As days go, so far, today is neither here nor there, in the sense that I am calm, and feel balanced, and my emotions are just not stirred right now, one way or the other. The rainy morning pleases me, by wrapping me in a certain sentimental something that I feel on rainy days. I don’t know where it comes from. I feel it on rainy days. It’s not a good feeling or a bad feeling. It’s not an emotion I know how to name, but it is a comfortable fit, inasmuch as it feels very familiar and relaxed and centered. It is an experience I enjoy, although I have never examined it very closely. It was raining hard enough to decide to ride the bus to work. The rain spattering the bus windows, and the filtered gray light gave me a strange sense of emotional safety and this morning I had a Dave Matthews song stuck in my head, which sort of encouraged my thinking in the direction of mindfulness, emotions, and change.
I started thinking about ‘anger’. I regularly avoid the word, hoping to avoid the experience. I’ve had very bad experiences with anger, both other people’s anger and my own. I feel overwhelmed by anger, even to the point of frankly finding it hard to write about with candor. Fear of feeling it, fear of failing at it, fear of facing it, fear of being unable to contain it…anger is powerful stuff. I’d like to be more easily able to accept that I can and do feel angry sometimes, and just move on from it or let it go. I’d also like to be able to observe someone else’s anger without taking it personally, feeling defensive or blamed, or feeling responsible for ‘fixing’ it. (Seeing it in text, I see that some of those are choices I can make, and other bits seem relevant to mindfulness practices I am cultivating.) I focused on ‘going easy on myself’ for past anger, so I could more easily examine anger in general. Big Anger associated with ancient hurts and long-carried baggage is a wound I know I’m not quite ready to tackle, but I got to wondering if every day anger could be ‘practiced’ for skill building so that I could be ready to tackle it some other time? So… I considered something small I was angry about recently that I didn’t act on or attempt to resolve at that time, and allowed myself to acknowledge and feel being angry about it. Then one by one I put some of the specific mindfulness practices I am learning into action. I didn’t make assumptions about whether any one thing would or would not work. I just did steps, followed processes, pursued practices. I practiced. I practiced being angry without escalating. I practiced accepting the feeling of anger without acting out. I practiced allowing myself to ‘consider other sides’ of an issue in spite of an emotion of anger. I practiced letting anger go without compromising my values, or depriving myself of personal understanding or validation of my experience. I repeated the exercise with a number of small things I was angry about in a small way. I didn’t panic, have a fit, escalate, or feel hurt or damaged, and the anger itself didn’t do anything at all. Actually – I still feel good; calm and balanced. I even found myself understanding one or two small things differently, over which I had been harboring some resentment. The anger really just evaporated when I gained a somewhat different understanding of the circumstances through calm consideration of what I did and did not know, instead of struggling with the anger itself.
Anger is nasty stuff. I’d like to master it. Looks like I would do well to really understand what I mean by that, too, because apparently ‘mastery’ of anger is not about ‘making it go away’.
Mindfulness and emotion is more intense than I expected and less scary than I feared. Pleasant emotions, the ‘good stuff’, are actually very rich experiences, and I am learning to really savor them and take my time with life on a different level. Emotions that are often experienced as ‘bad’ or negative emotions are intense too, incredibly intense, and I am hoping to continue to learn not to be wounded by those experiences. I feel hopeful – and supported. It is easier to write about some of these things than to talk about them in real life with people I love and make my life with – because the conversation itself is so personal, so emotional, and so ‘right now’, for me; I easily lose sight of boundaries or limits. I sometimes cry when I’m trying to talk about things that are emotional. I’m learning to be ok with that, and to understand it more as an expression of intensity rather than an expression of a particular emotion. Adjusting my understanding of that experience has seemed, so far, to result in fewer tears. I wish I understood that.
So…Tuesday. It is a good one, so far. 😀
Evening Light 