Intro to Healing Steps Series
Healing Steps 1
One of the reasons why we are, often, afraid to look at our anger, is because we think that is all there is. We’re afraid if we give voice to our rage, we’ll never stop screaming. But that’s not true.
Step 2: Letting Go
Song: Dancing Cranes
(For lyrics and more songs: www.soundclick.com/dreamsinger)
“The compassion from a new perspective expressed in Dancing Cranes” is what was left after I listened to and sang my anger out in “Backstabber“. It’s the life hidden inside the seed, after the husk has fallen away.
Emotions can be intense. It doesn’t help if we feel we don’t have a right to them, or only bad people…or “bad girls” get angry. But it’s a bit of an irony, that the only way we can really be the nice parts of ourselves is to accept and embrace the not-so-nice parts.
And really, even classifying the not-so-pleasant-to-experience emotion of anger as negative is revealing in our personal prejudices. Just because it’s not fun doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Some people classify anger and hate in one sweep. I do not.
Anger is an integral and necessary part of human existence. It’s not the presence of anger that is damaging, but the denial of it or the unwillingness to own it, thereby allowing it to own you.
How many times has anger, no longer able to be contained under your “nice girl” image, erupted on the scene, and usurping your right and responsibility to think, placed words in your mouth or made decisions for you, as if you were some puppet sitting on a ventriloquist’s knee – words and decisions you were not able to take back…and wished you could?
But anger didn’t make you do that. Your denial and refusal to address it with empowerment did.
This denial of ownership can, also, increase the likelihood that we’ll seek to justify our anger. That justification can take the form of hate and often does. That’s the relationship between the two, but it’s one that’s joined together by our refusal to be authentic with ourselves in the first place.
Anger is our friend when it alerts us that something is not right.
It’s the notification that our basic humanity is being devalued or disrespected. It tells us our boundaries are being transgressed or something unjust is occurring. Or our anger can be the signal that there are unresolved issues within us, buttons too easily pushed that would be in our best interest to look at.
Anger informs us, makes us aware of our environment, both inner and outer and it transports us to greater awareness and better choices, but only if we take charge of what we feel and not the other way around.
And when we listen to that voice and stay in a real place with it, then our anger can transport us not only to a place of productive action but a place of peace.
When you refuse to listen to the voice of your own anger, then it does not let you go. It’s not so much that you’re holding on to it, which you are, but it’s really holding on to you. Allowing this part of you to be heard, if only by you, allows anger to be the fluid stream of emotion that it is, instead of a stagnant pool where you get stuck standing in its mucky bottom.
And where can anger take you? When acknowledged and heard, it can take you to a place of release, that place of letting go that so many people, including yourself, want you to jump to right away.
When I first wrote the words and melody to “Dancing Cranes“, I clearly had the aggressor in mind. After we recorded it, I remember hearing it for the first time, and I was so proud. This was my response, my resolution. It was genuine and it was beautiful.
For all my mistakes, for all my fumbling, trying to find a way to deal with the aggression, the hurt, the infuriating unfairness of it all, I had come to a place where I could finally tap into the more compassionate part of me and give that voice.
But when I listened carefully to my own song, as often happens, I found I received a meaning that went beyond the original purpose I thought I had written the song for. I didn’t write this for her. I mean, I did…but I didn’t.
I wrote it for me. I was being asked to move on from this one shore of experience to another. No matter how negative or positive, it is your charge to find the blessing within any given situation or to create it, and move on.
Not for the convenience of others, not for you to escape, but to embrace…
And because I didn’t have the burden of carrying anger I didn’t want to see on my back, I could. I could stretch my wings and fly.
And I did.
Healing Steps 3 on Monday
Recent Comments