With the full moon in Aries approaching this evening, there have been several cautions that anger is not our best resource to work with the explosive energies and revelations that surround us. I thought I'd share some thoughts on the first reiki principle:
Just For Today, I Will Not be Angry
In approaching
this principle, it is important to begin with the understanding that we are
equipped with emotions for a reason.
Emotion = E-motion, the movement of energy in the body. The expression of grief creates continuity
and flow where there had been compartmentalization. Joy opens our heart and expands our awareness beyond the
boundaries of self interest.
Depression can indicate a need for the stillness of the element of
earth.
Anger clears space
of unwanted intrusions. If you are
on a crowded subway and someone stabs your foot with their umbrella, you have a
flash of appropriate anger and do what you need to do to protect yourself. It is a momentary fire that flares up
in response to danger. If we are
fully present in the moment, we respond skillfully and our anger dissipates
when the danger has passed.
Unfortunately,
most of us carry trauma that has not fully resolved. A perceived threat in the moment wakes the experience of old
dangers that we unconsciously relive and project onto our current
experience. So that umbrella on
your big toe triggers a memory of all the ways you have ever had your
boundaries impinged upon, causing you to respond to this innocent intrusion on
your space as though your life were being threatened. Disproportionate rage and/or overwhelm might result, leaving
you furious at something that hasn’t actually happened, or dissociated and
resentful at a feeling of powerlessness.
Reiki helps us to
release old trauma and come back to the grounded experience of ourselves in the
present. Exercising the principle,
“Just for today, I will not be angry,” disciplines the mind to harmonize with
that process rather than hinder it, training it to respond to what is happening
right now and not joust with the phantoms of our past hurts.
There is a
difference between the emotion of anger and the state of being angry, which is
a reflexive and habituated response to unresolved fear. By embracing this first principle of
reiki, we take a breath and ask ourselves:
¨ Am I in immediate danger?
¨ Am I making assumptions that may not be
true about someone else’s motivations?
¨ Am I behaving in a way that exacerbates or
perpetuates the situation?
¨ Am I unable to accept an apology?
¨ Is there another way I could respond that
might be more productive of good?
¨ Is there something I can let go of that
could make this situation better?
Being angry is an
expression of powerlessness, a failure of imagination that limits our
perception of the choices available to us. It is a delusional state that keeps us fighting battles in a
war that exists only in our minds, funneling resources, that could be better
spent, into our own military industrial complex. Because the battles are not
real, they can never be won.
Being angry
creates a state of constant inflammation in the body, a system always on high
alert that degrades our wellness and makes it impossible for our awareness to
rest comfortably in our felt sense.
The attention is always directed outward, and we hold external forces
responsible for our well being.
If we are not
feeling compassion, we are not connected to the truth of what we are. We might feel as though we are right,
but if we aren’t feeling love, we have come unplugged.
So just for today,
just for this moment, what would it be like to choose a different
response? What would it take to
decide to ignore the initial kneejerk reaction to life and wait for another
possibility to present itself? If
the way you’ve always done things were not available to you, what other tool
could you use to resolve conflict?
Not being at war
with anything means you accept things as they are. That doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion about anything
or protect yourself. It just means
that by accepting things as they are, you are not wasting time and energy
wishing they were something they are not.
This places you firmly in the arena of life rather than in the land of
disempowered resentment; you are in real-time negotiation with the thing itself
and not your unfulfilled fantasy of what you want it to be.
Think of something
infuriating. You won’t have to
look far. Imagine that being angry
is not an option. Watch what happens
when your body steps down from the initial impulse to go to war. The narrowed vision of fear and rage
expands to take in more information, and you might observe something you’ve
never noticed before, see it from a different angle.
While being angry
perpetuates conflict and limits our efficacy, being present gives us access to
resources to create something beneficial and new. We begin with this principle, the practice of choosing
presence over fear, because it retrieves our awareness from the past and plugs
it back into the ground of the moment where we have true power to effect change.
