Transforming Anger And Shame In Shadow|Breathwork+Meditation

This is part of the shadow work series. Anger is the most maligned emotion and shame is the most ignored. Healthy anger is the guardian of your boundaries; you need it to protect your vulnerable self and Inner Child. Shame can run most of your behavior, although you're seldom aware. Learn to reframe and re-integrate these powerful allies. This session includes breath work, guided meditation and Q&A on the subject.

Transcript

Today,

The format is going to be as follows.

We're going to start off with some breathwork.

I'm going to teach you some sonic resonance,

Which is the sequence of events,

The sequence of breathwork I've been teaching the last few times.

I will continue to teach this,

A lot of positive feedback I've been receiving about this particular form of breathwork exercise.

The breathwork is intended to prepare your brain and your body to get into the state of deep meditation.

Today,

We're going to be doing a very,

Very important subject in shadow work,

Where we're going to look at our anger and our shame that's deeply buried in how you can bring it out of your shadow.

So,

Powerful exercise.

With that said,

Let's go ahead and begin the practice for today.

I ask that you go ahead and downshift your gaze or close your eyes,

And we'll start with something called box breathing.

In this box breathing exercise,

You will be breathing in for a count of four,

Holding for a count of four at the top of your breath,

Exhaling for a count of four,

And holding at the bottom of your lungs.

Inhale for four,

Hold for four,

Exhale for four.

And hold.

Inhale for four,

Hold.

Exhale and hold.

And when I'm asking you to inhale and exhale,

Please be inhaling,

Exhaling through your nostrils,

Not your mouth.

There's a lot of benefits to this,

But I want you to use your nostrils for this exercise.

Inhale for four,

Hold for four.

Exhale and hold.

Now we're going to extend the exhalation to eight this next time around.

Inhale for four,

Hold for four.

Exhale for eight.

And hold.

Inhale for four,

Hold.

Exhale for eight.

And hold.

Now return back to regular breathing.

Inhale for five,

And exhale for five.

In today's exercise,

I'll be teaching you something called full body sonic anatomy,

In which we will be going through the different energy centers in the body.

These are electromagnetic centers and you will be focusing on a specific sound as we exhale.

Imagine around your body,

In and around your body,

You have your own ionosphere.

This is an energy field.

It's like an electromagnetic field that's around you.

Visualize that.

Visualize a body of energy that surrounds your physical body.

And I want you to start off by first filling that bio-feel around you with I,

The sound I.

So inhale.

And we'll do this two more times.

Now this last time,

See if you can really fill this ionosphere of yours with the sound of I,

Turning it up.

I.

Now we're going to go with the sound of wa.

Wa,

And imagine this wa coming and reverberating from your foundation,

That is your tailbone.

Imagine if your tailbone has a mouth and it's singing the sound wa.

Let's do this together.

You can choose any pitch of this wa that you like.

One more time.

Now we're going to switch to the sound of ga,

Ga from your pelvic floor.

Feel the resonance.

Go to any note that you want.

This is at your,

Imagine there's a powerful engine at your pelvic floor and you're going to emerge the sound ga from that really powerful engine there,

Right from the rear of your pelvic floor.

Now we're going to go with the sound of moo,

Moo and it's going to come from your belly just under the lungs,

Into the kidney area.

So let's go with three times with moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Be as soft,

As loud as you like with the sound moo.

One last time.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Moo.

Now notice just how you're feeling.

What has this done for you?

Now this next breath,

The next sound is going to come from the front of your belly and this time you're going to release the sound you.

This is your home of self worth.

So be really expressive about this.

Three times with the sound you.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

See if you can push it up more and really connect with the sound.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

One last time.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

Now we're going to go from the back of our heart with the sound rar.

It's an agitating,

Rubby sound.

This is the part where the heart aches,

Any heartache that you have bottled up unresolved.

We're going to let it all out with the sound rar.

Stuck together three times.

Rar.

Rar.

Rar.

Now we're going to move towards the front of the heart,

Allowing the front of the heart to unfold with the sound.

You.

Really opening and softening this area on the front of your heart with the last year.

You.

Now we're going to move up slightly towards the chakra of the throat.

This is the area of thyroid where things have been unspoken,

Unsaid and let it be said with the sound boo.

Boo.

Boo.

One last time.

Now you're going to take your attention to the front of your vocal cords.

And if you haven't been able to sing,

Let it all unfold,

Unfurl it with the sound ha.

Now,

Can you get a little bit more of the ha in there?

One last time.

Now I want you to go into the playground of your face between your eyes.

Imagine there's a crystal core like a lighthouse inside your forehead.

Let this light shoot out from the top of your head with the sound of a,

A.

So let it go up through the head and out through the crown chakra.

Let it spin around if you need it to.

Hey.

Now for this last day,

I want you to cup your palms in front of your face,

About four inches in front of your face and feel the resonance as you say the a spinning out from the top of your head out into the ionosphere.

Hey.

Now the last one,

We're going to go venturing up to the crown.

You want your crown to drink in what it needs to feed the entire central channel.

And now we're going to do this with the sound e,

Vibrating the precious metals in your head,

The frequencies,

Raising the frequency,

Letting you hear those high frequencies with the sound e.

Let's do this together.

E.

See if you can take a little higher.

One last time together.

And allow yourself to settle in to the experience,

The full body experience as we traverse through the core channel of the body,

Starting from the base.

Feel the vibration,

Feel this resonance.

And tap into the ionosphere around you,

Your electromagnetic field and see how,

What you feel in there.

You electrified your body,

Woken it up,

Activated all of the chakras.

Notice how this feels scanning your entire body from the base of your feet.

Coming up through the core channel from the pelvic area up through the thoracic region into the shoulders,

Neck and head.

Notice how electrified you feel.

This is work in process.

My name is Jay Chodagam.

And we will embark on a journey for bringing our anger and our shame out of our shadow.

I ask that you sit comfortably.

Alert,

Yet relaxed.

Taking in some deep,

Comfortable breaths.

And with each passing breath,

I want to see your belly rising and collapsing,

Not your chest.

Our shadow is a place within each of us that contains what we don't know,

Don't like,

Or deny about ourselves.

Calling it our shadow is fitting because of the lack of illumination.

What it's storing is being kept in the dark to whatever degree.

Wherever we go,

Our shadow goes with us.

Whether we are aware of it or not.

Our shadow holds our unattended and not yet illuminated conditioning.

All the programmed ways we act,

Think,

Feel,

And choose without even knowing why.

It also contains all that we've disowned,

Pushed aside,

And otherwise rejected in ourselves.

It's whatever it is about us that we insist that that's not me.

Whatever in us that we're out of touch with or just keeping out of sight.

This is likely the root of our unresolved wounding that we're trying to deny.

There's a few emotions that are particularly embedded in our shadow,

Tucked away,

Hidden.

And anger can be a part of that.

We house it there in the deep recesses as something we deem to be dangerous or otherwise worth avoiding.

Sometimes even denying that we even have it.

And there could be many things that lead to our anger being housed in our shadow,

Whether partially or wholly.

And some of these reasons could be when expressing anger in your childhood was dangerous.

If showing anger could further inflame an already abusive parent or a sibling,

We learned for purpose of pure survival to suppress it,

To show no signs of it.

When expressing anger in our childhood meant a loss of love or affection,

Given how important love and affection were to our childhood,

We learned not to show our anger.

Or it could be because we attached the belief that anger is negative,

It's a negative emotion.

Or because we confused anger with aggression.

Anger doesn't attack,

But aggression does.

Or we could have convinced ourselves that anger and love cannot coexist.

It's true that most of the time they don't coexist.

But there can be times in which there's heart anger,

Anger in which there's a genuine interest in and care for this other person,

In an exchange that can mutually serve the well-being of both.

It's uncommon,

But it does exist.

It's a kind of love,

However fierce or fiery in its expression.

Anger could be housed in our shadow because any expression of anger may have threatened our relationship.

If we were with a partner who,

Because of past negative experiences with unhealthy anger,

Pulls away from us when we show any anger,

We may try to keep all our anger in our shadow.

When our anger isn't in our shadow,

Unrepressed and very much alive,

We can't yet say that we have handled it.

It may be aggressive,

Blaming,

Pushy,

Shaming,

And devoid of caring.

What we may need to do is identify the qualities and phenomena that may be obscured or pushed into our shadow by what we are doing with our out-front anger.

And these elements,

These qualities could include vulnerability.

When you're transparent,

Undefended,

And open,

Vulnerability can get pushed into our shadow when anger arises.

Our hurt,

Sadness,

And grief can become hidden,

Denied,

Buried,

Camouflaged,

Or reduced to only superficial considerations by which we're expressing or holding our anger.

Because anger is often,

Not always,

But often a defense mechanism against feeling or showing our hurt.

It could be fear.

When we let our anger capture or fill up the foreground,

Possessing us with its fiery intensity,

Our fear may seem non-existent.

This is different than having our fear transform into anger.

When we ache for something,

Whether it's love,

Attention,

Affection,

Or something else,

And react to the absence or perceived absence of it with such anger that we appear to be only angry.

When in anger,

We act as if we are not aching or yearning,

Perhaps because we're feeling shame,

Shame about admitting the presence of these states or qualities in us,

We further estrange ourselves from that which we are longing for.

Then our vulnerability and softness gets pushed deep into our shadow.

This doesn't mean we ought to never get angry about the lack of what we're longing for.

Rather,

We should allow our anger to deepen the rawness of our longing rather than distract us from it.

And shame is perhaps the most uncomfortable emotion.

Shame occupies our shadow when we're caught up in unhealthy anger,

Meaning anger that has become aggression.

When we feel shame arising in us,

We commonly allow it to mutate very quickly into aggression,

So much so that it appears that we are not feeling any shame but only aggression.

The fiery intensity at the heart of anger asks not for smothering or mere discharge,

But for a wakeful embrace that doesn't require any dilution of the passion,

Nor any flight from empathy,

Nor any muting of the essential voice in the flames.

So now,

Let us look at ways in which we can gently become present,

Giving space for this anger and or shame,

Which could be two faces of the same coin,

To emerge from the crevices and let it see the light of day so that it may be healed,

It may be tended to.

So how do you become present with these hidden emotions in our shadow?

There are five steps to help us stabilize and deepen our capacity to become present.

First,

Practice sensing and observing what's occurring right now,

Right here.

When you feel you're being taken over by some emotion that you think is not you,

Ask yourself what's happening right now,

Right here.

Do so both outwardly and inwardly,

Giving what's happening your whole-hearted attention.

And when you practice meditation or mindfulness every day,

It becomes a part of your muscle memory to go into that state of observing.

And when you're practicing this,

If you feel distracted,

Note it,

And note what is pulling you,

What's taking your mind away from being here now.

Register your emotional state and the leanings of your mind and bring yourself back to the arrival and the departure of your breath.

This will help you to settle into the sense of relaxed,

Undivided attentiveness.

The second step to becoming present is to be self-transparent.

Register and openly acknowledge your actual condition,

Inner and outer,

However uncomfortable or unflattering this may be.

The way to make this more doable includes not treating your pain as an enemy or a problem,

But befriending your discomfort and resistance,

Not letting your inner critic have its way with you,

And ceasing to distract yourself from your suffering,

No longer smothering your feeling of hopelessness.

Here you don't evaluate how you're doing with such labor,

But give your whole-hearted attention to them with both curiosity and courage.

Just be transparent to yourself.

And the third step of this practice is don't flee from your hurt.

Don't try to eradicate your hurt.

Don't treat hurt as a problem,

Inconvenience,

Or an anomaly.

Don't belittle it.

Rather,

Give it compassionate room in which to breathe and find itself fully alive,

Allowing it to express.

There's healing in expression.

Step number four,

Get more embodied and grounded and down to earth.

To be present doesn't mean abiding with supposed awareness that you're above your pain or your difficulties.

It means really being with what is.

Being present isn't an altered state.

It's our natural condition,

Nothing special.

And when we settle into it,

There's a sense of being at home.

The fifth step of becoming more present is to cultivate internal stillness.

Spend some time each day sensing the space between your thoughts,

Feeling the space between the end of your exhalation and the very beginning of the next inhalation.

And can you let these spaces widen,

Expand,

And open into stillness?

Bring your busyness,

Your inner turmoil,

And fuss into such stillness bit by bit without any pressure to alter them.

Real stillness doesn't require a cessation of movement or thought,

But rather a relocation of attention to the presence of being,

The feeling of being.

You don't have to be motionless to be present.

In fact,

You don't have to be anything in particular.

All you need is to consciously be.

Be regardless of what's happening.

Now bring your palms to your heart center in prayer position.

And acknowledge your state of presence in this moment right here,

Right now.

And imagine from the center of your heart where there is a diamond that shines.

Send a beam of light out through your being,

Visualizing the earth in front of you and all of its creatures,

Our fellow beings.

And let this light of compassion emerge from your heart as a healing energy that shines upon all beings on this planet earth,

Our home in this physical world.

And may they feel safe,

May they feel held and supported.

And they may be comfortable letting their shadows that have been controlling them subconsciously emerge out,

Such that they may find their peace.

And as you bring your awareness back into your heart center,

Feel into the sinosphere that we've activated and ask yourself,

How do I feel right now?

And if you could summarize how you feel right now in one word,

What would that be?

I invite you to share that one word in the comments so we may all know how you're feeling right now.

Mmm.

Outstanding,

Relaxed,

Comforted,

Relieved,

Limitless.

Wow.

Powerful.

Peaceful,

Forgiven.

Indeed,

Forgiving yourself is the beginning.

It is the first step of the process.

Blessed,

Open,

Enlightened,

Love balanced.

Still.

Wow.

Soothed.

Open heart.

Yea.

Energized.

More at peace and feeling less pain.

Fantastic,

Liz.

And that's the idea.

Om Shanti indeed.

Light.

Yes.

Thank you for sharing this.

Thank you for being part of this.

And this is the work that we've been doing and we will continue to do.

I am offering a very powerful workshop next month.

And this is about cultivating that inner knowing muscle,

That inner guru that lies within each one of us.

And yet nobody has taught us how to tap into it,

Let alone cultivated and strengthen that inner knowing muscles.

So this workshop I'm leading for four weeks.

But I'll give you tools every single week,

Different set of tools to build that muscle of your intuition.

It is starting on the 5th of February.

It's going to be four consecutive Saturdays.

And it's a cohort based learning.

So wherein you will be seen and heard.

We will do hands on exercises and we'll do breakout groups into communities where you will be paired with people who are in a similar place in life and working on similar things as you.

So a very,

Very deeply empowering exercise workshop series in which you will not only learn new things,

But you also you'll find a supportive community to take you along the way as you're walking this path of awakening.

And information to that can be found when you click on the live button on this window here and you'll see workshops and you can go find Awaken Your Intuition starting February 5th.

Ruth says,

Jay,

Would you be willing to describe your own personal daily practice of meditation or pranayama or whatever it consists of?

Fantastic.

Great question.

In fact,

Thank you for asking that Ruth because I've had other people in this whole tribe reach out to me and say,

Jay,

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

And I realize that unless you come on to a one on one mentoring or if you come into one of the workshops,

I get a chance.

I get the time to discuss a little bit more about my own journey.

But,

You know,

Just I'll say in short that my first very,

Very deep,

Deeply held practice for the last 20 years is first thing in the morning,

Wake up and meditate.

So I've been sharing this.

Some of you have heard me say this moniker RPM,

Rise,

P,

Meditate.

So that's a very integral part of my discipline.

And I so three things that I do in the morning.

I drink a tall glass of warm water with lemon,

A lime or lemon depends on what you have in the fridge.

And then I sit down to meditate and I meditate for an hour.

And the next important aspect of it is reading.

I read every day.

I read as little as two pages.

Sometimes if I have the time,

I'll read an entire chapter of a book and finding that nourishing food for the soul first thing in the morning,

Before anything,

Before breakfast,

Before any digital consumption,

Social media,

Turning on the phone,

Etc.

That is my first foundation practice.

And it's very important.

Sometimes,

You know,

I stumble and I something urgent comes up and I'm like,

I'm expecting an email or some such.

And if I ever try to go into technology,

I find that my brain is already activated at a different frequency,

That it's hard to rein in and become into the state of depth that calm that then allows me to really feel into what I'm reading.

So I have always certain books that I have on my table next to my cushion where I meditate that are available for me to feed the soul in the morning.

So hopefully that answers your question.

Now,

What practice do I do?

You can actually listen to my TED talk.

I have a TED talk.

You can go and search for me on YouTube.

I just Google my name Jay Chodagam.

Being before doing is the name of the title of the TED talk.

And so there I share my practice and I've shared.

I've done 120 something episodes here.

Number of different things that I have learned along the way.

And I constantly,

As you can see that each episode is completely different from the other.

And it's that process which I described that after I meditate,

I read,

I learn,

I apply that on myself and I find something transformative.

Then I share it with you.

And so now this whole month of January and even going into some of February,

I'll be doing the shadow work,

Which is now the edge that I'm working on.

Because I believe that this is a frontier that even spiritual practitioners,

Even ashrams established spiritual leaders don't know nothing about.

They'll be living in the state of what I call spiritual bypassing.

And those of you attended my last Wednesday night session,

I did a one hour long guided meditation practice around identifying what are signs of spiritual bypassing.

And I was a monk for 18 years.

Some of you know that.

And if you don't,

I'm telling you now,

I was a monk for 18 years.

I lived in an ashram and I realized after all that years of practice that there are certain elements of being shoving something under the shadow and not dealing with it because it's a negative emotion.

It's something that you don't feel that it's a part of you.

So that's some that's work that I'm doing and I'm bringing it out into my teachings.

Fahad says reading is a great practice.

Very much so.

Very much so.

And I tell you,

Reading actually has a very broad scope of benefits,

Not just the fact that you're learning something.

You know,

The attention that you give to actually reading things on a page where you're present is huge.

It's we are at a time where it's an age of distraction.

We are addicted to being distracted.

And notice for yourself that when you were a child,

If you had a practice of reading,

How fluently,

How effortless it was.

And now how it's a challenge to be focused on just completing,

Just leaving in three or four pages.

So this has got that being present,

Being focused,

Soaking that in.

And also the vicarious experience of somebody that you don't,

You can be you're inheriting it without having to go through all of that effort and the turmoil and that time that it takes for you to gain that wisdom.

So tremendous benefits and reading.

So please encourage yourself to get into that habit.

Do you ever do journaling,

Jay?

Yes.

End of the day.

And so journaling for me is,

First of all,

At the beginning of the day,

Asking myself,

Who am I?

What are my value systems and what is my focus for today?

And at the end of the day,

Reviewing that and asking myself as to what it is that I,

How was I able to stay focused on what is it that I wanted to do and how did I feel?

And yes,

You know,

Things come and you wander or you meander or you get taken in paths that you did not intend at the beginning of the day.

But still,

Are you holding the value?

Am I holding the value system?

How true to myself was I during the course of the day?

That and then also for my workshops,

Many of you attend my workshop,

Every single workshop of mine that I've offered includes some amount of writing,

Some drawing,

Some sort of presenting what's happening,

Downloading what's happening in your head and your experience and your being onto paper.

Now,

I want you to know that before any of the exercises that I've taught in my workshops,

I've done those exercises on myself.

So that's where the journaling also comes in.

What book do you tend to reach out to for most,

Jay?

Susan,

So this is something that I am not reaching out to random books at a different time with,

You know,

Every given day.

So as I am working through a book and I guess I said I may do two pages in a day,

I might do one page,

One paragraph,

Who knows?

Or I might do a whole chapter,

But I'm working on a book.

I do have multiple books,

Which means I serialize them.

I want to get to the end of something before I'm the kind of a person I am.

I'm a finisher.

I like to get things checked off.

And this is part of my engineering training,

Working in Silicon Valley,

So productivity to me is an integral part of my work.

And so it's important for me to finish something before I pick up a different book.

Now,

I might pick up different books and stack them,

But it serializes as I'm consuming them.

Well,

Thank you.

We come to the top of the hour again.

I thank you for your donations.

Definitely do sign up for my workshop.

Awaken your intuition starting February 5th.

It's going to be four consecutive Saturdays,

Lots of powerful tools to awaken that inherent muscle that you is going to serve you most.

No Google has the answers for you in your life.

Nobody else has experience.

I mean,

Yes,

They can point you in directions,

But ultimately it be your decision.

And that has to be very intrinsic.

It is something that happens from all of the experiences and knowing fully who you are.

Nobody can ever get into your skin and have the experience that you've had.

How do you do that?

How do you navigate these situations,

Relationships?

How do you know what the next thing for you to do your job?

It is by tapping into your emotion and becoming intimate with it.

So I hope to see you all there starting February 5th and until I see you then,

I wish you all stay strong,

Be happy and stay well.