A short guided-meditation episode (Awareness That Heals, Episode 140) by Robert J. Strock focused on caring for and responding to anger and related emotions. Strock outlines a three-step practice: (1) sustained awareness of the angry or frustrated feeling, (2) recognizing the desire to care for oneself without judgment and reframing anger as potential vitality, and (3) containment — fully feeling the emotion (even exaggerating it) while not acting it out, thereby preserving safety and channeling anger as a source of aliveness. The episode emphasizes staying with the feeling, self-compassion, and using containment as a tool to prevent suppression or impulsive harm. The host closes by inviting listeners to continue through the series.
Awareness that heals episode 140.
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. Welcome to our third guided meditation on.
Caring for and responding to anger and related emotions. The first step is always being aware of our anger or related feeling that you choose. And as I'm speaking now, go to that experience. Allow yourself to be generous to feel the anger or the frustration, the feeling that you are choosing that most frequently happens in your life or is happening now. And don't underestimate the importance of staying aware. Not just being aware for a moment, but staying aware all the way through, which really is a golden key to to allowing anger to serve your life rather than disrupt your life. And then you go to the second step, which is recognizing, of course I want to care for myself while I'm angry, I don't want to be angry. And then go, oh, I'm really an ass for being angry or to suppress it. And if you realize that anger can be a source of vitality, then it naturally will lead you to wanting to care for yourself more deeply while you're in an angry state or a frustrated related state. And then we move to the third step. And the third step is containment. What does containment mean? Containment means that you're fully feeling the emotion. If anything, you exaggerate the emotion, but because you're not acting it out, you don't have to worry about being harmful to anyone. But you're giving yourself the full experience of the vitality of the feeling and you're doing it in a safe way. And that safe way is critical to because if you suppress the anger, you're going to get depressed or you're going to get empty. You're going to feel a loss of vitality. If you let yourself feel the anger in this safe way, it's juicy, it's alive, it's vital. And that's you. So just take a look right now and pause. Are you letting yourself feel the anger? Stay aware of it and in this containment center. And the containment can be while you're doing the meditation, or you can do it on your own in your backyard, or you can do it on your own whenever you're by yourself. But you're taking yourself out of the situation and not impulsively acting it out or impulsively repressing it. You're dignifying it because you realize it is a source of aliveness. And so containment isn't what some people might understand and think, oh, you're causing me to suppress my feelings. No, it's the opposite. See, if you can let yourself feel where you are fully, you don't have to hold back at all. Staying aware and maybe even a little bit of appreciation that here I am in a state of awareness in my emotion that can normally create negative results, but I'm letting myself feel it fully and I'm appreciative that I'm containing it, which is allowing me to be further along the path of feeling where I am and channeling in a way that's going to serve my life. So thank you for joining us for this third meditation of seven, and I invite you and hope that you'll continue onto the fourth meditation. Thank you.
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