by Arjuna Ardagh: This is an excerpt from my book Leap Before You Look…
When you feel angry, resentful,
When you feel that some injustice has been done to you,
Stop and breathe deeply into the lower part of the belly.
Feel the energy there.
Feel the power.
Fill your lower belly with breath,
And let go of the story completely.
Every image, every explanation for why you feel as you do,
Let it all go. Let it be washed from you.
Stay with the raw energy in your belly.
You can place your hand there to help focus your attention.
Continue to bring the breath to this lower part of the belly,
And let it build and increase.
Build it up, more and more,
And let it explode in you.
If you need to make noise, growl like a lion.
If you are concerned with noise, scream into a cushion.
If you need to, you can beat and bite and throw the cushion.
Become pure anger itself, with no explanation, with no story.
Let it take over every part of your body.
Explode so completely that nothing is held back.
Then be still, lie down
And feel the space inside.
Anger has a bad rap. This is unfortunate, as fully entering into anger can be one of the fastest and most dynamic ways to return to an open heart and an expansive consciousness. The two feelings that have been most repressed in organized society—by religion, governments, and schoolteachers alike—are anger and sexual arousal. You cannot control a population that is either angry or horny: in either state, they become uncontrollable. Because we have been conditioned to push anger down into the cells of the body, we have become terrified of our own anger, and hence the anger of the rest of the world at the same time. As a result, we are afraid that if we allow ourselves to feel anger, even for a moment, that we might explode and become a serious danger to ourselves and to those close to us. We learn to keep anger behind a locked door by tightening our jaw muscles, constricting our diaphragm and our belly. With everything locked up in this way, not only do we prevent ourselves from feeling our anger, but we close off our love as well. Tragically, we cut ourselves off from the natural state of relaxed and open awareness.
The key to transforming anger from an obstacle to a blessing is letting go of the story of why we think we are angry. It is the conviction of this explanation in the mind that gives us justification for revenge, for violence, for throwing our anger out onto another. And truly, we can never really know its origin. We may come up with a million possible reasons why, but it is ultimately impossible to be sure of the source. You will never know, and you do not need to know.
If you can enter anger without any story, without any need to understand why, it will liberate you completely. Be generous with it, enjoy it fully, as much as you might enjoy having sex. You may feel ridiculous, to become angry without any reason or words—it’s best to do this practice in private. Breathe fully, all the way down into the lower part of the belly. It can become a kind of cosmic orgasm. Five minutes of jumping into anger, alone, without any restraint, will deliver you into ecstatic release, into Oneness with all that is alive.
