Anger by itself is a very normal expression in a human mind, however an intense/overwhelming anger that grips your being, to the point where you sense that you’ve lost control of your reaction, is a symptom of a high momentum of negativity, in this case an imbalance in dark nature. Anger can get overwhelming when your mind’s “normal anger” mixes with the past store-up of anger (emotional energy) and also syncs up with your mind’s momentum of negativity. When your mind loses its momentum, and as you release your past store-up of suppressed emotional energy, you will sense that anger does not have a grip on your being rather it’s just felt as an expression in the mind which you can follow up on, or let go of, based on the wisdom of the moment – there are times when it’s needed that you express your anger as a matter of being authentic and there are times when it’s best to let go of anger by understanding the need of the situation – this sense of inner “control”, or inner wisdom, can only be present when anger, as a movement, does not have the capacity to overwhelm, or hijack, your being.
The paradox is that you can only come to balance when you first stop feeling guilty about the imbalance, when you stop trying to suppress or fight the imbalance. The first step is always about being okay with allowing what arises without adding further negativity in terms of guilt or self-hatred. As you grow in ability to observe your mind, you will naturally be able to sense the energy of your anger more clearly, and you will also catch yourself being highly aware of your angry reactions (sometimes after the episode of outburst or in the middle of it) – instead of feeling bad about losing your stability, just bring awareness to its intensity in your mind, and feel it in your body, and don’t add any further negativity by judging yourself for your anger.
As you continue reducing your mind momentum and releasing your past store-up of negativity, through finding connection with your space of being and coming to a place of total allowing, the intensity of anger will keep reducing automatically until one day you sense that it has totally lost its grip on your being.
Don’t expect people to understand your anger
When you express your anger towards someone, or something, it’s very natural for the people in your surrounding to react negatively to you – a human mind automatically gets defensive/offensive when it senses anger from outside and it reacts in that fashion in a bid to protect itself. Anger is always sensed by a mind as a threat to its safety, that’s the primary reaction. So, you need to let go of asking people to understand your anger or to react patiently to your anger, it’s a tall task for anyone to do unless that person has a strong sense of inner balance.
A lot of people get upset that their partner, or parents, or friends, don’t “understand” them when they get angry, the truth is that it’s no-one’s responsibility to be understanding of you and it’s best if you don’t impose such a responsibility on someone, it’s too much of an expectation for anyone to carry. You have to be willing to accept the consequences of your anger, and the negative reaction that you get from your external reality, as a reflection of your inner imbalance and not blame the outside for not being understanding of you – this is how you take full responsibility for your state of being rather than place the onus on the outside to help you with it.
Also, it doesn’t make sense to keep feeling guilty about your imbalance in anger – the guilt only serves to add more fuel the negative momentum in the mind. It’s normal for guilt to arise, the mind feels “bad” since anger is judged as a negative, however you need to consciously let go of identifying with this guilt, and just let it ride out. If you get identified with the guilt, you will end up in a very low vibration such as depression or self-hatred.
You need to stop being overly “apologetic” about your anger, apologize where needed but not all the time; sometimes anger is a very valid reaction to a situation and you need to have enough self-love to realize that what you did was “fine” under the circumstances. And when you know you are on a journey towards balance, you don’t have to feel bad about an imbalanced reaction of anger on your part knowing that you are on your way towards more stability. Anger by itself is a higher vibration than depression, and it’s far more vitalizing to your body than a state of depression or self-hatred. It’s much better to express anger than to sit slumped in depression, however the journey is to reach an inner balance and not be a prisoner to any imbalances.
Handling anger from the outside
If you find yourself to be the brunt of other people’s anger on constant basis, it’s an indication of a “victim mindset” on your part. The various reasons why one ends up attracting a lot of outside anger are as below
– Holding onto patterns of self-criticism (your inner criticism is reflected as external criticism). The stronger your patterns of self-criticism that more the instances of attracting anger from outside.
– A tendency to want to please people for the sake of acceptance/approval usually through a subdued meekness or unnatural humility or servility. This tendency is seen in people who go out of their way to appear friendly, mostly out of fear or inferiority, to seek outside approval – also called the “nice guy/girl syndrome”. Such people wonder why the outside is being hostile in-spite of them trying to appear nice (it’s their inner fear that attracts the outside negativity).
– Holding on to thoughts of hatred or fear towards the outside (situation or person). Your feelings of hatred or fear will always get reciprocated in some way by the outside, fear is reciprocated by behaviors from the outside the amplify your fear, hatred is reciprocated by behaviors from the outside that amplify your hatred. Anger is a very common reaction that is attracted by people who hold strong patterns of fear/hatred within them.
When you face anger from the outside the general tendency of a fear-based mind is to get more fearful and defensive, whereas the tendency of a hate-based mind is to get more hateful and offensive – both these reactions don’t break this cycle of imbalanced reality and keep on fueling the attraction of such negative experiences. The way to attract a more aligned reality is to bring an inner change, or rather an inner balance, by first identifying whether the anger you are attracting is based on your inner fear or hatred, or both. To identify your inner negativity you need to first allow your awareness to come within, instead of sitting in blame of the outside. If you are authentic with yourself, you can easily see the patterns in you that are attracting anger from outside and after that it’s about a conscious dis-identification with these patterns – allowing them to run out of fuel by no longer buying into them when they arise.
Releasing the fuel of anger in you
Anger can be a reaction created from your inner fear or some form of hatred. Irritation, frustration, grumpiness or tantrums, are all varying expressions of anger. Fear induced anger has a slightly “defensive” quality, whereas a hate induced anger has an “offensive” quality – you can sense if a person’s anger is coming from a place of fear or hatred/disdain. A huge store-up of fear or hatred, as suppressed energy, will always result in the person getting into overwhelming episodes of anger now and then. Of course, anger is a protective mechanism in the mind in it’s bid to keep you facing the intense fear/hatred within, however as you grow in awareness you can allow yourself to face the inner fear/hatred that was fueling the anger – it’s about seeing below the anger to sense the fear, or hatred, that’s providing momentum to it. Once you bring awareness to this suppressed negativity, it can start getting released.
If you have the mindset of feeling negative about your anger, you will never allow yourself to bring awareness to the fear/hatred that lies below the surface-level reaction of anger. It’s only when you are willing to allow the energy of anger, fully, that you get to the bottom of it and thus be able to start releasing the emotional energy (usually in the form of a store-up of fear/hatred) that creates the intensity for your anger. Without releasing this past store-up of emotional energy, you can never feel spacious enough in your being to feel free of the grip of anger.
Whenever you become aware of yourself being in the grip of anger, just use it as an opportunity to release the suppressed energy within, all that you need to do is stay fully allowing of the energy of anger in you (it’s easier if you can isolate yourself for a few moments) and thus sensing the energy of fear/hatred below it. Anger is a very strong movement and hence it takes sometime before you can have enough stability to start allowing its energy without feeling overwhelmed by it – the more you practice relaxed awareness or connecting with your space of being, the more you grow in inner stability and the more you are able to release suppressed energy, that’s how a positive cycle develops.
Sen can you help me explain a little better the concept of “defending negativity” I have read it many times through your articles but am not sure i have fully understood it.
Rafael, defending negativity is an attitude that people can develop unconsciously where they start justifying the presence of negativity in their mind, personal life-situation, or global situation, by arguing for their “limitations” – this argument for limitations causes you to hinge on to a vibration of lack or fear, thus taking you off alignment with the vibration of wholeness. You can establish yourself in a vibration of wholeness when you can see a problem/negativity but are not reinforcing its presence by justifying it or identifying with it and simply stay open to allowing a solution to come through, trusting the intelligence of your life-stream – you see a problem and become open to allowing a solution instead of staying focused on the problem by justifying its presence in your life. The opposite of the attitude of defending negativity is the attitude of being open to solution, a true desire for solution/well-being rather than the limiting egoic attitude of finding identity in problems/negativity.
Hello Sen, so when anger and fear arise towards another I should allow the negativity to arise and feel its sensation in my body while ignoring and letting be any ensuing thoughts that arise defending or condemning myself and the other? I am assuming the situation arose to point me back to the inner imbalance so that I can become aware of it and release it? Is this correct? Thank you Sen.
That’s right, don’t “try” to ignore though, if thoughts of condemning/guilt happen, just let them be
my ego snuck ‘ignore’ into the sentence!!
so basically its growing and moving towards unconditional love – allowance and acceptance of life unfolding and all that arises.
Thank you so much Sen 🙂
I have been enjoying your articles. Can you or have you done one on this topic of anger, except focusing on dealing with someone else’s anger? My husband gets angry at other people and sometimes for silly reasons and I don’t understand why he lets small things bother him. How can one not be affected by this and help the other person to not get so upset about things? Thank you.
Rls, basically your being/mind perceives the emotion of “anger” present in someone outside you, as a threat to your own well-being because of the sense of violence that you feel in the emotion of anger. It’s a very natural reaction to feel fear when you sense anger in another person, and usually the mind will react to this inner fear through becoming defensive or offensive (fight or flight) towards the other person – where you try to protect yourself by becoming meek/servile to the other person (to assuage his/her anger) or you become angry/aggressive yourself combat their anger, even if their anger is not towards you. What’s needed is for you to bring a conscious awareness to this pattern within you in terms of how your mind reacts to the anger of your husband – the more aware you are, the less likely you are to “react” within to the external anger. Sense the fear arising in you in reaction to his anger, and consciously stay allowing of it without getting hooked on to it – you will see that without your identification the fear just does not grip your being. Once you’ve come to some stability in you in terms of dealing with how you react internally to your husband’s anger, you can of course guide him towards the same awareness in him – but it’s always first about finding your inner freedom become you can be an effective teacher for someone else.
That is a good tip about solving the feelings in yourself before trying to fix it in someone else. Your articles have been helpful to me, especially the ones about not letting emotions get to you, because the dwelling can become unhealthy as I have seen. I have been practicing your techniques as much as possible whenever I get a bad thought or let a sad movie affect me, and I think with practice I will get better at simply watching these things go by without having a negative effect. Thank you for the great reads and you should definitely write a book with all your knowledge!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the article! And also for the one on hatred. I am new to this journey and something that enraged me happened and I didn’t know how to handle it without going backwards. I am very grateful for your help. Thanks again!
So I need to report back on the outcome of reading about what you said about the relationship between anger and wisdom. I just came home from meeting with the person by whom I was very angered and hurt. I was able to be authentic, assertive, and compassionate. I shared with the person that though they hurt me, the experience has really awakened a lot of growth in me and shared some of the things I read. I inspired him to seek change and healing within himself. I could have created more drama and negative feelings but instead I feel really good inside and feel like I am making another person’s life better. Thank you for your guidance. 🙂
EB, imagine what the world would be like if we all learned to communicate like that! Tip of the hat to you.
Thanks Markus!
What do you do if your anger is so overwhelming, that you hardly can find any space at all and the mind just totally hijacks the situation without you having a change to do anything at all except following the pull.
My brain seems to be so addicted to anger so that i almost have no other choice except identifying out of addiction.
For example if my neighbor plays his TV to loud again, i instantly loose myself in the mind, even if i try to just accept it and what not, it just does not work, because my mind starts to go crazy and generates all kinds of thoughts, mixed up with fear and whatever.
And advice on that ?
A, the momentum of anger is clearly a big problem for you. Read Sen’s articles on reducing mind momentum – bear in mind that strong imbalance such as what you wrote will take time to change. Be patient with yourself, the process really does work.
If you need to vent your anger in moments when it seems to be your master, try punching and kicking the air in front of you. Physically it releases the tension; energetically it releases the emotion. Once calmed a bit, work on letting go of the momentum, as Sen writes.
What if someone has an angry attitude toward you? They are always thinking of it so they will get what they create. Which will be me being angry at them. What about that?
Ren, this is true in state of unconsciousness, where you are influenced by the outside and your reactions/response are not in your conscious control but are servile to the outside influences – this is reason why unconscious living has aspects of being powerless/helpless. Conscious living, on the other hand, comes from a place of finding connection with your inner freedom and power, and finding self-alignment from this place. From a place of conscious living, your attitude, behaviors, reactions and responses are not servile to anyone, and your experiences are totally relative to your awareness/alignment. A truly conscious person is in control of his/her state of being, in a state of full awareness and hence is not privy to outside influences; and since, in this state of consciousness, you have a conscious control over your state of being, you are not feeding into the pull of an outside influence, and hence it has no capacity to infiltrate your experience/reality. The very reason for moving towards a conscious inner freedom (or conscious living) is to take control of your state of being, and be free of the unconscious influences of the outside – you become the master of your domain.
Hey Sen,
I got really angry at my dad. For the past year or so i have been dealing with depressive feelings and just a sense of helplessness and frustration. I spoke to him and asked him to consider going to a special nutritionist that take care of some chemical imbalances that may be there by supplying vitamins and nutrients. He said “its not necessary, you’re fine etc. It out of the insurance.” I just flipped and said “i am not listening to you anymore, i will do my own thing… etc”
I want to feel like i actually care for him genuinely and i cannot. Up until now i have pretended. This happens everywhere. I care for someone and then i think do i really care for him/her? or love him/her? do i want to care for him/her? its weird…. I dont know who i am close to or love. I just sense frustration in me. I feel like i am turning into a bad person who is hurting other people. in this case i flipped out on my dad. hes old and i want to genuinely help him! how?
Any advice can be helpful.
Vrajesh
Hello, I recognize in myself a lot of the same behaviors that you described about the “victim mindset” and obviously this is problematic, and greatly concerns me. Do you happen to have any knowledge on what a person like myself can do to change these behaviors, or can you point me in the right direction of someone who might? My guess is that like myself, once someone has discovered that they have these inclinations, their only real hope for change is probably years of therapy. That way we can get work with an educated professional to figure out the cause of why, and learn ways of how to make serious changes. To be honest, it all sounds exhausting and extremely difficult. Could i be incorrect and maybe it’s easier than I am fearing? Sorry for going on and on….