Apparently, anger is such a powerful opportunity that I have been having trouble writing about it this week. I started this post on Monday night and here it is already Wednesday night. It has never taken me this long to write about any subject before anger came on the scene. All right, I admit it. Anger scares me. To me anger means the threat of violence and physical or emotional harm and even worse, abandonment. Although I’m much better at dealing with my own and others’ anger now that I am an adult, I still don’t feel totally comfortable with it.
Despite the fact that anger is a perfectly healthy and often a necessary response, my own anger has often eluded me. For years, I imagined that I never got angry. I was easy-going and easy to please. While that was an accurate description of me, it was not the entire truth. I have spent my whole life being conflict adverse. If I thought that my anger would cause a conflict, I immediately did what I could to ameliorate the situation, most times putting my own needs on hold. Not paying attention to what I needed in the moment was far superior than risking a conflict where I imagined I would lose the argument, be physically overpowered or left because I didn’t agree with the others. Consequently, my own anger always served as a cue to cow myself rather than to protect me. Read the rest of this entry »
Whenever I think of July 4th, I think of freedom. When I got up this morning I read a bit from Mary Pipher’s excellent new book, “Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World”. I was powerfully moved by this sentence: “Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives.” Although I meditate and have read many books on Buddhism, I’m not officially a Buddhist. However, Buddhism has allowed me to explore the idea and the experience of freedom in a way that I hadn’t previously encountered.
True freedom for me is freedom from my obsessive self-castigating thoughts. My mind produces thousands of these thoughts each day. Mindfulness is the larger container that allows me to notice them and not become one with any single one of them. I’m not often successful in remaining unattached to individual thoughts. They are so inviting, with their magnetic pull toward a seemingly stable identity of me as an insufficient, narcissistic and selfish person. In those moments of ego identification with those thoughts I’m steadfastly not cognizant of any of my altruistic and generous thoughts or actions. I hate myself for not living up to my own ideals and even worse for hurting others by my own insistence on any thought or action that could relate to my own well being. Read the rest of this entry »
Apparently, anger is such a powerful opportunity that I have been having trouble writing about it this week. I started this post on Monday night and here it is already Wednesday night. It has never taken me this long to write about any subject before anger came on the scene. All right, I admit it. Anger scares me. To me anger means the threat of violence and physical or emotional harm and even worse, abandonment. Although I’m much better at dealing with my own and others’ anger now that I am an adult, I still don’t feel totally comfortable with it.![[del.icio.us]](http://theopportunitygame.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
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