Conscious Inner Transformation

I don’t know about you but everyone I meet lately is having issues with frustration.  Even those people who spend time on inner work and are usually quite cruisy.  If you’re into astrology, you might see it reflected in astrological events, but I’m not an expert in that field, so I’ll leave more in-depth comments to the professional astrologers.  Astro.com is a good place to start, if you want to learn more about your own chart.

Anyway, there’s one person at the moment who is pushing a lot of my buttons and on the positive side, is revealing in more clarity some of my more pressing (pardon the pun) issues.   My earlier post outlined the beginning of this particular cycle of inner growth and talks about the trap of getting stuck in an emotion.

Well, after a couple of weeks of becoming increasingly angry at what felt like constant unfair criticism of how and what I was doing, but also of me as a person, I realised I couldn’t continue in the same manner without blowing a fuse, storming away or suppressing it and becoming sick (dis-ease describes when we are ill at ease).

If something makes us feel angry it is usually pointing out that we feel powerless in a situation.  If we are receptive to this inner emotion and do not hold any judgment about it, like it’s wrong to feel angry, it’s scary to express anger, then we can act on what it is telling us and do something appropriate to empower ourselves in the situation.  (Notice the word appropriate here!)

Generally, I don’t think blowing a fuse or erupting in anger at another person is helpful in a situation as it doesn’t really help, as the other person will probably react out of anger themselves, or become fearful.  Neither reaction is empowering.  If you’re on your own, quickly dissipating the energy by verbalizing it may work, as long as you truly release it.  Often we can express an emotion but still hold on mentally to the cause and therefore not really resolve anything with the outburst.

Storming away can sometimes be the right move, if it’s used in a “time out” way.  “I really need some time out here – I’m feeling very strongly about this,” could be a way of expressing yourself while you walk away and calm down.  But storming out and shouting “That’s it, I quit!”, wouldn’t necessarily be useful if you walked out of a job into unemployment with a mortgage and lots of bills to pay and a couple of starving kids waiting for dinner.

Suppressing an emotion isn’t healthy either. Often people who don’t like conflict, or the thought of hurting someone will do this.  But suppressing an emotion and carrying it around as baggage isn’t good for long-term health.  Carrying around anger for example is a cause of dis-ease and is not recommended for long periods.  Emotions, by their nature, are energy in motion (e-motion) and when we are in balanced and centred and do not carry any judgments or unresolved issues about a situation, we can allow emotions to flow through us.

But in those moments when our buttons are pressed, well that’s a sure sign we’re holding a judgment about the situation, or ourselves, or how the other person, or taking it too personally – or we are holding onto an unresolved emotional issue from the past that is being triggered.

What to do?  I use a several-pronged approach.

1. I resolve to express myself differently.  In the case of anger, I hold on to this emotion when I’m afraid to express myself in the situation because of a disempowering belief I either have of myself or I’m afraid of the consequences and what will happen to me.  It’s something I learned as I was growing up and an emotion I personally find hard to address.  We’ve all got different emotions we’re uncomfy with, anger is one of mine.  Rather than express anger at a (projected) authority figure by expressing my own displeasure, I will often remain silent and then resentment and anger can build up. So deciding that next time I will express myself appropriately, such as saying, “When you say that, it makes me feel really useless.”  This doesn’t guarantee any change in the situation, but it is at least giving myself permission to express myself in a way that’s non threatening and lets the other person know how I’m feeling.  How will they change their behaviour if they don’t know it’s affecting someone else.  (Of course it’s also a possibility that they may never change their behaviour!)
2. I try not to take it personally. I remind myself that often what’s being said is more about where the other person is coming from, rather than a statement about me.  Not taking it personally is easier said than done, especially if one is looking to the other person for approval, or feels bad if the other person is not happy.  Often empathic people are sensitive to other people’s ‘stuff’ and are more easily caught up in the other person’s ‘dramas’.  Remembering that we are not responsible for the other person’s emotions is helpful.
3. When I have time to myself, I take a moment to centre myself, connect with the All That Is, God, Higher Power, Higher Self, whatever you call that all-encompassing energy that surrounds us and fills us.  I also send my energy down to the earth, to get a sense of support from the planet that provides me with my home and food.  Then I feel the anger (or other emotion/s) in my body, imagine I’m lifting it up through me with my hands and up out of my head and mentally give it away to the All That Is.  I know when I’ve really released this, because I often do a little shake like a dog shaking water off its back.  Within moments, there is a shift in my emotional clarity and I often have difficulty remembering what the problem was all about (which to me is a sign I’ve really let it go).
4. I remember what the emotion was telling me.  For instance, in the workplace, anger might be showing me that I felt powerless to escape the situation because I couldn’t see another way to earn money.  How could I use that feedback to empower myself? I could look within myself at my talents and abilities and find another way to earn extra money.  Following through on that might be enough to gain a sense of empowerment, knowing I was not as ‘useless’ as I was being ‘made’ to feel.  Alternatively, it might provide an extra or alternative source of income, with somewhere to go if the situation didn’t resolve itself in any great way.
5. Next time I am with the same person, I choose to go into the situation with a blank mind.  Not dumb and vacant.  Blank.  In other words, I choose not to think, “Oh this person’s  going to make me feel bad again”, because that will immediately switch on my defences and I may inadvertently make the same thing happen by my own actions or words.  In other words, if I go in thinking the person’s going to bully me again, I am likely to unconsciously portray victim behaviour and actually cause a repeat scenario.  If I can’t actually envision a positive outcome to the situation, I do my best to go into it with at least a blank mind, which means that I resolve not to imagine a bad outcome, another argument, or whatever happened before.  I choose to keep my mind focused on what’s in front of my nose at the time.  And continue to do so when I’m in the situation.  While it is difficult to do, I work hard to keep my thoughts focused on the present moment.  The Right Here, Right Now Moment.

So, going back to my example recently, I released my anger and decided to meet the next day with an open mind.  The next morning when I awoke, I actually felt sick with fear.  Interesting.  Anger was replaced by fear.  So I went through the releasing, and chose to remain focused on the here and now.  Throughout that day, I kept feeling fearful and very open.  I felt vulnerable.  It was difficult to operate with such strong emotions flooding me, but I did my best to remain centred.  Interestingly things I touched kept going wrong and this fuelled the other person’s criticism more.  But I was determined not to rise to anger because I felt powerless.  Instead, I remained with that open feeling of vulnerability.  When confronted with my inability to function, I merely said, without a trace of anger or pride, “funnily enough everywhere else, people come to me to fix things.  Here lately, I seem to be always in the wrong.”

What I did there was remain in my centre, stayed with how I was feeling and expressed myself honestly.  While near to tears at my own vulnerability I had walked through a fear barrier.  The one that had caused me to feel angry for so long before.  Anger had been my way of protecting myself from feeling vulnerable.  That state that we all feel so often as children and yet harden to as we grow older.  Yet vulnerability goes hand in hand with an open-hearted embrace on life and is closest to expressing our soul nature.

What happened when I expressed myself that day?  Strangely, those words spoken so quietly, were heard and after that, while I was still requested to do things differently, I was requested rather than told, and requested with an explanation rather than a harsh cutting comment on my uselessness.

The other thing that happened was I had an idea to sell some of my creative products.  So out of that difficult ongoing scenario came a determination to find more of my own power by tapping into my creativity and following something that gives me a real feeling of joy and fulfillment.  So even though the situation I find myself in daily is not always ideal (and let’s face it we’re all human, so what is ideal anyway?), it is giving me the impetus to grow beyond my original frustration as mentioned in my earlier post.  To fulfill more of my potential and in that way walk taller, with quiet gratitude, rather than anger.