Reconciling with your anger

Reclaiming the sacred fire of self liberation

I think it takes a great degree of maturation to recognize what is sacred within the very aspects of ourselves we’ve been conditioned to disown and demonize. Anger is one of them.

In my opinion, Anger is one of the most demonized emotions. And it makes sense.

It often feels like an inner fire that wants to burn everything around us.

It is the emotional experience that most religions and spiritual traditions often invite us to get away from, in the name of being virtuous.

Well, here is a thought form that has been leading all the work I do:

There is absolutely no inner experience that is purely destructive. When we think a part of us is only negative or destructive, it’s because we haven’t romanced it enough to see the gold in the dirt.

This perspective applies to anger too. I will share with you at the end of this piece a few prompts that will initiate the journey to help you reconcile with your anger.

The real nature of anger

I used to have a twisted relationship with my own anger. Of course, like many of us, it started in my childhood.

For context, I was born and raised in Cameroon (a country in central Africa), where I lived up until age 24. To put it simply, back home the main way anger was done was explosive style… if you see what I mean.

As a child I was more on the sensitive end. Demonstrations of anger were often scary to me. That sensitive nature caused me to go through quite a bit of bullying growing up. I was the easy target.

Things started changing when I approached age 8. One day I was being bullied on the school yard by a kid a bit bigger than me. He became quite physical and pushed me to the ground harder than he ever did before. That day I lost it. I grabbed all the rocks I could find around me and I started throwing them at him like a mad child. I didn’t stop there. I started chasing him with more rocks. I wanted to hurt him. I was crying and enraged.

I had moved quickly from powerlessness, to anger and then full out rage.

That was one of the experiences where I started fighting back. And soon after that, the bullying stopped. That earned me the reputation of being a quiet yet feral cat. I became the little kid who always had rocks in his pocket.

Of course, I wish I didn’t have to defend myself so violently. I wished back then that I had the capacity to handle that differently.

That experience brought to my attention two things. The first one was a sense of power that came from allowing the rage to burst. The second thing was that the power I had just got in touch with felt scary… out of control. I was genuinely scared of how much I can hurt others if I don’t have my anger on a leash.

There is a difference between anger and hostility or aggression. In its truest nature, anger is the sacred inner fire that invites you to reclaim your integrity and dignity.

Hostility and aggression are what we do with anger when we infuse it with the intent to hurt.

In that moment, I had become hostile. Even though to this day, I think that defending myself was a valid reason to do so, that reaction made me repress my anger to a certain degree, especially in intimate relationships.

How repressing your anger is hurting you

Repressing your anger (which is often done unconsciously) is often behind some of the patterns that make our lives more difficult.

The most obvious one would be any inability to set healthy boundaries. Without healthy anger, it is more challenging to say “no” when you mean it. Repressing it makes you fawn and want to please more than you intend to. It hinders your ability to take a stand for yourself even when you are being mistreated.

That alone is a huge reason to begin the journey of reconciling with your own anger and to explore how to express it from a heart centered place. This reinstates you back in your power and allows you to tap into healthy assertiveness when you need it.

That is the first reason why I chose to reconcile with my anger to begin with. Without it, it was very challenging to be in my integrity in my relationship. Some of my personal journey involved somatic work and a devoted practice of martial arts. That’s a story for another day.

There is in my opinion an even more important reason to reconcile with your anger. It has to do with fully liberating yourself.

As you may know, a big intent of my work is to facilitate self liberation. It is one of my highest values. After supporting and guiding thousands of people in their inner journeys, I have noticed that those who are not in touch with their heart centered anger will often have a hard time dealing gracefully with the challenges that life brings their way. That includes their fears.

Without a healthy relationship with our own anger, we often tend to avoid the challenges that come with life, and this in turns, deepens suffering.

In its truest nature, anger if the inner fire that gives us the stamina to face our fears. If that’s something you wish to understand more, I invite you to keep reading.

Understanding heart centered anger

It takes a certain degree of inner fire to face your fears. I takes some inner fire to burn the chains that have been crippling you. It takes some inner fire to courageously face the challenges that life brings towards you. That inner fire is ignited by heart centered anger. It is not necessarily anger directed ‘at’ someone or something. It is a potent fire that fuels the determination and resolve of your heart. It is the sacred rebellion of your inner self that wants to remind you of your power.

Heart centered anger is the fire that welds together what was once broken. It is the stamina that allows you to take a stand for yourself without necessarily becoming aggressive or hostile. It is the fire that can set a boundary while creating deeper intimacy in the relationships you care about most.

Prompts to reconcile with you anger

Starting the reclamation of heart centered anger is one of the best journeys you may embark on as you keep expanding. The prompts below can help you deepen that exploration. Please complete as spontaneously as you can the following prompts.

• How I was modeled to deal with anger growing up is…

• How that conditioning is still showing up in my life today is…

• I tend to easily get angry when…

• What I often do instead of allowing myself to welcome my anger is…

• The benefits I get from dealing with anger that way are…

• The thought of becoming more intimate with my anger makes me feel…

• If I allow myself to fully embrace my anger, what I am afraid of is…

• The hurt that often lies beneath my anger is…

• The boundaries that my anger is inviting me to set in my life today are…

• If my anger was my intuition in disguise it would say…

PS: I’ll be hosting soon a deeper workshop about exploring and harnessing the liberating power of heart centered anger. Keep an eye out on your inbox for future details.

As always, thank you for reading and please share this with people who might resonate with it.

In gratitude and reverence,

— Xavier