rage to the underworld does not purge or heal, but only allows the deeply seated aggravation to gather energy like a psychic tornado, leaking out through sarcasm and derogatory humor, until it eventually surges again, in ways that lead to further suffering and prevent any clarity about or assimilation of the pain at its core. Now and then, try noticing . . . are you occasionally able to separate a bit so you don’t unconsciously merge with the rage? Are you ever able to retain a sense of autonomy rather than becoming or repressing the rage itself? Can you experiment with being in relationship with the need and the fear in the moment, without becoming the wound itself? We’re talking about intimacy without fusion. “I will enter relationship with myself and/or others but will not drown. I am listening. Feeling. I will not deny, nor will I be flooded. I will meet myself and others in the center.” Anger is not a toxin we must expunge from what we are, but a powerful and wise guide, an organic part of the psyche that demands a place in its rightful home. Anger is life itself, here to serve a vital function, wanting to be known, but it must be integrated in-order for its naturally clarifying wisdom to flow. Follow your breath into your belly; continue to track your breath to your heart, and notice from your heart there is a passageway to your throat. Notice that anger can lodge in your body, buried by old habits of self-sacrifice, beliefs in lack, and the “you’re not enough” narrative. Anger may be hard to find at times, yet it lies yearning and pleading for recognition in your tight shoulders and chronic low-back dysfunction.
In your body, anger will always be revealed for what it truly is, a protector of the pained one, and a guide, a bridge into the universal heart. Anger is a messenger of power, of knowing, of clarity, and it is an expression of fierce compassion for the tenderest parts of your being. In ways that may seem contradictory at first, connecting with your anger opens a path into connection with others – external others, partners and lovers, children and friends – as well as lost internal parts of your Self – your soul-child – so that living and moving and breathing with all these others through the course of your days can be skillful, wise, sensitive, and compassionate.
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