Finding the Gift in Rage

 

I am enjoying deeper and longer experiences of inner peace these days but I can still be disrupted by the impact of outer events. Even though these disruptions can be painful and uncomfortable, especially in contrast to deep peace, I’m choosing to see them as opportunities.

 

The philosophy behind the Soul Sanctuary practice I teach is that life is a continual flow of energy and intelligence, always evolving and reinventing itself. And because we humans are part of life we too, in our healthy state, are a continual flow of energy and intelligence, always evolving and reinventing ourselves. However, over many eons of time, the conditioned mind has rejected many aspects of the human experience and this renders us disempowered and much less intelligent than we potentially could be. In other words cultural conditioning has dumbed us down and this dulled intelligence is having devastating effects on our happiness, our culture and our planet. In every aspect of self that we have numbed, disowned or fragmented, there is an intelligent gift. The path to a conscious life is the opportunity to redeem these cut-off aspects of self and to integrate the gifts back into our being. One such culturally exiled and highly energetic aspect of human nature is rage.

 

Every holiday the peninsula where I live undergoes an invasion of holiday makers. They pour in from England to enjoy the peace and beauty this area offers, and they turn paradise into a parking lot and playground. I do my best to stay out of the way when the crowds come as I don’t generally enjoy masses of people, traffic jams and noise.

 

One of the behaviours of the visitors I find difficult to tolerate is the way they drive and hog the road. The village road is narrow and lined on one side by cars. It happens just about every time I’m coming back up the hill that I am met by some big gas guzzling SUV, cruising down the wrong side of the road straight towards me, with no intention of giving way. I know this is very petty in the scheme of things but each time I am forced to stop and let them pass, when it is my right of way, I see someone bearing down on me who is careless or ignorant of the rules of the road. And to me they represent the aspect of humanity that is entirely self-absorbed and does not recognise the existence or rights of others. In those moments of being forced to stop and move aside I see human ignorance, carelessness, domination and a puffed up sense of entitlement. (All qualities of many of our leaders and politicians who appear to be leading us deeper into chaos.) When I come face to face with these particular traits on my home turf I experience rage.

 

Now, I wouldn’t be sharing this in writing If I didn’t think there was something more important here than my personal inadequacy to deal with the minor inconvenience of someone driving at me on the wrong side of the road. After such an event happened to me last weekend I sat with the rage and let it take me down a familiar road towards isolation, depression, self-doubt and despair. Then I talked to a close friend and she had been experiencing something very similar. After weeks of having family and friends visiting her at home she finally imploded with the frustration of having others in her space who did not respect her boundaries despite the fact she had clearly stated them. Two days later I met with my Soul Sanctuary group and everyone there was sharing  similar stories of feeling pressed on by others, dominated or disrespected, somehow unable to get enough space, or having old trauma activated. Again, in the bigger scheme of things, who cares if a few privileged white westerners feel put upon or upset?  But, it appears to me, the intensity each of us was experiencing points to a collective pattern which is arising to be seen so that the trapped energy can be released and the power redeemed and integrated. And this is showing up  now in various ways in the lives of those of us on a conscious path, so that we can  liberate ourselves from the grip of the limiting conditions and create new tracks into the future by evolving and re-inventing ourselves.

 

We share a crowded and unhappy planet

At the last count the world population stood at 7.7 billion people and I’m amazed at how fast we are growing in numbers. That’s a lot of people for a planet with an estimated total carrying capacity of 10 billion. A lot of people sharing space and, unfortunately, we are slow as a species in learning how to share the resources we have. Our world is heaving with discontent, conflict, aggression, violence, addiction, war, brutality, cruelty, political unrest, corruption, injustice and oppression.

 

For those of you who know me you’ll know I usually look on the bright side. I attempt to write about my own times of suffering in such a way as to enlighten these uncomfortable states and show a way through. So for me to show up at the page today to write about something as uncomfortable as the dark, ignorant side of human nature (including my own) feels risky. Especially when I invite others into a Soul Sanctuary space to discover inner peace and stability.

 

But I must speak about this. I’m finding that as I grow more peaceful and more connected and more compassionate I am also becoming more intolerant of human ignorance and the kind of self-centred entitlement that is wreaking havoc on our planet. Compassion and intolerance are certainly uncomfortable bedfellows; some would say they are incompatible. But when I tell you about my relationship with my father you will see they are not – for me anyway.

 

I learned about rage from my father. He was the only one in my family who was allowed to rage. The rest of us were forced into silent submission. His rage scared and traumatised me, my brother, and my mother. As late as in my early thirties I remember him screaming into my face, so close I could feel his spit and his spite. I realised then that even though he had never hit me or physically violated me, his rage penetrated me on an energetic, soul level. This left me with a traumatic fault-line – a fragile place in my psychic container that could easily be triggered and broken open and send me spiralling down into the low energy emotions of isolation and shame. It’s taken me a long time to understand that process. In order to survive at home as a child and teenager I made myself mute, almost catatonic, and spent as much time as I could either in my room working or out of the house playing. I hated my Dad. I hated being oppressed by him. I hated seeing him disrespect and mistreat my brother and my mother. His behaviour enraged me. And I had to bury the rage because there was no safe space for it.

 

In 2002 I spent a year living with my father, caring for him after my mother’s death and getting to know him better. We had some good times together but neither his rage nor mine had gone away and I discovered more about its roots. He died in 2011 and since then I‘ve been able to reach a place of forgiveness and compassion. I realised his rage was an expression of his own disempowerment; of his own longing and failure to connect. Over the last three years I have been on a journey of deep healing and I’ve seen and felt how those threads of disempowerment go back through the generations and how we’ve all been conditioned into believing there is something wrong with us, something lacking. We’ve been taught that we are not worthy, not good enough, that we don’t deserve, that we should be quiet and small and submissive. We’ve been beaten into submission and enslaved for other’s profit. Many of us carry old traumas with us through life which can trigger us onto a raw edge again and again, where we’re howling into the wind and there’s no-one there to listen.

 

So you see, my father taught me compassion, which means an acceptance of the human condition with all its suffering and an empathic understanding of how people are trapped and pained by their ignorance, as he was (and including myself). But that doesn’t mean I accept his behaviour. My father’s suffering doesn’t excuse him for terrorising us and causing harm. Some behaviour is unacceptable and there is a lot of unacceptable behaviour in our world now, behaviour that hasn’t really changed much over thousands of years. We are not just drowning in a sea of plastic, the plastic is a symptom of our careless, toxic lifestyle and our ignorant, dumbed down, cut off ways.

What is the gift in rage?  

Rage is a big energy. It often manifests as dark and ugly and most of us quite rightly fear it, in others and in ourselves. It’s socially unacceptable. Maybe it’s one of the most uncomfortable emotions to own?  So how do we relate to it when it arises in ourselves? Is there a place within a spiritual practice for rage? Or should we send it away?  Put it down. Numb it out. Pretend it doesn’t exist in us. Only in others. Only in them.

 

The first time I ever expressed rage I was twenty-eight and it surprised me as much as the two men I directed it at – my husband from whom I had just separated, and shortly after, my father. As the burst of rage emerged I felt a big, exhilarating power, a primordial energy which I later came to name the Deep Feminine, after reading the myth of Inanna’s descent to her dark underground sister, Erishkegal. It’s that raw part of the Feminine that rages against injustice and is ready to destroy it. It’s a ruthless compassion which values the truth and the good of the Whole more than being nice and polite and conforming to any social expectation. Both men withdrew their love from me thereafter and this taught me that rage is ugly and unacceptable, especially in a woman. Since then I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve let rage out of the bag. I’ve discovered raging at a person is counter-productive because they are so alarmed they can’t hear me, and in any case trying to get someone else to change is usually a waste of energy. Yet this big powerful energy lived on in me and I found if I turned it inwards I became depressed or despairing. The best way I found to channel it was into social change work, which I was naturally drawn to. The more oppressed the group I was working to liberate the better.

 

Finding my spiritual path changed everything. The psychotherapeutic work I was doing didn’t go deep enough or give me the tools and understanding I needed to liberate myself from trauma, depression and disempowerment. Spiritual practice did and my path became a lifelong, ever evolving journey towards realising wholeness. I’ve spent the last thirty years healing the violation, soothing the rage, learning how to liberate and empower myself, to reach for a higher vision, and practice being Love-in-action. Most of the people I choose to hang out with now are doing their best to raise their consciousness beyond self-serving patterns and towards serving the whole. We see the arising of these old patterns as opportunities to transcend them, no matter how hard that is. And that means at times being willing to descend into the darkness, to feel those uncomfortable, socially unsanctioned feelings. To know them. To name them. Even to welcome them into the sanctuary of our being

 

Despite years of meditation and spiritual practice my rage has never totally gone away and at times I’ve felt like a wounded bear howling at the stars with discontent.

Although part of me knew better I‘ve continued to see this as a personal inadequacy, and the rage as a volatile force to be kept hidden at all costs. It felt so ugly because it seemed to be an expression of ego, arising when I felt disrespected or violated in some way. I’d been taught I didn’t really have a right to complain or to be respected and it was “just my ego”. The fire didn’t erupt often but when it did I felt so raw and edgy and alone. Even though I could feel its power, I was ashamed of the rage and ashamed of having a voice that couldn’t be heard. Speaking of it now I still feel vulnerable.

 

A fire that burns against injustice

My story is mild compared to that of many others. I’ve worked with hundreds of people over the years in a therapeutic context and I know how abusive so many domestic situations are and how, behind closed doors, many good people are cruelly mistreated and how those wounds fester until they are given light and space.

 

Now, for the first time, I’m fully understanding that rage is not a personal inadequacy or an expression of ego, but it’s that part of the human condition which has been repressed and downtrodden and can no longer tolerate being dominated, disrespected, pressed upon and forced into the gutter so that those with gas guzzling tanks can breeze by as if they own the world. It’s the part of us that rises up to throw off oppression and explodes in a burst of “I’ve had enough! Don’t treat me like this.“ This is bubbling up in the collective now because our world has become so crazy and our political leaders so clearly inadequate, many of us are reaching this point of zero tolerance. In its purest expression rage is a fire that burns against injustice, that demands respect and equality. It’s an expression of sovereignty and the demand for justice that’s ready to rise.

 

But what to do with rage when it arises? It’s not an energy to be flaunted or unleashed unconsciously. Rage can be dangerous, violent, murderous. But repressing it can also be deadly, suicidal and give rise to disease. Scratch any addiction long enough – food addiction, alcohol addiction, drug addiction, gambling, you name it – and you’ll find the rage of disempowerment. We’ve been taught to repress our fire. To keep ourselves small. To submit. To be quiet and numb and not make a fuss.

 

Like any intense emotion rage can only reach its purest expression when it’s given conscious attention and held in love. My spiritual work now is moving into a place where I’m being given the opportunity to exercise compassion and set clear boundaries at the same time. After all how can I be compassionate with others if I am not taking care of myself and my own sovereignty? Sometimes this practice feels like learning to love the unacceptable, it stretches me uncomfortably. I’m not advocating that we start wantonly expressing our rage and dumping it on each other, not at all. Rage is a fire that’s been exiled for a long time and I want to befriend it when I feel it arising, to welcome it in and give it a place at the table and hear what it has to say. It’s showing me all the ways I haven’t taken care of myself; where I’ve sacrificed my own needs to please another; where I haven’t taken responsibility; where I need to be the guardian of my soul sanctuary with firm boundaries.

 

When I listen deeply I can hear how rage has been transmuted into music that touches the soul – the blues, some jazz and rock n’ roll for instance. – these arise out of centuries of slavery and are expressions of the soul crying out to be free to move and express in the human body and to celebrate life – free of judgment and oppression. Rage can be transmuted into a clear and whole-y fire, a laser beam to slice through untruth and injustice.

 

None of us will really be free until all of humanity is free. And that starts here with me. Sometimes it’s necessary to make a fuss and to overthrow injustice. Just as sometimes it’s necessary to get down and dirty in the muck of human ignorance to find the hidden gems.

 

The road rage for me was just a catalyst in my otherwise peaceful life to show me I needed to take another look at rage, to get to know it better and to free myself from a lifelong pattern of trauma, once and for all. And this put me in touch with the collective arising of rage and gave me the opportunity to contribute towards the  healing of collective consciousness. Mostly, I think we tend to exercise our rage against those close to home, where we feel relatively safe. The friends, family or drivers on the road are simply the messengers and not the message.

 

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Can you resonate with any of this?

 

You can find out more about The Soul Sanctuary Programme here.