Anger is Not the Enemy

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

I think we are in the days where science and spirituality are in the same room, gazing amorously at each other across the crowd, getting ready to kiss.  And they're both made of the energy of everything. 

The energetic level of things is as much a reality as real and solid objects, as solid as your hand when you put it in front of your face and there it is, comfortable and trustworthy and real and stable.  Except if you put your hand under a microscope, and follow it down to atomic level, you will find that your hand is more ... well, it's more not there than it is there.  More empty space than anything solid.  Made up of waves that behave as particles, that behave differently when they are being looked at than when they aren't, made of the same stuff as the stars.

We are all made of stars.

Even your hand, so comfortably real and known, proves to be magical and mysterious.  Life is nowhere near as mundane as consumer culture would have us believe.

I read some websites that would be considered by maybe most to be a little on the verge of nutty.  Hell, sometimes I think they're nutty.  Some are by people who identify themselves as "lightworkers", working on an energetic level to help people and the earth.  Now, I happen to be in the camp with the mystics and so some or much of what New Agers say I feel is true.  But some of it verges on religiosity for me.  And regardless of what stream or institution they come out of, all of control's cloaks happen to be as ugly as each other.

One thing I have noticed about some of the people who frequent these sites is that there is most certainly a hierarchy in many people's thinking not simply when it comes to dimensions of existence, but also when it comes to emotions.  Many of the emotions are considered "lower".  Now, I can understand this if you're talking about weightiness.  Say you had a machine that measured the heaviness of emotions.  You would most certainly find fear and anger are heavy and weighted emotions, and love and joy are light, almost not there at all but far weightier in their effects for the positive than maybe even fear and anger are in their effects for the negative.

I understand why people shy away from those heavier emotions.  I have been spending a great deal of my time trying to harness them so that I can dampen down their effects in my life.  Being a pyroluric, I have an intimate acquaintance with fear and terror.  My system has a tendency towards reacting in those fashions because for so many years of its existence it hasn't had the extra amounts of nutritional elements it needs to function in a different way (B6 and zinc being the main elements I need way more of than the average person).

I understand too why people shy away from those negative emotions because we are not taught how to deal with them!  Now, that should be a standard subject in the Australian curriculum, learning to harness the beast that is fear, and the beast that is anger.  Those are animals that can trample you underfoot and ruin your life.

Angerpour by Lucid Light (CC)
I had a breakthrough with anger the other day.  It's been in my focus for a few years now, ever since an incident with my landlord a few years ago who, upon parting from each other with me disgruntled and angry at how little of my bond he was giving back, informed me that "I hope we can part on good terms, as I know you can be an angry person."

Well, that set me back in my tracks a little.  Me, an angry person?  When I feel so collapsible and sorta vulnerable and small on the inside?  Me?  Really??

Well, as it turns out, I have had and do have a lot of old anger, which I seem to be still carrying around with me on some level that he picked up on, and which has come out sideways, making me get angrier than I need to at things that legitimately anger me.  Way deep down, I have a rather deep reservoir of anger - maybe even rage - that I haven't had the ability to be able to face it because I haven't known what to do with it.  Well, maybe now I'm beginning to feel capable of facing that old anger, and letting it go.

What's anger actually for, anyway? Now, that's a question you don't hear often, do you?  What are certain emotions for?  It's not until I began to read the rather wonderful and insightful Karla McLaren that I began understanding that I could deal with anger, that it's meant to be wielded like a light sabre.  Anger is not the enemy;  our inability to know how to wield it is.  And the other day was my first real victory in a big ring.

I was dealing with someone I know well who I believe is mentally ill.  They began laying into me via text message when I hadn't actually done anything wrong.  In fact, it was a situation where I would normally expect the person on the other end of the phone to have some sympathy and understanding, and I was very upset.  But instead, this person took my actions as an assault against them and their partner, and began laying into me.  It was so bizarre.  Out of the blue, someone who has been a destructive influence in my life for a long time began calling me a bitch, selfish, a fucking cunt.  They even called me up and with hate dripping off the end of their deluded voice to tell me those same things.  I let that message go to messagebank.

Flow by Lucid Light (CC)
It was a little scary, I must admit.  And it also made me very angry.  So angry that my hands were shaking in my bid to text them back.  And so I took my new wonder powers of using energy for my benefit instead of repressing it down into a small ball and storing it in my body like cancer.  I felt the anger flowing through me.  It felt more like a river that had been cleared than it ever had before.  Free to flow, without getting tangled up in the reeds at the banks, or getting tangled up too much in big boulders in the middle of the riverbed.  It just flowed.  And it felt a little uncomfortable, because anger always does.

But anger is an energy like anything else.  Public Image Limited said so, after all.  And for the first time in my life on a stage where I was furious, I let it flow through me, felt it, harnessed it to speak a few measured things to this person that I haven't had the guts to say before, and then it left.  And afterwards, there was this joy.  I felt flooded with this joy.

I never, ever realised that what follows on the tail of the energy of anger is joy.  Whoever would have thought it?

6 comments

  1. I agree we have a right to our anger! Within bounds, it's healthy, liberating, creative. As you say, Sue, one long screech sometimes is absolute joy.

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  2. Great piece. Energy is energy, whatever we label its various forms - including these bodyminds of course - and it's very nature is flow. If it gets blocked one way it'll go another. We can choose the form it takes, and so the effect it has.

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  3. It sure is, Sarah! The bad wielding of it is unhealthy, enmeshing and stilted but the emotion is all of those opposites you mention :)

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  4. Indeedly doodly, Mr Riley :)

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  5. Thanks for this Sue. I have relate to this. Also, I love your choice of art!

    Your mention of science and spirituality made me think of this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19870036 - Scientists and Religious types getting together to talk about the big bang and Higgs Boson and what not. I thought that was encouraging.

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  6. Hello thar, Emma :) That article was rather edifying. There are so many wonderful things that happen when different camps get together and share from different perspectives. Opens up the discussion, gets rid of some of the crust and frost that stops people from thinking in different directions. It is encouraging, isn't it :)

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