Angry Eyes



angry-eyes2As we walk this spiritual path, sooner or later we come to a point where we are face to face with the raw emotion of anger.   Sometimes we are angry at the world and at other times we may turn the anger inward and feel the fury directed at our own being.  I established a belief long ago that anger was not a “safe” emotion to experience.  Once when I was nineteen I threw a plate on the floor to express a moment of rage.  Perhaps it was a learned behavior from watching too much mindless television.  In the movies someone is always throwing a plate, or a lamp, or a glass when they are having a fit.  And on the big screen the item smashes into a thousand pieces without injury or consequence.  This was not the case for my white Corelle plate.

As the plate shattered into a sharp edged dirty bomb, one of the shards hit my cat who was on the other side of the room!  The glass lacerated her left eye and what had been a moment of ire turned into a dash to the ER.  The resulting optic surgeries were an expense and an experience I would never forget.

The imprinting left behind from that experience was that it wasn’t safe to be angry, or at least to show your anger.  A few years later I began getting the heart palpitations that plague me to this day.  At first I would notice them only when I was very upset or … you guessed it ANGRY!  Over the years, I came to believe anger wasn’t allowed to rise in this body/mind organism without dire consequences and I did every breathing, sitting, forgiveness and energy practice to rid myself of this taboo emotion.

But during this healing process I have had the opportunity to see up close some of the old wounds that still bleed under pressure and among these include my nemesis anger.  Just as earlier on my journey I learned to see Pain and Fear as faces of God, it would also be the case that Anger too was part of the ultimate totality.  Not a cast off or defect of the Divine, but anger in its own right was perfect in its essence.

However it was not the fake-china-plate-throwing anger or the expression of anger as physicality, but the emotion of anger and the body sensations that arise with annoy.  These were filled with unknowable nuisances that brought an even deeper understanding of what it is to be awake.  When I could sit and simply be with anger in terms of thoughts or contracted and often painful body sensations, there was a spontaneous and simultaneous compassion that appeared and danced inside of the dark passion.

With the acceptance and open invitation to our own waves of anger that organically arise as part of our life experience, we may change not only our own private encounter but also perhaps open the door to transformation of how we perceive anger in the illusion of an outside world.

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