Robert J. Strock guides you through anger to find what's underneath: hurt, fear, helplessness, insecurity, abandonment. Learn to stabilize the emotion, contain it, and channel that energy somewhere it matters instead of lashing out.
Awareness that heals episode 141.
A very warm welcome to season three of awareness that Heals, where we have progressed to be able to focus on one challenging emotion at a time. This will allow you to choose a specific emotion that you've had challenges with, and each one will have a progressive series of of guided meditations that will allow you to go deeper and deeper into self compassion. For me, it's truly inspiring because each emotion has unique nuances for both self care and responding to your environment at the same time. This is subtle and a rare skill as all too often we don't stay aware of how we can care for ourselves as we are. I hope that you'll not only find it helpful, but also give you deep resources that you can internalize when the emotion is most emerging.
Thanks for joining us again for the fourth meditation on caring for and responding to caring, anger and related emotions. So the first step is always identifying where you're angry and recognizing the importance of stable awareness. Now, stable awareness is something, as we've reviewed, that is not common as we so often are aware we're angry or we're frustrated, but then we zip out of our awareness, we go into the emotion and then it leads us to want to be more attacking. Instead, we're staying with the awareness. And as I'm speaking, let yourself drop into the emotion that's most significant for you now, whether it's anger or frustration, impatience. So take that time to drop in. And then recognize that of course you want to have a positive attitude and find a way to have the anger or the emotion be serving your life and recognize you want to open your heart a little bit to the anger itself. And then you realize that if you act out the anger spontaneously, it's going to lead to something destructive. So you're moving into containment. And in containment you're finding a safe way to fully experience the anger or your feeling, which again you're identifying and you're staying aware of to see if you are and you're containing it so you can find a way that's not going to create harm. And while you're in this containment, you're going to glimpse, or you might be able to glimpse the vulnerable feelings and even the needs underneath it. While you feel your feeling fully, the more full you feel the anger or you're feeling, the more you can sense the vulnerability also and start to understand there was something that you needed that pissed you off, that made you frustrated, it made you angry. So again, stay with your feeling wherever it is. Now, as you experience the anger, let your attention really focus on what was the vulnerable. What is the vulnerable feeling that really is there? And it might have just been a flash, a moment of, oh, that hurt me, or I felt abandoned, I felt alone, I felt hurt. And let yourself do everything you can to stay with the anger, but also go to the vulnerable feeling underneath. Because the more vulnerable you can also feel, the easier it's going to be to start to channel your energy in a direction that's going to be harmless, that's going to be helpful, that's going to serve your life, that's going to serve your relationship. So take a few moments and identify and feel. Is it hurt? Maybe it was fear, maybe it made you feel insecure and it pissed you off that your partner was doing something that made you feel insecure. But you'll know if you stay deeply with your experience of the primary feeling of anger. But you'll know the feeling if you stay with the primary feeling of anger. And then you realize you want to care for yourself, which leads you to contain your emotion because you don't want to do something that's going to hurt you. And then you're going to drop into these vulnerable feelings that are golden. That includes a helplessness or a hurt or an insecurity or a fear. It's going to soften you. Now, at this point, you'll be both hard and soft. You'll be feeling angry and more vulnerable. And if you can't find it, keep looking, because underneath the anger, almost invariably you'll feel a vulnerable feeling. So just take a few more seconds and drop into both of those feelings with your awareness. And maybe even appreciate yourself that you're going through all of this to find a way to deal with a part of you that's led you into trouble, and instead you're finding a way to turn it around and be able to have it serve you. Thank you for joining us here on the 4th of 7 guided meditations, and please join us for the 5th one.
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