Anger is an energetic, emotional response to some type of uncomfortable feeling, physical or emotional, including pain, illness, rejection, threat, loss, grief, disappointment, etc), or anticipation of such a feeling. Yet uncomfortable feelings alone are not the cause. Triggering thoughts, especially judgments or perceptions of potential or real harm, threat, or vulnerability are also required. The thought can be as simple as a memory of a seemingly related experience, or expectation of one.
The energy of anger motivates action to deal with the threat or the associated feelings. This urge wants to change something, so it seeks a target, outside or inside. The action chosen can take a wide range of forms with a wide range of results, both constructive and destructive. Anger can also be a substitute emotion for uncomfortable feelings, a form of distraction in which a choice, conscious or unconscious, is made to get angry rather than feel pain/discomfort or feel helpless and powerless in relation to it. Utilizing anger can promote an attention shift - from self-focus to other-focus, providing a false sense of power, protection and control. Getting angry may serve to reduce feelings of fear and vulnerability by transferring them to something or someone else, thus putting another person in the victim role. In addition to providing a good smoke screen for feelings of vulnerability, anger also offers a false sense of power, righteousness, and moral superiority to make up for a lack of self-esteem. â Many of us have been encouraged to deny, repress, or hide many uncomfortable feelings and vulnerabilities by transforming them into anger, yet at deep levels they persist. Not fully facing and befriending them limits our full expression of aliveness, interferes with all our relationships, and undermines our health and wellbeing.
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The human mind-body operating system embodies life experience by cross linking elements of thought, feeling, and action. Awareness of how we operate is the doorway into understanding ourselves and relationships with others. We unawarely took on a self-identity and storyline that we reflexively operate within, a brilliant design of evolution, that helps us unconsciously navigate familiar conditions. Yet our minds also possess the amazing capacity to be self aware and self reflect, in other words to observe the thoughts, feelings, and actions it is generating. This provides us with abilities to adapt, adjust, or change how we operate, i.e. shift into new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, when venturing into the unfamiliar.
Shift out of the reactive state into self awareness by breathing slowly and deeply while noticing thoughts, feelings, and actions as they come and go, without judging.
Our mind's default operating system is driven by fear for our security - not being safe, not mattering, not belonging. It instinctively doubts each of these and generates feelings that motivate actions to address perceived problems. By stepping outside of this insecure, judging, mindset and simply being present with what is, we enter a field of non-judgmental awareness and experience the LOVE we are.
Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other Doesn't make any sense. RUMI
Take charge of your perception of present moment reality by slowing down, breathing slowly, and affirming that you are OK as you are, even though you may be having some insecure thoughts, feelings or bodily reactions, which tend to feel uncomfortable. The more we can acknowledge and tolerate such discomfort, and see it as normal and healthy, the more present we can be for ourselves and others. Over time, practicing a positive mindset will result in less and less regression and reactivity during stressful situations.
We are born into the world with survival instincts that revolve around seemingly insatiable needs to be physically secure, to have value or purpose, and to belong to a community. As we grow and develop, these drive us to adapt in attempt to satisfy these needs. In the process strengths, talents, skills, capabilities, achievements, and relationships develop that prove useful for individual and group survival. By design, when stressed or threatened, we often revert back to primitive feelings of vulnerability and reactive thought and behavior patterns typical of early childhood. This can be especially problematic during relationship challenges when both parties are feeling insecure.
Abundance within our communities is best created and sustained through generosity and gratitude, which are based in loving. Greed, individualism, and economic exploitation, usually generated by fear of scarcity, eventually drain the common wealth.
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