Posts Tagged ‘anger’
Last week we looked at anger, the idea of lack and disempowerment, and how to find true energy from our source rather than from someone else (read part 1, part 2, and part 3 if you haven’t yet). Today, though, we’ll approach anger in a different way.
Essentially, you can boil down anger as having a couple of different possibilities: being stuck in a struggle, or as a motivating force to push us into a new place. For the former, you might be angry at someone (say, a relative, or someone you work with), and unhappy with something that happened. Or maybe you’re unhappy with an aspect of your life.
But is this necessarily a bad thing? No. Anger is a sign that you’d like something to change. What’s the difference between anger as struggle and anger as motivation? Simply changing your mindset. The thing is, you can’t change the past. If someone apologizes for a past action, it might return energy to you, but it doesn’t give you what you truly want: to set a new course for the future.
Action: Think of something that’s upset you as of late, either interpersonally or in your own life. Get in touch with what you’d like to be different – and take steps in that direction right away.
In part 1 we discovered that we get angry because we feel disempowered, and in part 2 we saw that we can choose to draw our power from other sources. Here’s an exercise to do this.
- Plant your feet on the floor, relax your body, and close your eyes.
- Consider a situation or person that recently caused anger to arise. Pay attention to the solar plexus region. Note any constriction or tension.
- Breathe deeply into the solar plexus. Send it the message, “This is not your job to worry about. You can let go, and let me take charge.”
- Visualize sending roots down, through your body, deep into the earth. Imagine energy surging through your body from the ground.
- Now send a root or cord up into the sky. See energy coursing down through you from both above and below.
- Return your attention to the source of your anger. Try a statement, either to yourself or out loud, such as, “I see that I was trying to take power from you to feel better. I wish you your own empowerment, and that you can feel loved. I now ask the earth and the heavens to support and supply me with all I require.”
Alter as needed. And if you try it, as always, please leave a comment with your experience.
When we’re angry, we’re literally trying to get our power back from someone (or everyone) else. In a fight, whoever wins ends up with more energy, and the other person feels depleted.
What’s fundamentally wrong with this strategy is its unconscious assumption that we can only get energy from other people. However, your true Source is far beyond this plane. It’s reminiscent of a favorite book from my youth, Flatland, a land inhabited by two-dimensional geometric shapes, which are disoriented when a sphere moves through its world. That is, we pay attention to just what or who is in front of us, rather than realizing that the picture is far greater than our immediate vision perceives.
Rather than sourcing from other people, we can draw energy up from the earth; this is why so many people feel energized from spending time in nature. Or, you can draw it down from the heavens. These limitless supplies provide more than we could ever need.
But we typically don’t see these. In a sense, anger is a reflection of lack. That is, someone else has treated us unfairly and it must be rectified, or we won’t be whole, or get our just due.
In part 3, we’ll try an exercise on how to shift this.
Among people involved in the personal development scene, anger gets a bad rap. Yes, I recently wrote on how to stop being angry and forgive. But it’s good to have a reminder as to why we feel angry, and how it functions, in order to make a more informed choice about how to deal with it.
Essentially, anger arises because we feel disempowered. Being angry is a way to get our power back.
For those interested in the energetics, this tends to happen in the third chakra, located in the solar plexus. This is the center of our power… and is why we can get an upset stomach if we’re nervous or distraught. (Regardless of your opinion on chakras, everyone knows the feeling of butterflies in the stomach, so go with that if nothing else.) Energetically, we are literally demanding our power back.
But the basic strategy for getting it usually doesn’t work. More details forthcoming in part 2.
Sometimes inspiration isn’t about creating an amazing feeling – it’s about letting go of the blocks that stand in our way. One of them… grudges. Anger. Negativity. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with anger – it’s about getting in touch with our own power. But it can get in the way of being happy and in touch with our inner love. Here are some ideas.
- Picture them as a small child, hurt, not knowing what to do.
- Take your image of that person and imagine it’s a million miles away, growing smaller and smaller.
- Spend time loving and appreciating yourself.
- Know that someone’s actions have little to do with you – they’re how we were trained to react.
- Invite them to the world you want to live in. Talk to them. Tell them what you’d like to be there in your relationship.
the inspiration blog 