Anger and violence, like sex, are hot topics that tend to stir people up. This was certainly evident in last night’s sharing group where these energies were being experienced in some, and (in my perception) controlled or suppressed in others. I certainly had an exhilarating ride of a group, and this morning woke with some passionate energy to express myself on this topic.
In my view, practically everyone has rage within them. We are enraged by how we are bound, how we do not feel free to express ourselves as we truly are, how we edit ourselves, compromise, negotiate, make excuses, - the myriad facets of suppression. Often we project this onto others, they are the controlling ones, they are the ones that knocked the life out of us as children etc. Women also have the whole big story of male patriarchal tyranny, and persecution over lifetimes. Rage is the response we feel when we see our own control reflected in others. You may well have the urge to kill someone who is showing this to you. You may want to tear off their limbs, screaming.
When it comes down to it though, there is nobody else creating your emotions. And it is only you that is feeding this rage, by compromising your own sweet self.
We are often terrified of feeling anger, judging it to be bad, dangerous, unpredictable. And so create even more suppressed energy in ourselves by pushing it away into a deep corner, hoping it will be safe down there. But this energy is a big force, and it will not just go away.
If you are afraid of violence, take a look inside at what you are doing to yourself. By judging and controlling, you are being violent to yourself, and, as long as there is inner conflict within you, you will find it in the world out there. I am not being metaphorical here, if you are at war with any part of yourself by judging it, suppressing it, denying it, you are LITERALLY creating the wars, conflicts, and violence on the planet.
Until you dare to liberate yourself from all inner conflict, the outer conflict will continue to manifest. This includes any thought or feeling that you keep inside you, however subtle. You don’t even need to express it. So controlling these feelings DOES NOT WORK if you want to live in a healthy, sane, peaceful world.
So what to do about this – how to make peace with ourselves and others? Well these things inside you that feel scary and overwhelmingly intense, can be gone in an instant. No need for suffering and drama. In fully feeling, accepting, and embracing your most violent emotions you will discover their emptiness, their inherent meaninglessness, and they will cease to control you.
If you would just free your fury. Experience your inner killer, and love it to death.
Let the rage enliven your blood with a fire that transmutes it into exquisite unbounded passion for life.
In your rage lies your joy. Do you love yourself enough to feel it? To free yourself from the tyranny of your control?
Then you are also free to feel your participation in the violence you see in the world, without judgement, but with compassionate understanding.
Or
You can keep that energy wound up inside you, protect it, do your best to hide it. But see how it sparks off at inconvenient moments, how it slips out the side. Everyone can feel it anyway, even if you hide it really well.
You can let it eat you up for lifetimes if you wish. But that’s not my choice.
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Hi! How come that everybody just believes? It´s just opinions, isn´t it? Why should it be true that inner rage causes the world´s wars? It´s possible – but in no way certain. It´s all fiction. Sure I can feel my anger, express it etc.. and the next day they proclaim all wars ended? My experience is that sometimes anger is surpressed and sometimes it is expressed, accordingly to zillion contributing factors. period. and life goes on unfolding…
with love, Vai
I missed that particular group but feel very touched by your post – so the group reaches me through this. Thanks for writing. It feels very simple. Can I just experience and SEE myself including rage (and other things I resist), without judging or wanting to change it? Whatever’s there is there – rage comes -I feel it as full of energy, fire, possibility for transformation . Can I trust it’s okay becase it exists? An ongoing question for me. I forget it’s okay all the time. So, thanks for helping me to remember xx
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Hi veronica,
Thanks for posting. I really like what you say. Sounds similar to my own experience. YES :-)
love, Clare
Hello! Just found your site. Fantastic post on rage, thank you Claire! No need to know or analyse it. I only got access to rage this year, and was fortunate to be working with a friend that could hold me in it. Indeed i did not know what freedom felt like in this body before then. And i was so so scared to let it out, there was so much shame with it, so much thinking that surely i’m gona be so ugly if i let my rage show that no-body will love me, how can i release this and still be in control (you cant! this is great! out of control that which breathes me and beats my heart can live me with full force and expression : ) ) I could see that i dont need to know, or be in control, because i am perfectly lived in each moment. My friend, lucky me, a huge compassionate heart and patience, and nothing, in my experince can resist tenderness forever. Wow, i am not afraid to be me anymore, i have nothing to hide, i am free to live my life fully. Yes, its good!!! And a continous practice! Eeeeek how exciting and how lucky are we?!
Much Love, Veronica
Clare, thank you for writing this. I have been watching how anger usually bounces around when people project it on others…it seems that most people either throw it back or onwards, or (those who are perhaps trying to take more responsibility) absorb it violently within themselves.
It helps me lately to remember that there is absolutely NO connection between the anger I feel and whatever triggered it. Whenever I have the impulse to say, “I feel angry BECAUSE….” I now stop and remember that there’s no because.
A great example of that came up between me and my daughter, yesterday morning. She had left eraser crumbs all over the table, and I felt anger coming up. My mind repeated its old story of the anger being justified, after all, she has so few responsibilities, when is she going to learn to clean up after herself, etc., etc….and she felt my anger coming through when I asked her to wipe up. Then I saw how my anger triggered hers, and she threw it right back at me.
I stopped and thanked her for making the whole thing obvious to me. We talked then about how, if I had a different conditioning, if I were Dobby the house elf, for example, I might be triggered to be HAPPY when she left eraser crumbs on the table. If I were an eraser crumb eater and saw them as a delicacy, I would be in ecstasy when she left them there! The fact that she left those crumbs on the table had absolutely NO connection with my feeling of anger…only my conditioned mind said it did.
Breakfast ended in gales of laughter about eating erasers.
Much love,
LeAnn
P.S. I just realized I should be writing “rubbers” here, which feels pretty odd to me! :-)
Thank you all for your comments and feedback. All very much appreciated. Love, Clare
Hello! All this is very judging! Not seeing that life force remains untouched to this dualistic good-bad-inner-outer-talk. Singular statements without any profound thinking is thoughtless. Remember: Listening, thinking, meditating – than you will C, Max
hi, clare,
this might be a little long but i feel strongly, i have to make this point.
there might be some truth to this. and still, though, i hear the same hidden “should, ought, must, better be different” and so on. it’s easy to write things down and may be, you are, this morning, this hour, this letter long, where you’re saying you are. it sounds to me, though, as another hidden, because of the energy which goes along with your writing, way of saying, i want to be different, i dont want to feel this anymore. even though you mean to say the opposite.
our anger might be in its essence be empty, like EYVERYTHING than, our envy and rage as well, but have you been realy down there and found what you say, from the inside, looking outwards and still found it to be true? or are you doing what so many “spiritualist’s”(sorry) do, telling us to overcome our suffering by subtle aggressive neglecting what’s really there, what we really feel, and making just another shortcut, this time with a spiritual color, before we even really felt it?!
no question, you got good responce – people want to hear it so hard, that the trap, we are all in, is just not the truth. but this is superficial to me, it helps not us nor the world. its just another way of escape, of neglecting the shaming truth BEFORE meting and, may be, overcoming it. may be. we want to overcome the suffering so hard, without getting it realy to know first, realy shaking hands with it. (and, by the way, “depression” is not the truth! it s another way, even though painfull, to avoid to feel the real rage and sadness). so realy making friends with the still little one, bigger one, youngster one – deep, deep down there in the cellar, with no bread, no water, just beeing abandoned. still!just endless suffering (and the moment to moment we have lived as children was really eternal, say endless!)no one (for most of us) has (ever) shown bye, no one (ever) has cared. We have been in that pit, it was so hard, it was literally not to bare.
other than to stir up rage, to become unspeakably frustrated, sad, lonesame. Did you ever come down to make friends with THAT abandoned child you once have been and found it’s hurt to be empty and meaningless? if not, i must assume, you do, what your enemy’s did. still abandon your (relative?!) truth.
but what’s, if we meet the suffering in its essence. fetching the little one after endless lifetimes of emotional and mentally torture. embracing it and trying, i mean really trying to understand the beginning of it’s rage, it’s sadness, it’s helplessness, fear and hunger?
maybe its not JUST empty down there, may be its still the best of us, just waiting down there, still hurt, for the adult ones we are now, who finally could let them know, because now we could feel what we ones felt but now know, its realy over, its past. (because today we know, things go by and are not eternal). telling it to ourselves, while experiencing the suffer as we ones did, victimized, – we now come back bringing them(us self) empathy, warmth, emotional care without neglecting the suffering which tortured and almost killed us (many times!). from here on, we start to believe, no one will ever harm the little ones anymore, we ones where, because now we, the grown ups, will care, will become the loving and protecting parents to ourselves, we did not have but had needed so very much. but this is not all, we address the pain which made us victims towards the ones, who did all this to us. and now, we come to now our rage, our fears, our envy and sadness as truly appropriate after realizing what the did and and did not.
but now we have no longer to act it out, because what makes the difference is to take the child close to our chest we ones where with no condition, with no buts! and tell, but not act its truth.
will say, when jesus said, leaf your parents behind (to get free) than it is, to my understanding, timeless true. the children of the world, even centuries back, are still victimized and therefore depressed or in rage. so, when they get strong enough, the will act this out. against them selves or others. not knowing why and what because they ought not know what happened to them.
this makes our world to such an battlefield, in my eyes, as it is.
enlightenment and happiness do naturally follow, when children needs are really met. but so far, this did not happen for millenniums, and our wars, brutal globalism, personal hidden rage, grief and emotional hunger give witness to this, show it to be true. better not to overcome this lighty without really understanding it.
andreas
?
Hi dear
Clair your sharing hit the nail on the head.
My mantra in these situations is: Wut ist gut.
Too bad that the distance between london and Frankfurt is not small.
Sending Energy – Michael
Dear Clare, you don’t have idea how appropriate your words are for me right now. Just about 20 minutes ago we had this really strange quarrel with my father… I started it so out of the blue, all because I thought “he wasn’t helping me because he really wanted to, but because he didn’t know how to say ‘no’ when I asked him something he didn’t want to do” (I know, it sounds quite complicated)…
I was almost crying when I came and sit here in front of my laptop, because I knew all that anger I “threw” him in the face, my dad’s face, was so mine, SO MINE! And it’s horrific the way my rage is always there, just like you said, it never goes away…
I received a link to this website thanks I’m in PaulList, and this is one of those occasions I’m really grateful to be in it…
What else can I say?… I didn’t want to cry, I didn’t want to feel the way I felt, and I think I came here looking for an answer and I got it so well: I have to feel that feeling so deeply that I’ll finally understand how meaningless it is… I don’t know yet if I’m angry with myself or with my father or with the world, but now I know how to start looking for!… NOT SUPPRESSING MY RAGE BUT FEELING IT!
Thank you so much, Clare.
Osvaldo.
Hi,
It’s great that you have a forum for discussion which is not appropriate at the Sharing Group. I think where we differ is not on feeling the emotion of violence, but acting on it. Andrew Cohen sums it up nicely in his 2nd Tenet: the Law of Violitionality,
‘There are few human beings who truly aspire to be absolutely responsible for themselves. Most prefer to see themselves as unconscious victims of the forces within and without. As long as you allow yourself to be victimized by your own conditioned responses that arise as a result of past wounds and traumas, it is inevitable that sooner or later you are going to wound and traumatize others, and the momentum of your own karma will only increase. But when you renounce the victim position, you finally take the weight of your karma upon your own shoulders. You bear it so that no one else has to suffer. Heroically, you choose to liberate the world from your own miserable ego—and if you care about the evolution of consciousness, you will be in a position to make a significant contribution.’
So, I think you have to first understand why you have feelings of violence, before it can be transmuted into the passion of joy for living. Warm regards
Wow Clare thank you. Very appropriate for me. I just had a reading with Kira in which she said let your anger is a great tool for telling me when something is off balance or i missed something. I’m going to let it inform me. Thanks for encouraging me not to be afraid of my rage. x
This was so well said. Thank you, Clare. The sharing groups must be great!
I love this Clare, thank you. You’ve expressed it really clearly. How exciting that we get to ‘go there’, feel this rage and watch it transmute into pure, boundless life-force energy. What a gift. xxx
darling Claire… so profound… so needed/appropriate for me, for the world. thank you.
So beautiful, Clare! Thank you! Very moving and right on the money. Loving you… and almost fearing you with that powerful, uncompromising clarity.
I love your article, thank you for sharing this. Insightful, powerful and touching. I’m with you. xx