Intention:
My intention is to be able to remain at peace when this difficult emotion/vibration comes up. To simply no longer take it personally, but rather welcome it and give it permission to be in my body without reacting to it or identifying with it. To be able to remain present as presence: holding it in impersonal awareness that remains now – while feelingly in embodied contact with the sensation of it in the present – and holding it in unconditional love. To purify personal identification with this information and all the patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior. Having been disassociated for a long time and only recently able to feel my emotions and my body, I simply don’t have the tools yet to be able to observe it from a distance without getting sucked into it. I also didn’t grow up with healthy models of how to self-regulate or socially express this energy in healthy ways – so with all these difficult feelings and areas I am undertaking a conscious exploration of them to ease my way into these scary places and find a way to stabilize in peace with them.
How does anger live in me now?
Recently I was present enough to notice the presence of anger in me that I have been disrespecting. I say disrespecting not ignoring because I was aware of it, but have been habitually and automatically brushing it off and going against the feeling of it to act normal or inoffensively.
My suicidal self-disgust comes from disrespecting my own emotions and sometimes outright suppressing them. I need to learn to be with these difficult emotions in the body in a friendly, welcoming, patient way: respecting their voices in me and giving them permission to be there and giving them my impersonal awareness and unconditional love.
I notice that as soon as impersonally stayed with my suicidal self-hatred and just held it without identifying with it – that without a body to attach to – it immediately flipped into a murderous rage projected on others I thought I had forgiven. I obviously didn’t kill anyone. Being impersonally present with the anger it’s clear to see it is pure ignorance – compassionless blame, attributing agency to what is impersonal causality expressed through human action. And ultimately, just another dimension of ingratitude.
I’m locked into an anger towards my step-father, or rather my mother’s abusive partner, that I can’t express. It’s her neurotic clinging to the fantasy image of being a “happy family” that makes her live in denial and ignore his cold selfish lovelessness. Together the accepted emotional stalemate they have settled on is where he confines his lovelessness to no longer being physically violent and to dysfunctional behaviours that he can gas light away and she can defend or blame herself for so that they can both avoid the inconvenience of meeting and confronting the truth of his loveless selfishness and aggression.
As a child, my normal emotional reaction to his acts of lovelessness, cruelty, and aggression motivated by jealousy and his desire to dominate – but also a pre-personal impulse of all abusers to dump and transmit their “dark murky energy” into an open other – was gas lighted away by both of them. Living in the midst of their complicated abusive relationship propped up by denial, my emotional reactions aligned with natural truth didn’t matter at all as they were both invested in maintaining their untruth. More than that, as a threat to the stability of the joint construct of their abusive relationship, my inconvenient presence was itself scapegoated as the reason for their mutual unhappiness. This developmental context really twisted up my relationship with my own feelings.
As an adult, life has stuck my nose back into the heap of shit that is this family dynamic. I had for a long time cut them both off, but losing my job yet again forced me back into their ghost house of illusions, demons, and denial. Obviously, cutting them off was a a reactive avoidance strategy of a personal consciousness that still identified with and held emotional charge to this situation – I need to come to an impersonal accepting beingness with this situation – to truly be at compassionate peace with their ignorance and trivialized and normalized emotional violence and dysfunction.
Reflective Conclusion
Looking deeply, what sparks my anger are moments or interactions with them that make their disregard, dishonouring, or devaluation of the truth of the life in me evident. It creates a split in the unity of love and life in me, where the life in me says something like: “fuck you, bye, have a nice life. If you don’t have any appreciation and respect for the life in me, then I don’t need to be in interbeing with the life in you: the life in me can live self-sufficiently by itself”. My heart shuts off, which shunts my energy system into the impoverished energy of the psychological and personal self. I really need to practice metta with them: to love them unconditionally – not for them – for me! So that my life doesn’t split from the unity of the interbeing of all life and my heart doesn’t close.
I need to say something back as the adult self when the inner voice of inner-baby anger arises and says “hey these these idiots are making out as if your life and existence don’t matter, let’s show them our life is even more important than theirs by hurting the life in them”.
I think the first things to say back to the voice of baby anger is thank you. “Thank you baby anger for trying to protect me and raise the importance and sacredness of our life into their sight and mind even though they maybe blind to it or too self-absorbed to acknowledge it.” “I acknowledge you baby anger, and am grateful you speak to me. Though I hear your voice, I don’t they would understand you even if you spoke or acted through me. They are not present enough to give their presence to the life in themselves let alone the life in us”.
“What do you think if, instead of that, we just have silent compassion for the life in them that they are ignoring and not giving their presence to too, and instead of demanding their presence for the life in us, we meditate and be really lovingly present and give our full presence to the life in us. Do you agree? I love you, shall we put your and our energy into fully giving our presence and loving awareness into the life in us that they can’t see appreciate? Let’s rest in our own self-fulfilled heart and flood ourselves with our own loving presence!”
We know lovelessness as an energy is like a mould. It doesn’t personally matter “who” is loveless: we can not be peronsally angry at the specific slice of bread because it itself is mouldy. So let us be accurate in our wrath and direct our angry energy into destroying the lovelessness not the host. Let us turn our anger energy to fierce compassion to destroy the lovelessness in ourselves by transmuting it into passionate compassion.
I think anger is the energetic intelligence of our immune system.