When We Give Up Our Anger We Give Up Our Healing

In a dream I run at night to the forest. It was dark and scary. I reached a clearing without many trees around. To my right a small stone wall to the height of my knee.

I was afraid of the wolves in the forest. As I run by the stone wall suddenly a fury animal rolled down from it and landed on the leaves covered ground. I was afraid the wolf found me. But I looked closer and saw it was a beaver. Phew. I breathed again.

But then. The wolf indeed came. My dog, Muss, came to help me. She is a big black Labrador Retriever. Muss told she’ll run towards the heart of the forest to distract the wolf and buy me time to run out of the forest and so I did.

In a split of a second, as can happen only in dreams, I both saw my dog enticing the wolf to follow her and the wolf appearing in front of me with a piece of my dog’s face in her mouth. Startled I fell to the ground.

The wolf looked me in the eye and I looked into hers.

Though my dog yelled at me to run away I was mesmerised by the wolf’s eyes. I then realised I’m not afraid of her. She is indeed wild but she poses no danger to me.

I knew that I’m going to take out of her mouth the turn piece of my dog’s face and take my dog immediately to the vet - because you can’t live in the world without a face.

Deeply saddened by the violence in the US I went to sleep with a question : if we are beings of love how come we judge so much? We judge ourselves and others while tearing the connective tissues to bring us together.

We can run away from our wild nature but it’ll will catch us for sure. In its mouth it’ll have a piece of our domesticated self asking us if we’re willing to sacrifice our place in the world for our fears.

We can hide from our anger, from the rage but it’ll always find a way to make an appearance right in front of us and give us a choice:

Are we going to stay fearful of the dense forest of our life, the intense feelings of our heart, or are we going to look it in the eye and help us uncover a bigger story of the truth of life?

The wild is chasing us not because it wants to harm us but because it has a massage to deliver.

“I saw well why the gods

do not speak to us openly,

nor let us answer.

Till that word can be dug out of us,

why should they hear

the babble that we think we mean?

How can they meet us face to face

till we have faces” wrote C. S. Lewis in his book Till We Have Faces.

There’s a lot of anger in our world. And it’s a healthy one!

We mustn’t be afraid of expressing it. It’s the repression that is more dangerous. It’s the running away and hiding that make our feelings explosive.

At the heart of anger there’s a truth that wants to be heard by you, by me, by our psyche, by our gods.

Anger is not violent by nature.

It’s the bottling up

that makes its coming out

volcanic so it can defy our attempts

to control the wild nature that speaks to us.

Anger is a stop sign. It calls us to stop ignore the misalignment and take the right action!

Most of the time, those who ask you to stop being angry are those who cannot deal with their own anger. They tore pieces of themselves for the sake of approval, to maintain a reputation but their face is a mask.

Our meditation is to revive and revitalise the turn aspects of ourselves, the turn elements that were left to face anger for us.

Our meditation is to create a better place to live in from the messages of our anger and our saddening judgments.

The essence of our story

and the essence of each of our feelings

are leading us back home,

where the wild self

and the tamed self

merge together

by fearless gaze at each other.