The Power Of YES

YES To Life And Yes To Anger

Twenty years ago at the end of an anger outburst, I “caught myself short” spontaneously and observed myself in detachment. I noticed that I was feeling violent and upset — and at the same time I was hating all the powerful sensations which were going through my body and my mind. I was agitated and uncomfortable. Usually in such rage I would have said to myself, “HE caused this, it’s HIS FAULT. If he hadn’t done that yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah.” But I had already walked away, my adversary cowed, from an argument I didn’t much care about anyway. My body was shaking, with a head full of racing thoughts, and when I started thinking about what had happened, I was almost ready to turn back looking for more trouble. Nearly stumbling, I stamped my boot in frustration.

I felt miserable, lots of adrenaline coursing through my veins, my mind repeating and repeating negative-charged thoughts that the anger emotion seemed to nail down inside my head. It was terrible to watch myself, once I wasn’t attached to the anger, it nonetheless had it’s energy still coursing through me.

Striding away on a quiet path through the trees, I realized I really disliked the affects of anger. I hated it!

Anger hurt.

I stopped and the thought came to me, “I’ve just realized that anger is the most intense mental unpleasantness that I can remember bringing on myself.”

Very curious, “Most intense?”o

Then suddenly, for the first time, I noticed that being angry was in fact a form of self-suffering, a form of suffering.

Suffering.
Wow.

I choose to live as a conscious being, one who chooses to live in self-awareness, own and be responsible to and in my life, so this was a bit of challenge. Anger? Let go of anger was an obvious logical solution, but stuffing anger and being a suppressed person was not remotely acceptable as a choice, either. I began to methodically watch myself and others, when they were in their anger. I didn’t see any having fun, they appeared unhappy. Although rare cruel persons may enjoy dispensing anger/hurt, they are the rarity and have nothing to do with healthy living. Meanies are unfortunates who cannot or will not take ownership of their own lives. Pray for them, if you will.

I wasn’t interested in what anger does or serves in life, I wanted to learn the “how’ of it and what I might learn – - what parts I might be denying with hidden NOs and then what I might integrate, with YES, into my own consciousness.

I saw a contradiction: healthy angry people are not having fun nor even having a satisfactory personal emotional result, but instead are unhappy, were experiencing degrees of unpleasantness, NOT the peace and happiness we say we all seek. Often, this was deep unpleasantness. A question began to clarify: Why the hell were modern people bothering with anger in a lives where we are left to our own devices? I studied these things, human nature; the way we work.

In time, I began to notice further aspects of anger. It had never taken note of this before, it was a little like exploring something unfamiliar, though anger itself was certainly familiar. I saw I could get angry sitting alone merely re-hashing some earlier incident. Then I realized, in surprise, that Hey! I was creating the anger right there right then in that moment, it was not some item carried around like a tiger in a cage. Yowza, I saw that all anger which I’ve experienced I had in fact created myself. Nobody made me angry.

I also saw, even early in this investigation of emotional outbursts, that I always had this choice. No-one else “made” me angry. For years I’d already had the ability to detach from anything. I never much enjoyed anger, and I often walked off when confrontation was brewing. I have great confront, can face about anything, but my view was “Why bother?” Confrontation usually led to unpleasantness, people are so invested in being ‘right’ and having their way (even myself, of course.) And even if I feel the argument worth it, arguments still don’t work for me. If I’m ‘right’, well, I must have thought I was ‘right’ anyway, so the wins felt useless. If I was ‘wrong’, I just humiliated myself (or worse, I won the argument and later felt to apologize.) Looking around at how other people are, and remembering many other arguments and results, it was plain to see anger’s nature is to feel unpleasant in the moment, and, further, I saw that it is a universal form of suffering.

But people put themselves into it anyway. They voluntarily became angry, when moments before they may have been perfectly content.
But anger was something that happens, an action. An activity is not permanent, but temporary and something one does. It’s not something you are.

Again I realized a deepening truth: there is no such thing as an “angry person.” There are only persons who have in some way, for some reason, decided to be anger, to emote anger. To act angry. They chose to feel, to expose themselves to, the entire gamut of unpleasantness. Wow again. They, in a way and for reasons I couldn’t see, were making themselves this way. I wondered about this, how they could choose to experience this. I knew that when I created inner anger I also experienced real hurting inside. And the pain went on for some time afterwards, and I had the sense that the anger had INCREASED the hurt inside.

So why was this happening? Better question, what was the mechanism?

I looked.

Here is what I’ve found.

Anger is merely an avoidance. Anger happens instead of feeling OR expressing a hurt we’ve been feeling, or are about to feel. Anger is the result of saying “NO” to experiencing painful feelings – feelings which we are unable, or think we are unable, to cope with right now. More precisely, all emotions are the result of refusing to experience our feelings. We believe emotion is healthy processing of life but, believe it or not, emotions are more like turmoil. We do emotions because we believe that we can’t cope, or simply want to avoid. We accept turmoil as preferable to going into feeling, believing afterwards we’ll remain stuck with these feelings. We believe both our old patterns and mainstream society’s limited beliefs of ignorant psychology about this for two reasons.

— The first reason is this: we’re not going to let go of our emotional safety net without a replacement option. At this point, we haven’t even begun to look at this. Even having read this far, few people will have already decided to dive in to this self-evolvement and dump the emotional circus. It’s a brand new idea – stop emoting? Hello? What’s that? How will I cope? We don’t realize yet that feeling feelings lets them move, pass on and tear us, whereas emoting stuffs them deeper inside us as permanent baggage to carry around forever until they resurface and blast us through another storm, again anyway.
– The second reason is that we don’t realize that the healing is in feeling deeply, not emoting. Almost none of the us has studied and understood the difference between the two words: feelings and emotions – even though they are distinct words with very distinct meanings. Take a look and you’ll see that most everywhere, these two words are used interchangeably. Mainstream society does not distinguish between the word “feelings” and the word “emotions” very often carefully or correctly.

However, in trying to be clear about this, we need to distinguish these two words “feelings” and “emotions” to be and mean exactly what they are. Quoting myself, above,

“All emotions are the result of refusing to feel our feelings.” This contradicts entirely a mainstream idea that feelings are emotional sensitivity. Feelings are not sensitivity to emotions. Emotions are a reaction to feelings. The direction of effect is reverse. Feelings come first.

Feelings are that which is real. Emoting may follow feelings, as a reaction to the feelings. Dramatic actions in response to the real. The feelings are real and our “No” to them creates emotional reactions which are not you, not your feelings, not real. We experience feelings, we create emotions. The emotional life is an illusion. The experiential life is real life. Feeling your feelings, not hiding or burying them is living in truth. If you’ve been longing for your real true self, start pausing, turning inward and feeling – - no matter what you find.

(I’ll be giving some tips shortly to prevent overwhelm and promote safe feelings, but meanwhile, COMMIT to being your real experience. Commit now!