Understanding your sensitive self
Anger is an emotion that hisses and burns. It curls inside, wrapping itself around our hearts, crushing them. It burns our insides with its vitriolic fumes.
Anger also rises like a magnificent wave, and offers protection when we most need it. It helps us right our wrongs and address injustices.
I have a cut-off, discordant relationship with time. I try to ignore it a lot of the time, but it seems to be slipping so fast from my fingers that I need to find a way to relate to it better. I am someone who resists schedules and planning, and some of it, I think, is related to removing a sense of reality, of getting disconnected from things so that they don’t quite touch you so deeply.
We are never taught about feelings, about what they mean or how to listen to them. The world inside is lost in shadow, and our attention is fixated on the outside. When feelings become insistent, they just feel problematic to us – something to be fixed or eased. We never get right to the heart of them, to try and understand what they are trying to tell us.
We don’t know how to use their energy, or how to respond to their call.
In her insightful book The Language of Emotions, Karla McLaren talks eloquently about how all emotions come to us with their own, specific gifts. This is true even for the so-called negative emotions like anger and fear. They speak of our deeper truths, truths we don’t want to deal with, but that ask us to pay attention, so we can grow into more of who we are. […]
There’s a fog settling down on the hills outside. I can see the traffic moving along, sighing under the weight of the approaching darkness. The general mood is hazy, compacted. Sometimes, our feelings can build up like that. They come swirling around the corner, and soon, our internal landscape seems saturated with them.