Grief Under Anger

I mentioned in my previous blog post “The Relapse” that I had taken a turn for the worse of late in terms of my spiritual disciplines and overall health.

I finally bit the proverbial bullet, and got in touch with my teacher. Now this guy scares me, he always has. I would say that it’s because he has an excellent read on the state of my ego/monster and he can pinpoint what I need to work on. Many a time my ego has had to suffer a small annihilation at his hands! I still listen to him because he is the one person who has continuously pushed me and always steered me in the right direction.

I mentioned to him in my e-mail how I hadn’t been finding things easy and how I had fallen off the wagon in terms of disciplines and alcohol consumption. I reluctantly pressed send and then stood by for a very blunt and punishing reply.

Now even here I was guilty of a “prediction”, it’s another tool that the ego has for trying to maintain it’s control. It’s the first and critical step of stepping away from the ego, to spot it’s traps it makes for us.

See “The Monster – Spotting and Stopping”

The e-mail that came back surprised me. The gist was that it was the right thing to do to admit my mistakes. You will see that those with excessive ego control will rarely admit to what the ego labels as a failure or a mistake.

I was pleased that I had been honest with him, but of course still quite displeased that I had slacked so much and drank so regularly.

You see spiritual fitness is much the same as physical fitness… Once you stop playing sport, running, yoga, whatever it is, it is exponentially more difficult to get back into it once you have stopped, and the longer you stop the more out of shape one gets.

It works the same way for spiritual fitness, the monster can take hold again and we can start to store undesirable emotions. This takes us away from what I would say is the ultimate goal of a spiritual path… To live in a balanced and flowing way.

In the email he also reminded me that I still had “decades of anger” in me. That wasn’t easy to hear but OK, this is what I need to get into. This brings me back to the subject of this blog post.

Of course I procrastinated for a few days before going off for a private walk to try and get into my emotions.

To use the fitness analogy again, it was like heading to the gym after a long time of absence. I noted I felt reluctant and annoyed. Overall a case of “I cant be arsed with this”.

As I got closer to a quiet place with no people around, I attempted a feeble warm up, starting to say to myself out loud how angry I was, but I wasn’t “FEELING” it yet.

It’s amazing to me how quickly the monster wants to put its oar in…. It really DOES NOT WANT YOU TO FEEL THESE EMOTIONS! Immediately it came up: “Oh this won’t work, you’re just tired, go home, you’re not really that angry” etc etc.

Ignoring this noise, I started to express more and really tried to access the anger. I started to pick some actual subjects that I was angry about. My teacher was correct, I had a fair few to pick from.

I started to gain a bit of momentum, the fury was building. As I expressed about my ex boss and colleagues, I felt my rage build. The voice became louder and the expletives became more frequent.

Funny that the more I expressed, the more was there to express, things that I thought I had forgotten came to mind, so I expressed those also.

I was reaching my “Zone” lol. I was sweating and my shirt came off. The “F-word” had now become the “C-word” and boy did I let it blast.

Now here comes the interesting part… I have been having difficulty with a very good friend of late, and as I started to express about him and how angry he had made me, again the monster tried to thwart my efforts.

All of a sudden I was expressing some anger about my father, and this is when the monster really kicked in. I noticed that the closer the people are or the deeper the wound is, the more barriers the monster will throw in your way to stop you from expressing about it.

Ironically, it is usually the people we are closest to that often cause the most anger or damage, so we need to be able to express that and as always, WITHOUT making it their problem. This is why my teacher spent a lot of time teaching me to spot and disable the monster…. It would have been very difficult to get into all this anger without having done this preliminary work.

And then it finally came, amidst the anger I felt towards my father, suddenly the tears came and I fell to my knees in grief. The anger quickly subsided and I just cried like a child. I realised in that moment the depth of my love for him and how I’d miss holding his frail body next to mine in a loving embrace.

The work was not done yet, my teacher always encouraged me to make these feelings worse. This way we can really get into the core emotion. The more profoundly we feel it, the more likely it is to go and be released for good.

So I let the tears run for a while and concentrated on how much I missed him.

In not more than a few minutes I felt a calm come, and I was able to dwell for a short time in the love I felt for him. I was exhausted and pouring with sweat. As usual with a release like this I was spitting up phlegm and air, which I’ve noticed is a physical by-product of releasing emotion.

I was calm and happier though, the energy had definitely changed from what I was feeling beforehand. The only unpleasant side-effect was a stinging head-ache.

Anger moves something that we call “Fire-Chi”, it is an energy that tends to move upwards through the body towards the crown. A sudden movement of this energy can cause headaches…. So all I needed to do now was ground that energy. My teacher has also given me tools to do this, and after a few minutes doing some grounding exercises, I felt the headache start to subside.

See “Fire and water Chi”

Overall I felt a lot better for having done this and it strikes me that anger really does sit in the way of other emotions. I would say that this time I did enough to hit what I’d call a “core-wound”.

It’s unsurprising to me that this anger was getting in the way of me feeling the grief about my father. I observe so much anger in people, displayed in many different ways. Maybe this is all sitting on top of deep hurts that we have experienced in life. Maybe it is our work to attend to this so we can feel what we need to feel and come back into a more balanced emotional state.

I would say that much of the anger we feel may indeed be trivial in comparison to the pain that lies underneath it all. While we are in the control of our egos, It will be difficult to feel the deeper emotion and hence we will respond to other scenarios in life with anger, even though what’s underneath may be a loss of a parent, or a break up that we never felt properly.

I find it strange and complicated how emotions work, but with these teachings I am much more equipped to deal with them and can even say now that I’m fascinated by them and looking forward to peeling of the next layer of emotions.

Only then will I find my true nature…. It’s work, it’s a pain in the ass, but ultimately it’s rewarding.

We must all become brave warriors in terms of our emotional/energetic selves.