Coming Home Meditation Is Wednesday at 9am EST This Week ~ Working with Anger

How to sit with the experience of anger in the body and how to wield the power it holds cleanly.

“Mary” by Jessica Watson in her Portraits of Rage series.

Dear Friends,

On Wednesday morning, we’ll gather from 9-10am EST to explore the emotion of anger in the body. It will be beautiful and subtle work and I think I can promise it won’t make you angry, but it will help you understand something about your relationship to anger.

I have recently initiated a “self study” related to anger. I was inspired to do so when I began to recognize some patterns related to suppressed anger arising in my body and in some of my key relationships.

(Check out the work of my friend, the talented photographer, Jessica Watson. Her “Portraits of Rage” project is powerful and brave.)

Anger is a tough one for me, and I think for many women. It’s the emotion we condemn most vehemently in girls (“Don’t be bossy!” “Be a good girl!”) just as we don’t let boys feel their sadness (“Stop crying!” “You’re acting like a girl!”). For men, too, the expression of anger can be tricky to navigate. Anger carries a lot of charge. It can be explosive or seething. It can hurt people. It can be scary. Anger moves things and also destroys them. Anger is fiery and hot. How can we harness the power of this emotion towards productive and constructive ends? As tricky as it can be, anger is essential. There are times when it is absolutely the appropriate response to a situation that needs to stop, a boundary trespass. Anger can be sacred rage.

A gift from my mom :)

I remember standing on a street in New York City’s East Village after a really frustrating meeting and feeling what I described to a friend as “red rage” at a woman who had spent the lunch meeting speaking down to me and generally underestimating me. She had been arrogant and oblivious. Because of some social dynamics, I had felt trapped at the table, unable to tell her what I thought of how she was treating me. I wanted to flail around, I wanted to spit, I wanted to destroy things. Of course, I didn’t. But, I could feel the anger eating me up! I remember this episode because it happened around the time I was really coming into an embodied awareness of my emotions. I was shocked at the intensity and power in the energy running through me…and to be honest, a little afraid of it.

When I look deeply at anger I can see that it arises when a boundary has been violated. It is the response to a boundary violation. The boundary can be physical, emotional, a character attack, or even a value you hold dear. We sometimes use anger to defend ourselves or something or someone we care about. The deeper the care, the more intense the anger response. I think this can be good. In the Buddhist Tantra, the wisdom aspect of anger is CLARITY. Anger can help us get really clear on what we care about and where our boundaries are. Anger or wrath, is essential in the alchemy of Tantra.

But there can also be a way that anger becomes a crutch. It can be a way of asserting ourselves when we’re not feeling steady or certain in our position and it can be very blinding, very righteous. The organs of anger are the liver and the eyes in Chinese medicine…blind rage, for example.

Over the last few years, I have done some shamanic deep dives into the most difficult of emotions. I tackled grief and also fear. I sought to understand my relationship to these emotions and how they work in the subtle energy body. I want to know them so I can work with them as tools for self-expression, communication and transformation. I don’t want to be hijacked by them. I want to live in right relationship to the full spectrum of human experience and these emotions, though we may try to avoid them, are a big part of our experience here in this life on earth. I think we can do better with them. I think we can reclaim the wisdom in them. I am willing to give it a try. Will you join me?

I can feel that I am finally ripe and ready to heal my relationship to this powerful emotion once and for all. I will share with you what I have learned when we sit together.

As always, Coming Home is a pay-what-you-feel event and I really appreciate donations. Suggested is between $10-25. You can do so on Venmo @ElizabethSchuyler-Brown or on PayPal @ schuyler@artofemergence.com . Thank you!