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There’s an old adage in Buddhism that says “Whatever is in the way, is the way.” Essentially, whatever you think is dumb, annoying, bad, wrong, or terrible, that (sorry to say) is the way to freedom. Not around it, not away from it, but through it.
This is not to be confused with making yourself love what you hate. As a person who's supposed to be a “on the path” and emanating love and compassion or whatever, instead of letting myself feel annoyed by someone or deeply disturbed by something, I can get frustrated with with myself for feeling that. And then I pretend that I'm feeling something else, like I'm okay with something that is totally whack.
If we have a meditation practice we might think we’re supposed to pretend to feel calm all the time, like having strong feelings is bad and if we pretend we don’t have them, we eventually won’t anymore. This usually backfires and we end up exploding, being passive aggressive, or emotionally constipated.
Mindfulness is the opposite of pretending not to feel anything. It means opening to things exactly as they are, not trying to change them, get rid of them, or fix them. And this includes our own reactivity, pain, or confusion. And when we can make enough space for our reactivity to exist and spread out a little, there’s a lot to learn.
Anger, for example, comes up when we feel violated or threatened in some way. It always points to how we deserve to be treated with love and respect. If we dismiss the whole experience of anger, we don’t get to see how much it’s born out of care, how it’s rooted in love, in compassion. And then we don’t set the boundary of protection it’s trying to help us set.
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”
-Prentis Hemphill
When you hate something, it’s a sign of life. It’s a sign of love. It means you can still feel pain and that you still care.
And yes, anger wants to cause harm, so we need to take care with how we use it. We listen to the root of the anger, we connect with the love there, and we try not to cause further harm with the energy it brings. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel it. It actually means we feel it completely. We let anger flow through our bodies, we listen to the meaning behind the thoughts it elicits, we stop blocking it internally so that it can stop living in us and dictating what we do.
Anger tells us that something cannot be tolerated for one more second, but rarely is it possible to actually stop the target of the anger so immediately. And so, we feel helpless. The urgency anger imparts upon us is based on the premise that a situation which in reality is far out of our control, is ours alone to deal with. And worse, that it’s our fault for allowing this to happen in the first place. It’s here that we start to see that at the root of most anger, we are truly angry at ourselves.
I try to single-handedly take down the patriarchy on a regular basis. I’ll be doing the dishes for the fifth time in a row, and then suddenly I’m picking a fight with my husband, but really I’m picking a fight with myself for having the same problems as my mom and her mother before her. If I had been stronger, better, more assertive: I wouldn’t be in this situation. Anger, no matter how much we believe it’s the ticket to safety, poisons us.
Because it’s not your fault that things are the way they are. Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have. And as soon as you can realize that, you can stop punching yourself in the gut every time something bad happens in your life, or in the world. And then you can stop letting anger, helplessness, or fear dictate how you move about, and instead see clearly what is yours to do and be totally available to do it.
Sometimes all that’s yours to do is stop adding fuel to the dumpster fire of pain and confusion that seems to be burning all around and inside. Sometimes it just means breathing through something hard. Being kind to someone who wasn’t expecting it. Come closer to your locus of control, and love everywhere you can (which sometimes is just the squirrel out the window). That’s enough.
Next time you’re full of rage, or fear, or grief, you have some degree of curiosity and balance of mind, and you have a little time to just be with that feeling, try allowing the feeling to fill your body. Put your attention on the physical sensations of the feeling, and make a lot of space for it to live and breathe and move around. Get into the fetal position, pace around, or get into your car and scream. Let the feeling express itself, and listen to the deeper message it has for you. It’s not your job to contain it, just to listen and learn.
The best thing about letting ourselves have our feelings is that it’s a huge relief. At first it may feel scary, because we’ve often stopped letting ourselves feel them. We think we can’t handle them or we’ll push people away. But when we discover that it’s not our job to change what we’re feeling, that we’re not wrong or bad for having them, and that our feelings are actually useful and rooted in love? Aaaah. Turns out you’re the right person, at the right place, and at the right time.
This article was born out of a talk I gave at Spirit Rock Meditation Center a few months ago.
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