The vital Importance of Awareness of Anger and Related Emotions - ATH Episode 138

Awareness That Heals, Episode 138. A very warm welcome to Season 3 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 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. Thank you for joining us for the first episode of 7 on how to care for and respond to our anger and related feelings. What we're going to be presenting are 7 guided meditations that are in a sequence. And the reason why we're doing it that way is to simplify each step to make it more easy to be understood. The focus is going to be how we can respond to and care for not only anger, but related feelings too, like frustration, Intolerance, impatience. And it's for you to identify, and even as I'm speaking now, to identify which of these emotions you identify with most. And for you to look at a situation that you have been in, are in, are frequently in, and really zero in on your experience. This is not about just getting an intellectual understanding. This is about you actually experiencing your anger, your frustration, your impatience, your intolerance. And as you are there, learning how to guide yourself to move toward peace. We're going to start now the guided meditation. So put yourself in a comfortable position. Where you know you're not going to be interrupted and you can just be present. So the first guided meditation is on being aware of awareness itself, of whatever emotion is most central for you. Again, whether it's anger itself or any of the related feelings. So take a few moments and just drop into your experience of anger or frustration, intolerance, and just get the feel and remember the situations or the situation you're in now and let yourself fully feel it. It's very important that you don't give short shrift to whatever your experience is. So fully allow yourself to identify your own personal experience and let yourself feel it. Now we're going to focus on really being aware of whatever your emotional state is and recognize that awareness itself is so often fleeting, and especially when it's something like an intolerance or an impatience. And so what we're focusing on here is the vital importance of staying aware to where you might be saying at the beginning, I'm aware of my anger. I'm here. I'm not only angry, but I'm aware of my anger. Now you might ask, why is this so important that I stay aware? And while I'm talking, stay aware. And it's because normally we just stay emotional and we act it out or we suppress it. And if we stay aware, it gives us options to not only feel where you are, which again, please stay with your feeling wherever it is, but also to use our intelligence and our wisdom to guide ourselves. But if we don't stay aware, then there's no chance we're going to have the presence to be able to focus on the next steps that we're going to be zeroing in on. Be aware of where your attention is right now. Are you with yourself? Are you with an emotion that you've identified? And if you haven't identified the emotion, keep looking for the one that is most you. What's really important is that you're experiencing it and you have a stable awareness. And please understand, this is only the beginning of 7 guided meditations. But we can't overlook the incredible importance of stably staying aware, because awareness is the gift of being human. But it's also so common to have it fleet in and out and then the emotion takes over. So just keep pausing and allowing yourself to drop into the anger or the resistance or whatever it is in you that is fighting or is resisting or is against in any way. Let yourself see if you can understand the importance of stabilizing your awareness. And it's as important as feeling the feeling. It's a partnership. It's kind of a miracle if you can stabilize your awareness. As you look at the situation where you're angry, can you see how your awareness of it goes in and out because you're focusing on, I'm angry because you did this. I'm frustrated with you because you did that. I'm impatient with you because you did this. Instead of, I'm staying internally aware of my anger and related feelings. This is gold. If and only if you stabilize this awareness and recognize that you're not as aware None of us are as aware of the anger and the related feelings as we think we are. We think awareness means, "Oh yeah, I recognize it." And then the next 25 seconds, we're just in the emotion, thinking about what we're angry about. No, we're staying inside ourselves and staying aware of your choice of which feeling you're in. So please join us for meditation number 2, where we're going to continue to go deeper and deeper and include the awareness. And each step will be including the prior steps so that you can have a deeper sense of how do I move from my awareness of my anger to move toward peace toward harmlessness, toward communication. So thank you for joining us as we go to meditation number 2.

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