I recently saw a post from a well known psychologist suggesting that anger was a se
condary emotion, and that beneath it was another feeling that was being misconstrued. No offense to this particular psychologist, because I realize she's simply regurgitating the studies of emotions from a crusade of academia that came before her, but it's been a while since i've come across something so egregiously begging to be decolonized as that sentiment.
Making anger a "secondary feeling" is yet another way of diminishing, dismissing, and gaslighting a perfectly natural feeling.
In the school of thought I teach from, anger is very much a primary emotion, along with joy, sadness, and fear; meaning that none of these experiences need to be legitimized nor explained by "digging deeper". In fact, I would argue that with making anger secondary comes the normalized, colonized-erasure of that which is completely human to feel.
When we list the phases of grief we address each as their own experience, with no linear progression, nor as some accomplishment to be mastered in order to achieve the next phase. For many of us who have become friends, even lovers, to our grief over the course of our lifetimes, we also understand that none of these phases are ever fully accomplished, and so, with the reminder of loss, they may
wash over us as easily as the next current ashore while our toes rest in the sand.
To search for a reason for our anger - validating our anger as a mask rather than an emotion, is to admonish our anger, and therefore, our love.
In the changing tides of our modern world, a sentiment i witness lament around all too frequently is that of not doing enough. Those who wonder why they didn't speak up in the moment they wanted to, those who struggle to put down boundaries to better communicate their needs to their community, those who feel their chronic people-pleaser is the loudest voice emanating from them, losing clarity and conviction in the mix. To these cries, I offer the remedy: may your anger be witnessed as sacred, for anger is the sacred motivator lacking in these moments. It's anger that speaks "no" with the conviction to stop a thousand pressures. It's anger that speaks to the trespasses on love.... LOVE... Which should be our normal condition.
Our anger is our immune system: when in its healthiest state, it fights that which disrupts our ability to be healthy, happy, and loved. When our anger has been pulled out of its healthy alignment, so too our immune system goes with it, causing all sorts of auto-immune dysfunction, illness, and confusion. A healthy immune system doesn't ask how a virus feels about it saying "no" before it enacts its "no". A healthy immune system doesn't negotiate parts of the body to an infection because it wants the infection to "like" it. A healthy immune system doesn't question whether the body and spirit are worthy of survival and protection before jumping to their aid. Our immunity, our anger, is coded with the love of the sacred, teaching us wisdom in the moments it arrives on how our ability to stay attuned to the rhythm of love has been ruptured, then finding the necessary aid to return us to that stasis. The decolonized model understands anger as sacred.
For the last year I have been traveling with a workshop entitled, Sacred Rage, which many of you have attended. To close the calendar year I had the privilege of teaching one last time to a community in nyc that is of the utmost importance to me. The resounding cry of many was the shared fear of losing safety, belonging, and the ability to feel protected through love as the world stage shifts like the tectonic plates below. After this workshop, I returned to Los Angeles for a hopeful two weeks off to integrate before resuming my life as a facilitator, and instead was met with the same angry cries from mother earth herself. Our sweet mother erupted into flames, indignant, screaming that she too no longer feels the protection and safety that sacred love should afford her. My body, also made of earth, burned with her, scorching to just over 105 degrees in moments. Like my ancestors before me, I knew our fires were not unrelated, and as the embers in my body churned, I sat in council in the spirit world, asking the ancestors what my own body, along with the body of this sacred mother earth, was asking for. I was reminded of "good burn", a practice held by more ancient tribes than we have history for, but most importantly in this moment, the tribes that were stewards to very land i was resting on. Our ancestors knew that our fire element must burn. That fire, like all of the elements, was not just relevant, but essential to all of life, and that learning how to balance and hold it, steadfast like the stars burning above us, was not only imperative, but life-giving. We must only look to our own great keeper of fire, the sun, to learn the importance of this element. Yet, in fear of the destruction the element of fire can hold, it's become easier to ignore the calls, and to bury our anger, rather than learn to live in balance with it... to cast it aside as secondary. So to look upon the element of fire, and call it a mask for the water, air, earth, or ether elements, is an attempt to avoid the wisdom we've forgotten. Just because we are out of practice with fire, to the point that it has grown to severe imbalances, does not make fire unimportant or obsolete. Quite to the contrary, the fire element is begging for our attention to be returned to the fire that burns within us. And just as aggression and harm are born of the explosion of harboring what could have been titrated as "healthy anger", so our wildfires burn with reckless abandon when in reality they too could have been titrated, as "good fire".
In my lineage, we understand power as a virus, defined by anyone or anything that places themselves between you and your divine connection to Creator. And just as viruses motivate healthy immune systems to enforce a resilient fight back to health and love, power will oppose (or worse yet, disregard as secondary) anger as that force which can assert the boundaries, "no", and fortitude needed to remove anything that seeks to disrupt our ability to connect to the sacred, including mother earth, and the voice of the divine itself.
So in the moments you most feel unsure, unclear, stepped on, fawning into people-pleasing mode, placative, unsafe, or insecure, I pray you too may take note from the codes gifted to your immune system by the divine itself, and i hope you are angry. and may that good anger burn the overgrowth on your sacred right to existence before it too erupts in relentless wildfire.
Comments