Working With Rage!

Yes…I cheated a little bit.  This post did not sit with me as being “complete” after I posted it a few days ago.  It just felt incomplete as if I was missing something.  I was missing something!  Read on…if you read it already…you’ll know what I added today…if not and you are seeing this for the first time…don’t worry about it and just enjoy!

Here`s something that surprised me about myself.  Yesterday I got triggered and I mean really triggered.  What was it that got triggered?  Quite simply – Rage!  Old, stored up rage!  

When I was a kid, I was a pretty angry kind of kid. Reflecting back, I had reasons for my anger.  There were all kinds of abuse emotional, physical and other kinds that sadly were part of my everyday reality.  I thought in those days, my life was normal and that`s how other kids must have felt in their homes. Waking up with dread, going to school and coming home with more dread, going to bed with dread, I didn’t know life could be any other way.  When you don`t know any different, what you know becomes “the norm”.  Having spent the past few years working with therapists and healers and a whole host of other holistic practitioners, to process, heal and reconnect with myself, I thought I had worked through some of the “big stuff”!  Life showed me otherwise yesterday and yes another lesson …what I blogged about last week… that we are always in process!

So what triggered it all?  I have to blame or is it thank  yoga!  Yes I know, all my posts seem to have some element of yoga these days…likely because I am still doing the 30 days of daily practice…a challenge I signed up for 26 days ago! As you can tell, I am very proud of this little feat!  Just like the practice of mindfulness helps brings awareness to what’s going in the domains of our thoughts, feelings and sensations as they occur in our bodies, the practice of yoga takes this aspect of “body awareness” to a completely different level.

As I work with my body through different postures, training myself to stay present, with the breath through all of the movements, I am finding my body speaking back!  Yesterday it spoke back with rage.  Being actively engaged in this work of healing for the past number of years, this is not news to me. I believe that our bodies are constantly in communication with us. The thing is, we were never taught to pay attention!  So we ignore the messages and the messenger as the knocks appear very softly at first.  Perhaps they come as subtle feelings, a nagging, a knowing, tightness, stiffness, nervousness, butterflies in our stomach and so on…each of our bodies using their own unique vocabulary as a way of communicating with us.  It is only when our bodies are fed up, can’t take any more and perhaps go on strike in some way, we are forced into paying attention. Often, it takes illness or an injury to jolt us into noticing. Even then we are quick to turn ourselves over to the professionals who we presume know more than we do and are more prone to popping a pill versus listening or paying attention to the message.

Let me clarify what I am saying here.  My intention is not to disrespect the amazing work that nurses and doctors and others do practicing conventional medicine. I recognize the immense value in this work!  What I am saying though is that by only subscribing to this method of care in times of illness, we are not serving the wholeness of who we are as embodied human beings.  We are so used to looking to others exclusively for answers when the real answers, the ones that hold the seeds and the promise to our real questions can only be discovered by a “turning inwards”.  By all means, if we are ill, we need to do what is skillful to take care of our self, to fix what is broken or not working or starting to not work…But, if we stop there, then there is also an opportunity that is lost. The messenger and the message… be it an illness or another type of suffering goes unnoticed to it’s true purpose for showing up in our life.

Tuning into our body, our suffering and our pain while perhaps also doing what we need to to attend to the situation skillfully allows us to bring healing to ourselves at a more deeper level than just at the physical level.  I truly believe through my own journey that what we don’t deal with, ultimately will keep trying to get our attention. If it’s cancer in one part of the body that we dealt with just at the physical level, without inquiring deeper and doing our own personal work of understanding the message of that particular messenger, then there is a chance it may return or show up as something else some where else in our body.   The same is true for difficult situations or difficult people in our lives. Every difficulty offers an opening for healing.  We can change jobs, we can change spouses and perhaps friends and think that we have dealt with the issue at hand.  I have learned the hard way that avoidance does not work, and fighting or pushing away out of mind and sight these annoyances as they come up…does not work either!  The release seems to come from turning towards the message and the messenger!  

Back to my rage story!

So yesterday, after an hour of intense yoga, I became aware of rage! I not only became aware of it, rather I became consumed by it. It took over all of me and completely overshadowed my awareness. I was aware enough to notice the rage, but not strong enough to let it not take over me or stop from acting out on it! Driving home, parts of me knew and could see clearly that this thing, whatever it was that had risen in the process of working with my body in yoga was “old stuff”. Stuff from childhood, adolescence, and years gone by that had been stored in the cells of my body, coming to the surface to be released. Yet, did this knowing stop me from acting out on it? 

No actually!  I hate to admit it, but my poor husband did not know what hit him as I walked into the house that afternoon.  I didn’t notice the kids that had their homework done, who were excited to see me or that the kitchen had been cleaned spotlessly!  Rather, I attacked my poor husband over some trivial other thing that he forgot to do!  Bear in mind I am feeling like an insane person while I am doing this because deep inside I could see there was a part of me that was aware of exactly what was going on…and that person could see that this emotion that had surfaced was huge and powerful and had essentially swept me off my feet.  Yet in this instance, it won out over awareness in strength and I succumbed! Feeling worn out and thoroughly confused, I went to bed! The power of this stormy emotion wiped me out and I was exhausted.

This morning, with some sanity and space to hold the emotion, I was able to see it and be with it in a more peaceful way without being carried away by it.  I even returned back to yoga with a renewed intention to hold the emotion with some curiosity and kindness and be open to listening to what it had to say to me without pushing it away or wanting it to be gone.  This evening finds me back to my old self with more understanding and a little more humble, forgiving and a lot more open to these waves of life.  I realize that just like in the real ocean, we can never always be sure of the waves that come to the shore.  They may seem tame and manageable for a time, but the big ones do exist and no shore is ever immune to the experience of a tidal wave paying a visit.

I hope when the next one hits that this experience will have taught me to notice the warning signs and perhaps just ride the wave and not meet it suited with armour, prepared for battle….for I know now that the armour will likely just cause me to sink yet again and really, I would be far better off learning to surf!

Thought I’d leave you with these words of wisdom…they are not mine…I don’t know who wrote it…and when it comes to the body, I don’t know anything that is more “truer”!

The body is the diary of our life and we write everything to it!  - unknown-