Today’s subject is one that is very close to me. Not in the way that, say, my kids are, or spending time with my wife, or looking out for the health of our planet… but close in a “skin rash” kinda way.
ANGER: What is it, anyway?
In my years as a healer, I have seen many people who are at odds with their anger. They say statements like, “I want to get rid of my anger,” or, “When x happens, I get so angry; and I don’t want to do that anymore,” or, “That makes me so angry – but I don’t know what to do with it!”
And while it is an admirable intention not to want to vent your frustrations all over people, as long as you are trying to stop yourself from feeling or expressing anger, you are putting your focus too far downstream.
Downstream?
Imagine that you live by a stream, and one day you found a bunch of junk washing ashore.
If you go about cleaning up the mess, that’s great – but what happens when more comes? To truly keep your shores clean, you have to address the cause; you need to look upstream at where the flotsam is coming from.
Similarly, when you experience anger, you’re just experiencing a “downstream” emotional reaction, not the true reaction at the source.
So what would you find if you walked upstream?
The first place you would come to is Helplessness. When you feel helpless, you believe that you cannot get what you want, or get your needs met, and so you feel stumped. In order to get past the hump of inaction, you marshal a reserve of energy and blast past your feelings of helplessness – and that is what we call anger. Anger is our attempt to not feel helpless.
Why does it have to look so, well, ugly?
When you are acting in accordance with your heart, your actions tend to be much more smooth. Anger, though, is a reaction of your personality, trying to achieve your initial objective despite your feelings of helplessness.
So, in trying to get what you want (whether it’s love, understanding, or anything else), you push for it. Push comes to shove, and… well, you get the picture.
This is the first stop upstream. What else would you find if you were to keep going?
Even more upstream than the feelings of helplessness are your wants and needs you are trying to meet. When you believe strongly that your desires are what is important in a given situation, but they aren’t being fulfilled, panic sets in, followed by a sense of helplessness to do anything about it, and whamo — you’re right back downstream again.
So if anger isn’t the source, and helplessness isn’t it either, are you saying it’s having needs?
Am I saying that you shouldn’t have needs? Of course not – we all have needs. Needs are as basic as living – one doesn’t happen without the other. All of us have basic needs for food, safety, shelter, connection, and love. If you try to deny that you have needs, that creates as many (or more) tough situations than just dealing with anger.
What’s tripping you up is the orientation you have around your needs and desires.
What orientation? That having them fulfilled is what is most important. That your agenda is the most important agenda, and should be top priority – not just for you, but everyone present should recognize it as well.
It comes down to the human perspective and its limitations – as long as you can only see things from one, isolated perspective, you are stuck with only one viewpoint, one interpretation of life.
As you can see, this kind of thinking sets up some interesting dynamics. The intricacies of the situation get further compounded if you explode your anger all over, too – most commonly because you’ll evaluate the situation by saying, “I got angry, and I didn’t get what I wanted – so it must’ve been my anger that kept me from getting what I wanted!”
No wonder we want to get rid of anger, huh?
The solution lies, I believe, on two levels.
One, the more you can hold your needs as equal with the needs of who or whatever else is present, the less you will trip down the path of “my needs aren’t being met”. Having a more inclusive mindset helps you compassionately include others’ needs in your assessment of how things are going.
If you consider that other people are also trying to get their needs met, then you’ll naturally look for ways to serve everyone, including yourself, rather than yourself to the exclusion of everyone else.
And two, it’s about seeing what happens in a situation not as “this is right/this is wrong”, but simply “this is what is”. This removes thoughts of injustice, exclusion, or “something other than my agenda is happening here”, because you’ve released the importance of your agenda.
Having a fixed picture of the most desirable outcome can be a decent goal, but holding onto it as “the only acceptable/best possible outcome” is only going to trip you up.
Opening to the realm of Infinite Possibilities, Oneness, Divine Reality, etc., is going to help you step beyond your old ways of orienting to the world, and be much more open to whatever happens.
Thinking it’s so won’t make it so
This is, of course, not a mental step, or a shift in thinking. Can you start thinking this way? Sure. Will it stick? Doubtful.
Because in order to successfully remove judgments of right and wrong from your perceptions, you often need to shift your perspective. It goes back to the classic Einstein quote:
The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
And, as Carl Jung said:
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
Making the shift
So what is this “perspective shift”? How do I “outgrow my problems”? It is a shift of heart that takes your view of your environment and lifts you up, up, up – to see with Divine Eyes.
Expansion of your heart grants you an inclusive perspective that your personality alone can’t reach, and yet you can tap into it all the time… if you can open your heart enough to see through it.
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