Receive the visitor. Touch it with your presence. Provide sanctuary for it to incarnate, as emotion in the body and image in the mind.
Speak with the angry one, listen to them. Feel what they are feeling, see what they are seeing.
We know the tragic effects of disavowing our rage. Sending it into the underworld does not purge or heal, but only allows it to gather energy like a psychic tornado, where it will eventually surge, in ways that lead to further suffering and prevent us from assimilating the clarity at its core.
Separate a bit so you do not unconsciously merge. Intimacy without fusion. “I will enter relationship but will not drown. I am listening. Feeling. I will no longer deny, but nor will I be flooded. I will meet you in the center.”
Deep in the somatic vessel, anger is not a toxin we must expunge from what we are, but a wrathful guide, an organic part of the psyche that longs to be provided its rightful home. It is life itself, wanting to be known, here to serve a vital function, but it must be integrated in order for its clarifying wisdom-nature to flow.
With the ally of the breath, descend into your belly, open a portal to your heart, discover a passageway to your throat. Find the anger lodged in somatic being, hiding and pleading for reunion, buried in the organizing narratives and in the unfelt emotions.
Here, anger will be revealed to be what it is, a secret wisdom-guide and bridge into the universal heart, a messenger of power, clarity, and fierce compassion that wants you as its midwife.
In ways that seem contradictory, befriending this anger opens a portal into connection with others—others external to us as well as lost pieces of soul within—so that we may live and move and breathe with them in ways that are skillful, wise, sensitive, and compassionate.
Image of the Tibetan feminine protector, Palden Lhamo
My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here.
My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon.
We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here.
