How To Turn Anger Into Strength | Awareness That Heals Episode 113

So start off by letting yourself guide your attention toward your heart and whatever your word is for the smartest part of yourself, your intelligence and your wisdom, and let it feel to its best capacity, your sincerity that wants to become more aware stably of your anger and aggressive emotions. See how much you can feel your genuine curiosity to find your intention to move from anger or related emotions like impatience and frustration and enter the contemplation to find and fulfill the needs that made you angry in the first place. The key now is to feel the urge to liberate yourself from the self destruction and negativity and pivot toward discovering and taking care of your most sincere needs that reduce or eliminate the anger. And when I say eliminate the anger, I don't mean that you won't still have angry feelings inside. I mean eliminate the external expression or lessen the external expression of the anger itself. So pause and feel this desire to liberate yourself in this way. Feel the intention to not just be reactive and impulsive and pause. Let yourself feel this urge and reflect. And not only as I'm speaking now, let this contemplation of I do want to find a way to speak more from my needs than my reactive negativity for the rest of my life. I want to be freed, to break the cycle and find a way to develop real strength and intimacy. One of the keys here, and it's sort of like the analogy of real estate. Location, location, location. This is intention, intention, intention, pure intention, pure intention, pure intention. Right at the point where your reaction is a retaliating intention. If you can see it's a retaliating intention and that you would rather find a intention that has a chance of creating a connection, a heart connection, a sensitivity, a trust, a love. Just pause and feel that urge, opening your mind and your heart is gold. So start off by becoming aware of your most frequent recurring and disturbing aggressive emotions that have sabotaged intimacy and given you the illusion of being strong in the past. You very likely might have said, well, I have to stand up for myself or this person's impossible and you write them off and you have forgotten to see you have this other capacity. See if you can identify the relationships and the patterns that have displayed this acting out or this suppression. And again, it may be anger, patience, frustration, irritation, intolerance, or other similar emotions that have elements of fight in them. Can you find your most frequent emotions? So take a couple seconds and appreciate that you're even looking. Let yourself visualize actual situations to ground your realization. You might have a particular memory A few explosions or situations that really were intense. This is the first step, as nothing can happen that creates stable change without awareness. The second step for making a dynamic and evolutionary practice is letting yourself now feel your aggressive emotion and ask yourself, how can you feel your wish or intention to care for yourself at the same time? I'm going to say that again. How can you feel your aggressive emotion and feel your wish to care for yourself at the same time? Now notice I'm not saying care for the other. I'm saying bring caring into your relationship to yourself. So again, pause and allow two points of feeling together. This truly is a major turning point when you can both remember and execute a shift of intention while you're in a state of this kind of negativity. Just caring for yourself while you're being negative will create a motivation to be more sensitive. So see if you can visualize, oh, I'm impatient, Oh, I want to find a way to care for myself here. And of course, ultimately it will lead toward caring for them. But at this moment, I don't want to judge myself because normally what happens is when we're angry, we're not aware of it, but we kind of know we're shit. We kind of know that we're judging ourselves. And what we don't know is we have the capacity to care for ourself. That can stabilize us. It doesn't require getting rid of the anger, but adds the deep wish to bring caring. It's like a secret potion of mixing two elements of the human psyche together when they are almost always compartmentalized. So just ask, how are you doing with us now? Are you tracking? Are you following that? These two seemingly opposing forces and powers, the anger and the wish to care for yourself, are being experienced together in this second step, the third step for creating this pivot from being against to being for. What you need is to follow your wish to bring caring, which results in what can be called containment. This containment is the third step and means that you're not going to act it out, you're not going to suppress it. You're going to look for a place where you're safe to feel it fully in a harmless way. There's no suppression. And you're really letting yourself feel the juiciness of your rage, your anger, your hate, your impatience, your intolerance. And it actually feels good if you let yourself do it because you're not holding yourself back and you know you're in a safe place so you don't have to be inhibited. Your wish to contain the aggression in a safe place encourages you, or can encourage you to feel it as fully as possible. And it's one of the greatest acts of fostering peace we can learn how to do. Do you understand this? It is experience your feelings fully in a way that isn't going to create damage. And hopefully, as you pause, you see that containment does not mean suppression. Now, most of our unconscious, because we're so used to expressing, will feel this as a suppression. But if we actually take the time to feel it fully, it'll become more and more obvious as we practice it. This has nothing to do with suppression. It's actually the opposite of it. Because you can afford to even exaggerate it. You will likely want to go to a private place, a car, a backyard, the beach, a park, a therapy office, your best friend, a counselor, and then let yourself go, oh, I hate this situation. I hate this person. And you let yourself have it. And while you're doing that, you're amplifying it. And in this third step of containment, you're. You're just starting to ask the question, what is it I really need? What did I need? What is it I needed? And ask yourself, at the peak points of aggression, what is it that I needed the most? And you see how you can start to stabilize your question while you're still in the peak of anger. Now, this is more than walking and chewing gum at the same time. This really is developing the capacity to think, feel a very profound, deep, destructive, potentially feeling. And at the same time doing your best to be contemplative and inquiring. This is the beginning of that. The third step doesn't necessarily mean you've arrived, but you're at least warming up. And once you're able to ground yourself and find the original need that was violated in the first place, this is the fourth step. The fourth step is totally committed to going into what is it that I needed? Now pause and see if you can plant a seed. This is what I want to do, and I want to remember this. I want to be able to do the first part, be aware of my need, do the second step, which is to care for myself, which itself is a revolution evolutionary step, as is the third step, which is to contain yourself and feel it fully. And the fourth step is really delving into what is it that I really need. And for those of you that have trouble finding your need, definitely have that list awareness that heals.org the introspective guides and download it, because you will be able to find your Needs on that list for sure. This is a time of great permission to feel and to reflect and to really take it deeply enough where you are able to find what you need. Once you've discovered what you need, and that might be more than one need, then you go on to the fifth step. And that is, how do I communicate this as sensitively as possible without polluting the expression of my need with the anger, which is a very, very high danger, because you might figure out, well, what I needed was for you to be more sensitive to me. So you might say, well, what I needed was to be more sensitive to me. But then you've just dumped your anger while you're expressing your needs. So it requires really looking in the fifth step at what your tone is, being sincere, being present, and as much as possible, communicating sincerely. You give that your best effort at least three times, because there might be a few different ways that you do that. And this is only the fifth step, when you believe that there's a slight chance that. That the person can hear you if you communicate sensitively. So it's a little subtle because the fifth step sometimes is bypassed when you're with someone where you know there's no chance whatsoever to communicate because they're completely defensive. So there's an awareness and an evaluation. Am I dealing with someone that there's a chance if I change my tone, if I realize I want to reach them, if I'm in touch with some of my heart and sensitivity, is it possible I can reach them? When I am warning you about the dangers of expressing your need with anger? My experience is at least 90% of people that do it in the first stages, that little anger sneaks in. And so you want to really learn how much that's likely to be occurring. And for example, if that's the case, you can say something like, I've had to work through a lot of anger, and I'm going to do my best to not have it sneak in, but it probably will. But I promise you, what's more important to me is this sincere set of needs or this need. So don't be naive that you can just do this and clean up the anger, because that anger is going to still be there and back in the background. The question is whether you can really transmute that anger into your sincerity, into your heart, into really being present and have elements of caring. And so then we can move on to the sixth step. If in your determination, the person that you're angry at is absolutely not possible to communicate with, and you see that that's the case, you need to ask yourself, well, how can I take care of myself? Given that communication is impossible and I don't want to be bottled up with frustration and anger, how do I move toward a tolerance or an acceptance? And for many people, this is where they're just not able to move on to the next step because it's quite difficult. You need to evaluate is this relationship itself important enough that it overrides the specific violation of needs, and that will make it easier to accept and tolerate. So you need to have a whole perspective of who you're dealing with. If it's your wife or your husband and they're not a good communicator and they do certain things, but you know what? They're a great soul. They support you in all these other ways, then you need to move toward tolerance and acceptance because the relationship is still worth it in your evaluation. Now, this requires tremendous maturity to realize that sometimes it's going to require inner work and, and not outer work of recognizing that the person you're dealing with has enough offerings that it warrants resolving it internally, that this one need isn't being met. This could also be your boss and you recognize, you know what, I need to resolve it because the person is just closed. And if that's the case, you need to see that the tolerance, the acceptance, is incredibly mature. You've discerned. It's a part of the whole that's not critical. And so your work is internal. If, on the other hand, you realize it is critical, then your choice is going to be to set a boundary and say, you know what, if it's a boss, you may have to quit the job. If it's really that abusive or critical, you might have to set a boundary with your partner. Maybe you're going to sleep in the other bedroom, maybe you're going to let, you're going to let them know that you're profoundly affected. And maybe it's going to lead to a separation. But you want to be clear, it's not a bluff. It's not an impulsive reaction. It's a deeply contemplated reaction and a perspective of how important is this need relative to all the rest of the needs in my relationship. One of the common denominators of really resolving this sixth step is you realize you're not interested in blaming, you're just interested in taking care of yourself in a wholesome way. And what you're going to do is either set the boundary or you're going to come to a mature acceptance. That's not a compromise if you're receiving plenty of good things. So this six step process is a way of being very specific about whether you can accept or need to reject. You've made your sincerest effort and have succeeded communicating at least three times in what you know is a sensitive way. And you recognize that all the other prior steps are needed to prepare you for where you are. This is a major evolutionary process that not many people have mastered unless they've been exposed to this or something very much like this. And it has been by far the most popular video in prior meditations. Hundreds of thousands of people have used this to reconstruct how they deal with their own aggression and how they can discover their own needs. So I really encourage you to take this into your heart to recognize this is not a. I listened to the meditation once and I got it. And that it's so crucial to be able to bring it down to the level of your own needs, your own vulnerability and also your own contemplation of the relative importance of the need in relationship to the gestalt of all of your needs. So if you've gone this far, I honor you for the sincerity of the soul search. This truly does require awareness, honesty, integrity, contemplation, balance. And if you've taken it this far, you have changed your life. When you have aggressive feelings, you now know how to turn it into wholesome needs that are not just self centered, they're relational. You're taking in the other person with you. And my deepest prayer, my deepest wish for you and for the world and for the country that is so troubled because it cannot do this is you take this on as a practice that will allow you to deal with even the most difficult aggressive feelings and find the source of not only your needs, but but how it fits into the needs of the people around you and how close they are and how you can best take care of your life and life itself. I wish you dedication and I thank you very much for listening all the way through.