Befriending Anger

My relationship with anger has shifted immensely over the past year. My friend Joy once asked me, "Where is your anger?"

For the longest time, I didn't really know.

"Anger is just sadness turned up too loud" (Janne Robinson). I meditated on that for a while.

Sadness had been familiar to me. I had been sad for most of my life. As I began to further explore my relationship with sadness, I realized how safe it really felt to be sad.

Sadness felt safe when anger didn't. Sadness tended to bring people closer while anger pushed people away.

Growing up, anger felt unsafe largely because of the way it was expressed by the adults around me, and because of the societal repercussions that always seemed to follow those who were brave enough to openly admit that they were angry.

It also didn't help that human societies had no normalized healthy models for expressing and releasing anger.

What I've come to learn is, we always have a choice in how we express or react to the anger felt by ourselves AND others—consciously or compulsively.

My relationship with anger used to look like pretending I didn't have it, or redirecting it at myself for feeling it in the first place.

But anger is actually meant to be a form of self-protection, a signal for self-preservation. Anger, alone, is never the enemy.

Anger is a motivator. A catalyst for change.

Anger can be our fuel if we let it. When we embrace this ferocity, this passion, this hyper-protective facet of our being, we KNOW our boundaries and can honor them accordingly.

And from an empathetic heart space, we can even know and honor the boundaries of others, feeling protective over them.

It was this kind of empathetic anger that stirred within me first. And I tried to push it down, tried to convince myself that I wasn't angry, "just" sad.

Sad was an umbrella term I used for shame, guilt, hopelessness, and grief (the lowest themes of consciousness).

Sad kept me powerless.

Then in Hawaii, on the Puna side of the Big Island, I connected with Pelé the volcano goddess. She, in all her fiery fury, led me to accept my anger and learn to embrace it again for the first time in this life.

I felt like a lioness who had finally come to own her roar. I was angry FOR those I loved who had been mistreated, including myself. I was angry at the injustices I perceived in the world around me.

As I surrendered to the truth of my anger, allowing the internal volcano to erupt, everything flowed.

It felt natural to take inspired action. I wrote and spoke with passion and purpose in my voice.

When the red-hot lava finally began to cool and slow, I let my anger go—at its own pace, without force.

Because I let myself feel it, and didn't repress or suppress any of it, the felt anger "softened into sadness, as it always does and always must" (Gregory David Roberts).

I've discovered the key to working with anger in a healthy way is to not let it overcome you and not to identify as one with it, but rather—allow it to pass through.

You mustn't wield anger like a sword. You mustn't minimize its use to that of a shield either. Anger is so much more than a weapon, or a wall placed between you and another. It is a fire in your soul.

You can fight FOR something (or someone) with anger, including yourself.

Emotions are messengers, not obstacles. They bring obstacles to your awareness so that you can do something about them.

Anger bursts in bearing an urgent message. Listen to it, first. Then take inspired action. If you act before you listen, you may misplace your anger.

Anger lets us know through an intense vibration of dissonance that a series of behaviors or circumstances is not working for us, or for the collective.

A natural purifier, anger lets us know what is important to us so we can DO or SAY something about it.

We must choose to see our anger as a motivator and fuel for change. These days, I invite anger to rise up within me, igniting a spark—the inner light I need to guide me through and out of the dark.

This is how I've come to befriend my anger. I welcome her fire, as she illuminates and trailblazes a clear path before me every time.

Beware: anger returns with a vengeance when an essential peace has not been kept. Old anger festers, blisters, and breeds—and the danger of this is, over time, it leads to disease. Anger, like all emotions (our energies in motion), never wants to be held onto, but allowed to come and go as it pleases—as it needs.

May our anger rage on so that we can right the world's wrongs and restore peace to the places it rightfully belongs.