Thinking more about anger
Thinking more about yesterday's (FLocked, sorry) post, because even when it doesn't look or feel like I'm actively processing something, I apparently am - sometimes even to my own surprise:
I've long been a proponent and practitioner of "back-burner thinking", in which conscious cogitation is shelved so the 10% of my brain over which I have any pretense of control can take a break while the other 90% works furtively but furiously in the background on the current topic. Eventually, new thoughts get shoved through the semi-permeable membrane back into the conscious portion, and processing resumes, generally with some new direction or perspective. It's not the most efficient process in the world, but it's what gets me from A to B more often than not, so I don't knock it.
I made the comment yesterday that:
Someone once said to me (I forget who, now; this was way back when I started my readings in Buddhism): "Enlightenment is what happens when you stop trying so hard to *BE* Enlightened." Maybe the lessons started sinking in when I stopped trying so hard to integrate them in my life, who knows?
I think to some extent, the way in which I process my anger, and specifically my anger around being hurt and disappointed (i.e., not managing my own expectations realistically, or leaning heavily - and perhaps disproportionately - on the perceived attachments), has changed fairly dramatically over the years. And managing that anger has been a key component in unraveling some of my attachment issues. The latter are still a thorn in my side and likely always will be to some extent, but if I can separate out trigger from reaction, it becomes a whole lot easier to breathe through the entire experience.
The hard part is, I'm not entirely sure how the evolution has happened; I just know that Things Are Different Now. People always want to know what the trick is, what practice forces that change? I think the short answer is, I did my homework, and somewhere along the way I just stopped fighting the lessons and started trusting to the process. There is no try; there is only "do", or "do not", as the Master says. I think I stopped beating myself up over being angry and hurt, over feeling victimized; I've done a lot of work in the past dozen years to learn to own my shit and see my own path through the pain and the muck... to just feel what I feel. In its own way, this is all about getting out of my own way, stop trying to analyze all the angles, stop judging myself as harshly as I self-reflexively used to judge others as a way of avoiding looking at my own complicity and culpability.
I have been very, very angry since September, the kind of angry that burns bridges and ends relationships and nukes sites from orbit as the only way to be sure. I have been this angry in the past and done all these things; triggered at the wrong time on a large-enough backlog of stress, and we have witnessed super-novas of surpassing magnitude. I have ended relationships, and I have left smoked and salted craters in my wake (it's the dark side of Gemini passion and capriciousness, for thems wot take arbitrary personality algorithms seriously). And I have burned myself out to a crispy hulk in the process. That kind of rage, that extreme passion, cannot be contained without charring the container as well.
But since September, I have co-existed with that rage and remained both highly functional AND engaged with everyone around me. In truth, I have spent a lot of time NOT staring into the crucible of my incandescent fury, but it has been a constant companion through my winter and a close informant on many decisions made in that time. Yet those decisions are not merely reactive stances to the massed anger; some decisions have flown directly in the face of that anger. The anger flares, I sit in the heat for a while, I ponder what needs pondering; eventually the heat subsides rather than consumes, and I go about my business of living in spite of the omnipresent power of that conflagration. I can talk of it without detachment, and without explosion. I can be honest about its impact, and about how I move with or around or through it; I've done that as recently as the night before last. Those are still hard conversations to have. There is as much vulnerability required in talking about rage and vengeance as there is in talking about betrayal and hurt, or fear and shame. The rage may seem to make us powerful in the moment, but in truth the shadows it casts are long but the person at the heart of those shadows, standing alone at the base of those skyward flames, is anything but.
Sometimes, it takes a lot to separate the two and say, "I understand being afraid of the fire; it's burned you many times too. But if I can learn to stand here within it and hold it at bay, can you learn to do so with me?" Part of that separation process is setting aside the attachment triggers - willfully and by brute mental force if necessary - and being willing to hear "no" as an answer. Hearing "no" means accepting that someone else has put needs above yours, made a self-centred and self-serving choice over choosing to serve your needs first and foremost. That's a difficult, sometimes craptacular thing to hear. But there are two people in the conversation in that moment, and as all life is about balance, sometimes peace in the fire comes from letting go of an unrealistic expectation that we're all going to get what WE want, all the time.
Self-care isn't just about being able to identify, articulate, and move to meet our own needs; sometimes it's about learning to manage ourselves with grace and effectiveness when our needs are shown to NOT surpass those of another, even on the important-to-us issues. It doesn't mean the rage won't happen when we perceive ourselves as being thwarted or rejected or abandoned, but if we stay engaged without exploding - if we can sit with the rage and feel its heat without letting it consume us - then we can find ways of letting things be as they need to be, and buy ourselves some breathing space to *consciously* observe what's happening, to make conscious decisions without that jerk-it-out-of-the-flame-and-wave-it-around-frantically thrashing that comes of feeling burned. We can practice something I termed elsewhere this morning "Risk-Aware Loving" without brandishing a flaming torch as a weapon of confrontation and demand.
It's one way in which we can choose to put the weapons down, and back away from being emotional terrorists by emptying our hands... without emptying our hearts.
Bear with the philosophy here; I'm new at this. And my discoveries come at the cost of much scar tissue and long days spent in the emotional equivalent of a burn unit nursing those scars to the point of treasuring the identity I've built around them. Anyone who has ever seen a burn victim begin to rehabilitate skin grafts and scar tissue knows how long and painful the process is of stretching that strange flesh out. This is no different. I'm trying this on for size, stretching through the integration and newness pain, learning about the limitations of what this new state does and does not support. And all the while, my skin, my mind, my heart retain the sense-memory of that explosive heat, carried in me as it always is, never far from the surface of daily life.
Like Icarus, it is my pride that carries me too close to the blaze.
Unlike Icarus, there are, and will be (again and again) gentler landings. With each flight, something is different, something is learned. The thing that changes most, always, is me.
I've long been a proponent and practitioner of "back-burner thinking", in which conscious cogitation is shelved so the 10% of my brain over which I have any pretense of control can take a break while the other 90% works furtively but furiously in the background on the current topic. Eventually, new thoughts get shoved through the semi-permeable membrane back into the conscious portion, and processing resumes, generally with some new direction or perspective. It's not the most efficient process in the world, but it's what gets me from A to B more often than not, so I don't knock it.
I made the comment yesterday that:
Someone once said to me (I forget who, now; this was way back when I started my readings in Buddhism): "Enlightenment is what happens when you stop trying so hard to *BE* Enlightened." Maybe the lessons started sinking in when I stopped trying so hard to integrate them in my life, who knows?
I think to some extent, the way in which I process my anger, and specifically my anger around being hurt and disappointed (i.e., not managing my own expectations realistically, or leaning heavily - and perhaps disproportionately - on the perceived attachments), has changed fairly dramatically over the years. And managing that anger has been a key component in unraveling some of my attachment issues. The latter are still a thorn in my side and likely always will be to some extent, but if I can separate out trigger from reaction, it becomes a whole lot easier to breathe through the entire experience.
The hard part is, I'm not entirely sure how the evolution has happened; I just know that Things Are Different Now. People always want to know what the trick is, what practice forces that change? I think the short answer is, I did my homework, and somewhere along the way I just stopped fighting the lessons and started trusting to the process. There is no try; there is only "do", or "do not", as the Master says. I think I stopped beating myself up over being angry and hurt, over feeling victimized; I've done a lot of work in the past dozen years to learn to own my shit and see my own path through the pain and the muck... to just feel what I feel. In its own way, this is all about getting out of my own way, stop trying to analyze all the angles, stop judging myself as harshly as I self-reflexively used to judge others as a way of avoiding looking at my own complicity and culpability.
I have been very, very angry since September, the kind of angry that burns bridges and ends relationships and nukes sites from orbit as the only way to be sure. I have been this angry in the past and done all these things; triggered at the wrong time on a large-enough backlog of stress, and we have witnessed super-novas of surpassing magnitude. I have ended relationships, and I have left smoked and salted craters in my wake (it's the dark side of Gemini passion and capriciousness, for thems wot take arbitrary personality algorithms seriously). And I have burned myself out to a crispy hulk in the process. That kind of rage, that extreme passion, cannot be contained without charring the container as well.
But since September, I have co-existed with that rage and remained both highly functional AND engaged with everyone around me. In truth, I have spent a lot of time NOT staring into the crucible of my incandescent fury, but it has been a constant companion through my winter and a close informant on many decisions made in that time. Yet those decisions are not merely reactive stances to the massed anger; some decisions have flown directly in the face of that anger. The anger flares, I sit in the heat for a while, I ponder what needs pondering; eventually the heat subsides rather than consumes, and I go about my business of living in spite of the omnipresent power of that conflagration. I can talk of it without detachment, and without explosion. I can be honest about its impact, and about how I move with or around or through it; I've done that as recently as the night before last. Those are still hard conversations to have. There is as much vulnerability required in talking about rage and vengeance as there is in talking about betrayal and hurt, or fear and shame. The rage may seem to make us powerful in the moment, but in truth the shadows it casts are long but the person at the heart of those shadows, standing alone at the base of those skyward flames, is anything but.
Sometimes, it takes a lot to separate the two and say, "I understand being afraid of the fire; it's burned you many times too. But if I can learn to stand here within it and hold it at bay, can you learn to do so with me?" Part of that separation process is setting aside the attachment triggers - willfully and by brute mental force if necessary - and being willing to hear "no" as an answer. Hearing "no" means accepting that someone else has put needs above yours, made a self-centred and self-serving choice over choosing to serve your needs first and foremost. That's a difficult, sometimes craptacular thing to hear. But there are two people in the conversation in that moment, and as all life is about balance, sometimes peace in the fire comes from letting go of an unrealistic expectation that we're all going to get what WE want, all the time.
Self-care isn't just about being able to identify, articulate, and move to meet our own needs; sometimes it's about learning to manage ourselves with grace and effectiveness when our needs are shown to NOT surpass those of another, even on the important-to-us issues. It doesn't mean the rage won't happen when we perceive ourselves as being thwarted or rejected or abandoned, but if we stay engaged without exploding - if we can sit with the rage and feel its heat without letting it consume us - then we can find ways of letting things be as they need to be, and buy ourselves some breathing space to *consciously* observe what's happening, to make conscious decisions without that jerk-it-out-of-the-flame-and-wave-it-around-frantically thrashing that comes of feeling burned. We can practice something I termed elsewhere this morning "Risk-Aware Loving" without brandishing a flaming torch as a weapon of confrontation and demand.
It's one way in which we can choose to put the weapons down, and back away from being emotional terrorists by emptying our hands... without emptying our hearts.
Bear with the philosophy here; I'm new at this. And my discoveries come at the cost of much scar tissue and long days spent in the emotional equivalent of a burn unit nursing those scars to the point of treasuring the identity I've built around them. Anyone who has ever seen a burn victim begin to rehabilitate skin grafts and scar tissue knows how long and painful the process is of stretching that strange flesh out. This is no different. I'm trying this on for size, stretching through the integration and newness pain, learning about the limitations of what this new state does and does not support. And all the while, my skin, my mind, my heart retain the sense-memory of that explosive heat, carried in me as it always is, never far from the surface of daily life.
Like Icarus, it is my pride that carries me too close to the blaze.
Unlike Icarus, there are, and will be (again and again) gentler landings. With each flight, something is different, something is learned. The thing that changes most, always, is me.