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Beautiful,
Imperfect life with spiritual tools,
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And our own personal stories.
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Real,
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Hello sweet spiritual friendies and gentle wanderers on the path of life.
Welcome back.
Or alien ship,
Who knows?
Who knows?
Please keep going.
All of you are welcome here.
That's right.
Today we're going to talk about anger.
And you know,
For better or for worse,
Anger is part of our emotional lives.
Personally,
I believe that it serves a purpose and it's intelligent,
Just like all the rest of the feelings that we have.
But if you're anything like me,
You might have been brought up in a culture where anger is off limits,
Bad,
Dangerous,
Not allowed.
And it's more than just a social rule because we incorporate it into our minds and our hearts.
And then when we have the very normal human experience of anger,
Which is a natural part of the emotional landscape,
We think we're not allowed to have this feeling or that we're bad for having it.
When I was preparing for this episode and looking at some stuff online,
I read something a doctor had written about the four main reasons that we experience anger.
And they fell in line with my own personal experiences.
So I wanted to share them in case they might be a useful starting point for anyone who's listening.
The first one is to harm ourselves,
Which I've always heard that depression is anger directed inward.
And I've actually experienced this in both ways where anger is directed at myself and manifests as depression and when I direct my anger outward in an attempt to protect myself from directing it at me.
The next reason is to get control.
The next is to feel powerful and the last one is to change circumstances that feel unjust.
And I like starting here because it helps me open up the narrow habitual stance of anger is bad so that I can acknowledge that anger has a purpose and an intelligence.
So when we talk about anger,
What I most want to talk about is how can anger be spiritual?
What is it to experience anger and learn from it without acting out in violence or hatred?
And how can we use the potency and intensity and energy of anger to take care of ourselves and other people rather than using its potentially violent or explosive nature to cause harm?
So with those lofty intentions in mind,
We're going to get into our own stories and experiences with anger.
What do you got for us,
Pony?
Hey everyone,
Lindsay Pony here.
Hey Pony.
Hi Pones.
Hi Annie.
Ella,
Thank you so much for bringing up anger.
This was interesting to explore and I really appreciate the idea.
I had never thought of anger being intelligent and that can redirect me towards when I'm feeling angry how to see that this anger is trying to inform me of something.
Thank you for that.
I want to share about angers I've felt before and presently sometimes that I'm an anger generator.
Anger was and sometimes still of course my go-to catch-all emotion that gave me the ability to feel most powerful in situations I felt most powerless.
Hello,
Self-righteous anger,
My greatest power generator,
Utmost power emotion.
I don't know how to feel or what I'm feeling,
So here is anger.
That's been my experience.
Without anger,
We wouldn't take a stand against unfairness or injustice.
With that in mind,
Anger is a healthy human emotion.
Looking back,
I see that I had loads of unprocessed stuffed down anger that came from,
I suspect,
Unmet needs.
In the past,
This would look like someone pulled out in front of me in their car while I was having a nice little time on my bicycle.
My immediate reaction,
Rage,
Fight,
Yell,
Become defensive,
Swing my arms and anger.
This led to several,
Quote unquote,
Street fights.
You're a real life street fighter.
This is true stories.
I'm embarrassed to say that I joined karate because that seemed like the solution to solve my anger problem when what I needed to do was some emotional investigation of what was underneath the anger.
Some of that investigation led to see the needs that I had such as security,
Which would look like to be safe on my bicycle.
Underneed qualifier is one known as to matter,
And under that is care and respect.
Without the knowledge of the unmet needs,
So what is being threatened,
The karate could be useful,
But I would probably just be a rageful assassin on my bicycle instead of the peaceful spiritual warrior I intend to be.
Both sound like really necessary superheroes to me.
I am all things.
I'm still in karate and I can't wait to share my tool with you so you too can identify and process your needs and your feelings.
Thank you so much,
Pones.
I love how honest you are.
Oh God,
It's all I got.
It's so good.
It's all I got.
Annie,
Will you let us know about your anger experiences?
Oh yeah.
From talking with both you ladies and just us growing together,
I love hearing about your experiences with anger because it is so different from mine.
I have the total opposite.
I was terrified and I didn't know how to allow the experience of anger through my body.
Of course,
The reasons for this are multiple.
There's the social conditioning that you talked about,
Ella.
I've got to be nice.
Got to be a sweet girl,
But I really had it internalized that anger is bad and I had taken it in that if someone was angry,
It was dangerous and it was also my job to meet it with gentle,
Soothing and solutions.
If someone gets angry,
My natural response besides getting frozen is my voice gets softer.
Everything about me gentle-izes.
I'm like,
I will fix this scenario with my ease.
I really thought things didn't make me angry.
I really thought that I could easily identify other emotions,
But I honestly did not know if or when I was angry.
If in fact,
Something did make me angry,
Which usually had to be pretty massive in size,
It would take days after the event until I realized I'm upset.
That makes me mad.
It was be three days later.
I'm just now starting to learn how to identify anger in real time.
It's a big step for me.
I'll talk about it in my tools.
It's just important if anybody else has had this experience out there to reiterate how much anger scared me.
Even if it was two other people on the street having.
.
.
If I rode by Lindsay on her bike and she was having her street,
I would have been terrified.
I didn't know how to register the emotion in my body or emotional landscape,
But also around me.
I would do anything to fix it.
If I saw anger happening,
I would do anything in my.
.
.
I could feel it in my body.
My whole nervous system would respond.
I've learned this term for it.
It's called fawning,
But there's another term.
It's called befriend and tend.
Basically,
It's people pleasing at its most submissive.
Oh,
Like a little baby deer.
Yes,
Just like before Godzilla steps on it.
Just kidding.
Bye,
Bambi.
All this was this mix of social conditioning and this automatic nervous system response.
I just didn't even know it was there.
I'm just like,
I'm just so nice that I never get mad.
Surely this isn't healthy because you're talking about the power of anger and how it's this very real,
Normal emotion.
Several years into this spiritual learning,
I've just been learning that this is actually having a delayed emotional response is a coping mechanism,
But it's very outdated for who I am right now.
It doesn't lend itself to having healthy relationships and healthy communication.
I have a very simple tool if anybody else has similar experiences to anger with me.
And teaser,
I'll share it later.
I'm so excited.
I have to say that I honestly was jealous of your internal,
I don't know that I'm angry thing.
I'm like,
Oh,
See everyone else is so much better,
Right?
I was like,
Oh,
That'd be so great.
But there's a disconnect.
It kind of sucks to just crawl around and try to make everybody happy.
And obviously you guys have watched over the last year,
It catches up.
I recognized how ridiculous my jealousy thoughts were.
Like maybe binging and purging is a result of not knowing how to be angry.
Like all this stuff,
It just seeps out elsewhere.
Thank you guys both so much.
I just love hearing how different bodies and hearts and minds come to terms with spiritual living.
And it's just so cool and I shared that experience.
Annie,
I was really,
Really surprised to find out I was angry because I really didn't think I was.
It took me a while to even acknowledge that I was angry because I had learned growing up that anger is toxic.
It's off limits to a woman.
Like Annie said,
I have to be nice.
And it was actually my body that woke me up to the anger because I started getting boils.
I got three successive boils in my left armpit,
One after another.
And when I went to see the acupuncturist,
He shared with me that in his professional opinion,
Boils are anger being expressed through the body.
And I was like,
This dude is a charlatan.
I will never be back.
He clearly doesn't understand what's happening for me.
I had inhabited anger for so long.
It was this protective stance that I'd used to keep myself safe,
Grasp at control.
And I would use this scary,
Rapid mood change anger to control and manipulate others,
To push people away,
To punish people,
Just in general,
Like a really super healthy,
Great recipe for intimate relationships.
And sarcasm.
Exactly.
That I actually,
This,
It was pointed out to me a few days ago by my partner that I was doing this.
Every time it gets pointed out to me,
It is so uncomfortable to own it because there's all of that conditioning of like,
But I don't do that.
I'm not angry for better or for worse.
I had to come to terms with the fact that apparently I was really angry and more than just really angry.
I started to see that I was just steeped in chronic resentments.
And there's a distinction that has been really helpful for me that a teacher named Darlene Cohen gets credit for,
So grateful for her teaching.
I never met her when she was alive,
But she's a really,
She's just incredible.
We're going to share her talk on anger in the tools page of our website,
Www.
Prettespiritualpodcast.
Com.
So Darlene Cohen likes to draw the distinction between anger and resentment.
And that one is really helpful for me because anger is this like alive,
Fiery,
Physical energy.
It's like coursing through our bodies and our hearts are racing and our blood pressure is going up and we can feel it happening inside of us.
And resentment on the other hand has this kind of like cold,
Stuck feeling like it's been there and it's just kind of been like seeping its poison out.
My personal experiences that anger that I have not felt or expressed in a healthy way hardens into this kind of cold lump of resentment and it's sticky and harmful.
And for me personally,
It has led me down paths of chronic victimization and just general dissatisfaction with life.
And what Darlene says about it is resentment means that we're taking refuge in hatred and using it as the grounds for how we experience life.
And doing that hurts us,
You know?
So when I was getting boils,
That's where I was at.
I was chronically dissatisfied thinking that life should be different,
Stuck inside this victim mentality and recounting all the wrongs that had been done to me and seething inwardly and yes,
Also outwardly.
And one of the biggest ways that I learned to free myself of that habitual attitude was through actually allowing myself to experience the anger before it got turned into resentment,
Which is similar to what Annie shared.
So more on the tools,
Which I think it's time for them,
Ladies.
Oh yes.
Tool time.
It's our spiritual Home Depot over here with all our mind palaces.
That's right.
Praise.
Praise be.
Annie?
Would you like to tell us about how you employed your tool?
Yes,
I would love it.
My tool is for anyone like me who struggles with the fawn,
The befriend and tend and the people pleasing defense tactics who thinks that they don't know how to be angry.
So mine's like very simple tool and it's been helpful for me.
And it is step one,
Acknowledge I am angry,
Which is actually a lot more complicated than it might seem for somebody who has,
I'm 40 and I have spent 37 years of my life not being angry.
It takes a lot of practice to say,
Does that make me angry?
I have to think about it.
My wife is a very safe person for me to experiment and learn how to do new things with.
And we're just so close.
So she's someone where it's safe and easy for me to know when I feel reactive or angry.
But it's other people where I am not sure where boundaries are,
Or I don't know that they're as safe.
And those are the people that it's hard for me to know what my response is.
What I have done is I will check in with myself and I'll say,
If I have this inclination in my mind that's like,
That's fine.
It's almost like this mental voice I can hear.
It's like,
That's fine.
Almost like kind of a squashing I can feel inside.
And then I'll say,
Oh,
What helps me,
I feel like bathrooms are very spiritual places.
Because I can go in,
I can shut the door,
I can be alone.
And so if I'm somewhere where there's a bunch of people around,
Or I'll even do it at my house,
I went in the bathroom,
I got off the phone call with this woman and I was like,
Huh,
I feel very interesting inside right now.
And I went in the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and I said,
That makes me angry.
And I looked at myself while I was saying it and I said,
That makes me angry.
I can also say,
I'm angry about what happened.
So this was a really random example,
But it was a phone call for work and this woman was very rude to me.
And I was like,
Gosh,
And my tendency,
That befriend and tend tendency that I told you about,
I was like,
I'm just going to charm the pants off this lady.
And so I'm just like trying to be friendly and we get off the phone and I'm like,
Gosh,
That was a real stinker of a phone call.
And that's what I went in the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and I just said,
I am angry.
That woman made me angry.
And this was,
This happened last year,
But this was revolutionary.
Just be like,
Oh,
I can admit that something that I would deem to myself that is petty and that I'm not allowed to be angry over and it should be fine.
And I'm can be a better person to just give myself the room to say that made me angry.
And then the trick for me is to say,
Okay,
That happened,
Let it go through me.
Often I'll feel this little bubble burst of energy.
And if it's something I'm really fired up about,
That lady's coming on,
But I'll usually,
If I can have that moment of acknowledging to myself that I'm angry,
There'll be this little bubble burst and I'll have a little tear,
Because I get emotional when I have emotions and I'll do a little baby cry.
And it's usually,
And it's usually not like a little sober.
It's just like a,
You know,
And at this thing in my throat just pops.
And I,
What I've learned too,
Is that a lot of my anxiety was unexpressed emotion.
So I like having this wild anxiety for so much of my adult life.
And I'm like,
Oh,
So much as this just pending emotion that I'm like,
Nope,
You're fine.
No,
It's fine.
I'm like emotion pending.
Yeah.
So if you don't know what it feels like to be angry and something happens and you feel uncomfortable,
Just go in the bathroom,
Look in the mirror,
You can put your hand on your heart and say,
I think,
I think that made me angry and just let yourself be angry.
Maybe you'll have a little baby cry and then let it go.
And if I get stuck in anger,
Like I've been with my wife and we're get heated about something for me,
Praying helps because I don't want to stay in anger.
I need to acknowledge it.
I need to let it go through me,
But I don't want to stay there.
And so I,
I'll just,
I have a little prayer.
I'll be like,
Hey,
Hey,
Universe,
Please save me from being angry.
Those are my very lengthy tools that are actually really simple,
But I just talked about a lot.
They're so perfect.
I think I've shared on the podcast before how one of my favorite teachers,
When she would be experiencing a strong emotion would say,
Excuse me,
I need to feel something.
And then she would step away to the nearest bathroom,
Probably get busy.
I love that so much.
It's so useful to me.
And Annie,
It's interesting because just like we all are different bodies and experience emotions differently,
Even though it was very clear that I was like extremely angry or I was acting from a place of anger in,
In the moment,
It was very confusing for me.
And I probably wouldn't have been able to be like,
Oh,
I'm angry right now.
And then it wouldn't be until later on that I just to look at the enormity of what was happening and what was going on and the feelings and emotions that were there.
And I read something that said that anger is a secondary emotion underneath the anger is usually some other,
What they consider primary emotions.
So usually sadness or whatever.
And for me,
Even though anger was like ever present and always here,
Or I was super aggressive or just had have a tone,
If you will,
I didn't mean that I was connected with feelings or that I understood it was,
That's what I meant by anger was really just my catch all emotion.
And I was really far removed from feelings and from not having the space or there not feeling as though there was space for my feelings or my emotions or my wants.
That's where I continued to just suppress and stuff.
And what that did was really remove me from understanding feelings or emotions.
And I oftentimes I,
That's where my disconnection,
I really oftentimes feel like it's only my head that I have access to.
And then it's like an iceberg and my heart is really frozen and I don't understand feelings,
Emotions or needs.
And that's where this tool comes in for me.
I first started learning about this from nonviolent communication.
That's also known as compassionate communication.
And it was pretty evident from a lot of the people I care about in my life who were like,
Kind of pointed me in that direction,
Which is a community,
Very helpful way of being able to communicate and understand about what's going on for you and try and understand compassionately what might be going on for other people.
And there's,
And it's a community and a practice and there's a lot in there.
So I highly recommend that community.
But the tool that I got from them,
That is my favorite thing that we'll put up on our tools tab is a needs inventory and a feeling inventory.
And the idea is that we have these needs and whether they're met or unmet,
Then we have feelings that come along with it.
Nonviolent communications purpose is to strengthen our ability to inspire compassion and to respond compassionately to others and to ourselves.
So the list has been so handy for me to have a list of every feeling on it so I can put towards the feelings I'm currently having,
But don't have the language for.
I've recognized that I'm quite removed from my feelings from stuffing them down all these years and that it takes a lot of practice for me to be able to identify what I'm feeling to identify what feeling I'm actually having.
The list of the feelings and the needs has been really handy just for me to carry that around.
A great way to practice this is to share three feelings with someone you care about and someone you know that you're emotionally safe with.
It can be about three events throughout the day.
You share your feelings regarding them with the event that occurred or any other situation.
This can open up a profound dialogue and encourage all of us to really discover what emotions we're experiencing.
When I was writing this,
The three feelings that I wrote that morning,
Because I just had this really intense conversation with my partner and he was trying to ask me what I was feeling because he's really close with me and can see how this is some experience that I'm lacking that really seeps out into the rest of my life and consequently,
Anyone who is intertwined with me or I come into contact with,
Hence the driver driving by.
When I checked in,
The feelings that I was having were despairing,
Dejected,
And that I'm pretty sure that's under.
What's really cool about the feelings inventory is that they have peaceful,
Loving,
Glad,
Playful,
Interested,
Confused,
Tired,
Scared,
Sad,
Mad.
Then underneath each one of those,
They have 10 other feelings that you can describe them.
You can just go through that list and be like,
Oh God,
Okay,
I think I'm feeling sad.
I go to the sad column and then I go down and I read all of the different ways I could feel distant or despondent or discouraged.
Then I can just try all of them on and then see which one fits because for me,
I haven't had that experience of it being safe or okay to even have these feelings.
Why don't I just go and attempt and try them on?
That's what the sharing three feelings with a friend is for.
It's just this opportunity to see what feelings are here.
That's been very helpful to me.
Another quick little way to check in is to do a gut check at breakfast,
Lunch,
And dinner.
Identify the three feelings you're having right at that moment.
You can keep a note on your phone or in your journal about what the three feelings are,
Who you're with,
And what you're doing.
This will help you build that feelings identifying muscle to start doing this and see what you're feeling and experiencing.
I'm really grateful for this practice because when I do this,
I can see what feelings are here and then not just act out in anger,
But tend to the feelings that are here now and get more understanding for what's going on and what needs are being met or are not being met and see if I can show up and meet those needs or get them met.
It's so great.
I love that there are tools like that available to just help us try stuff on and see what might fit what we're feeling.
There are so many.
I found this wheel.
Some therapists,
There's lots of different ways that you can do this,
Whether it's a list that's really easy for you or this interesting wheel that has,
They just keep going out,
The feelings and emotions going out and around.
Those will be up on the tools tab.
We love good tools.
When I was in rehab,
We weren't allowed to say that we were doing okay or fine,
So they gave us all a feelings sheet.
I would still automatically be like,
I'm fine.
They'd be like,
Can you look at your feelings sheet?
I would be like,
I'm okay.
They'd be like,
Please refer to your feelings sheet.
I would go to it and I'd be like,
I am somnolent and hungry.
They're like,
That might not be a feeling.
Disgruntled.
Yeah.
I would just choose words off of there.
It's great.
It's such a good practice to start to learn what does and doesn't line up with our experience.
It's totally allowed to look up those big words.
Like I do.
I highly recommend.
Then I really get familiar like,
Oh,
I didn't even know what that meant.
Thank you,
Ms.
Google.
Thank you.
Ms.
Google.
Like I was saying before,
My belief is that anger is intelligent.
It's wise.
It's unnecessary.
Just like all of the feelings that we experience.
But like Lindsay and Annie,
We're both talking about if I don't feel it,
Then I will end up hurting myself and others probably.
And I don't want to get stuck in those states.
So if I don't want to get stuck,
That means I have to feel the anger.
But how do I do that?
Because it's so icky and uncomfortable and big.
And one of our favorite teachers,
Tara Brock,
Likes to talk about anger as indicative of an unmet need,
Which is what Lindsay has been talking about.
Actually,
Darlene Cohen talks about this too.
And she says that she believes anger arises when one of our core beliefs has been violated.
We need something that we're not getting or something that we believe is foundational to the world gets that core belief gets violated or broken by something someone does or by life circumstances.
And that attitude actually helps me be willing to experience the anger when it's hot and alive in my body because it is intelligent.
It's happening for a reason.
It has something to show me.
So how can I how can I feel it and get to that message without hurting people?
So my tool has to do with turning inward,
Like all of the tools today.
And in Zen,
We call it the backward step.
Tara Brock calls it the U-turn,
Capital U,
U-turn.
And I guess that's how U-turn is.
The Y-O-U as in turn into U.
Thank you.
I was like,
I don't have that right,
Do I?
It's right.
So all of these tools have to do with directing our attention inward instead of outward to learn what's happening for us in this moment.
And the tool that has helped me the most with anger and other really big emotions is RAIN meditation.
RAIN meditation is a way to use compassion and wisdom or mindful insight to help us contact our experience.
So it's an acronym and R stands for recognize,
A stands for allow,
I stands for investigate and N stands for nourish slash non-attachment.
R for me is akin to what Annie was talking about with just acknowledging something is happening right now and it deserves my attention.
Usually when it's at its simplest,
That's what R is,
Like something is happening.
A stands for allow and this one gives me the most relief of any part of the meditation.
So if you only get to A,
You will still benefit enormously from this practice.
I stands for investigate,
Which means locating the lived reality inside your own body.
I just like to say that this is really different from thinking about the lived reality or trying to figure out the lived reality or assigning blame based on the lived reality.
It's actually being present to the physical sensations in your body that are happening as a corollary of the feeling.
And for me with anger,
It's usually my heart is racing.
I noticed this one especially with like righteous indignation where I'm like,
I'm going to say something that will break your heart and fracture your worldview.
And I'm preparing myself to like come up with what it is.
My heart starts racing and it feels like panic almost like this really intense anxiety.
So my heart is racing,
I have heat in my chest,
There's swirling in my belly and my throat gets tight.
This is what anger feels like when I'm investigating it inside my body.
There's this really interesting neuroscientific research that just helped me so much when I was really in the thick of extreme emotions.
The research says that the lifespan of an emotion inside our physical bodies is 60 to 90 seconds.
Even if I can just be with the physical manifestation for like one second,
My experience has shown me that if I can be fiercely present with the life of my feelings and can grow my capacity to just stay is that over time what's happened is that I can watch an emotion come into existence and then I can watch it pass out of existence,
Which is so cool and weird means that so much freedom is possible to me.
And if you have never heard Jill Bolt Taylor's stroke of insight story,
It's really great.
We'll have a link to it.
She did the neuroscientific research that I was just talking about and then had a massive stroke and her Ted talk and she wrote a book about it too is all about how a stroke woke her up spiritually.
Basically,
It's really cool.
And the final letter and stands for nourish.
I practice it first for nourish and then for non attachment.
If I'm having this unmet need,
What,
What do I need?
If I'm really present with the experience I'm having,
I can feel where the vulnerability is I can feel where the unmet need is.
And then I can also have this like direct heartfelt insight into what what I need in that moment.
And sometimes it's just gentle affirmations like no matter what happens,
I'm not going anywhere or putting my hand on my heart and saying stuff like I love you and I'm going to be here with you.
And then what happens when I feel nourished is that I'm really able to take this step back from the experience and see that it's not me.
It's not personal.
It's just what's arising right now.
And that kind of non attachment can be so helpful in being able to respond to anger and other big emotions instead of like getting on the anger tornado and just letting it take me on its path of destruction through my life and other people's.
I've been on that ride a lot of times.
It can be fun at first and then it's just,
There's a lot of cleaning up to do after that.
Lindsay's in a frenzy.
You're camp anger frenzy.
I was like,
You're our friend.
I know it goes a different way.
We like it that way.
I think you guys all so much for joining us today.
If you would let us know what anger is like for you and what tools you use to experience it,
We would love to add them to our spiritual toolbox.
And we'd love to get to know you and just make us feel so much better to know we're not alone in our own anger spirals.
You can find us on www.
Prettyspiritualpodcast.
Com.
It's an amazing website.
There's been so much work put into it and there's so many resources there.
We'd love to have you come visit or come say hi.
There's a direct link to contact us there.
We would love so very much to hear from you.
You can find us on Instagram,
Facebook.
We've taken over the whole internet.
We're out there.
We out there.
We here.
Come find us.
Oh yes.
See you on the other side.
Bye.
God Bless.
