How to Move Through Anger?

Anger arises from a place of hurt and behind it is immense pain. Anger, as a force, is deeply contracting. It’s very energizing but deeply contracting. It has higher energy than fear, pain, depression. If you check, you will always have more energy when you are angry than when you are afraid.

Beneath anger is pain, fear, so when we can be mindful and witness, creating space around it, instead of identifying with it, we can watch the anger arising, peaking and slowly disappearing. If we explore within that anger, from where did it arise, we will find hurt, fear.

Explore your hurt. What is the story you are carrying which creates this sense of hurt?

When you start to become more aware of what it is that you are afraid of, what it is that challenges you, what it is that gives rise to this anger, then you can start setting yourself free from anger.

If you don’t acknowledge the fear, the pain, the hurt, the story that you carry that creates that trigger and you don’t address where you are afraid, then that anger will keep arising.

As you start coming to your awakening, what you experience more is your fierceness, not anger.

You have to be more in touch with your fierceness. That’s why you can see Buddha in the Vajrayana tradition pictured with a sword, and Shiva has a trident. There is a sense of fierceness in the yogi but it’s not rage. It’s not anger. It’s this sense of deep certainty and commitment. This sense of surety that, “No matter what, I will return to this sense of equanimity.”

No matter what the challenge is on the level of thought, mind, circumstance, you have that immense capacity in you to transcend.

Anger arises when there is a sense of fear that you won’t be able to transcend but, when there is a sense of fierceness inside, then that force is not destructive or traumatic anymore.

Then we don’t project that anger out or turn that anger in so that it becomes depression, anger towards oneself, or anger towards the other. Ultimately, anger is a depressive and destructive force which destroys the psyche.

As human beings, we cannot deny that there is a sense of fire within us and when we get in touch with that fire, it starts showing up as fierceness. As we develop more and more space within us, a sense of equanimity, we can let these denser emotional states arise, without acting on them, without getting identified with them. Then these emotional movements start to refine.

Instead of anger, we start experiencing a sense of fearlessness, a sense of certainty that no matter the circumstances, they don’t affect us anymore. They don’t trigger us. They don’t create any drama in us, so we can be more equanimous.

Instead of playing the victim of the situation, we use that fierceness to transcend. When we are in touch with that fierceness, we won’t be angry or throwing out blame or reacting to anything. We will be transcending and taking ourselves to the place where we are not yet expanding in our own consciousness because, ultimately, it is our responsibility how we feel.

Nobody can make us angry. We choose it.

As we start to realize this, more and more, there is liberation, because the experiencer is the experience. If the experiencer is in a state of fierce serenity, then the experience is like that.

So, as you deepen into your silence and you develop witness consciousness, then you can transcend any anger, as there is natural spaciousness within you.

Anger is a contractive force. Consciousness is naturally spacious. When you are in silence, anger can arise, peak and dissipate. You can witness it and start to see the unconscious place from where the anger arose, these unconscious stories that you might be carrying within yourself, the prejudices, the victim identity, unconscious fears. Anger can be a great gift then.

And, as you maintain this witness consciousness, it is fierceness, fearlessness, that starts to arise within you.

It’s not about suppression. It’s not about projection. It’s about transmutation. Transform your energy!

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