Life can be messy...ok, my life can be messy

Christmas week, and God's gift to me: embodying healthy anger

Me holding a can of Sovereignty Beer at a dance class that was really a Bitcoin Meetup with some salsa lessons. Super fun night with interesting, inspiring people talking about their take on the world.

*There is a quote below that is not included in the audio. I read it after completing this article and found it relevant, so I added it after the fact.

It was Thursday last week, when my post came out and I saw people were enjoying it, that I got a little worried. I had written about communication skills, something I have studied a lot and had just successfully practiced with my roommates here. At least, I thought it was successful. Technically, at that moment it was…

It is just that on Thursday morning, everything fell apart. And I blamed myself for it. It hurt that I had just written about heart centered communication and then had a traumatizing experience soon after.

And, like I repeat in these posts frequently (thanks Sean Stephenson for these last words that echo in my soul now) “This is happening for me, not to me.”

I believe that.

I worried about what I would write this week when I was in the middle of it all. I thought I had nothing helpful to say. But here it is only Monday and I have my feet up, a juice from the new three day cleanse I am starting next to me on a side table, dust from the workers at the pool down below is wafting through my open window, and I am both amused and happy.

Thank you God.

And I mean it. I don’t mean that sarcastically. When tough times come, it can seem like they won’t end. Things can touch young parts of oneself in need of healing, or care and when those places get activated. Well…I will tell you about what happened to me.

First off, as you probably know, I am a bit proactive about personal transformation. So, I believe all this is partly due to my own choice to open the door to things (not slam it shut which you will hear about in a minute).

It has been a long time since I have hired anyone one on one to explore and open places in myself ready for some healing. Of course, there are my weekly sessions with my practice partner, Sandra. And Sandra and I do a lot, so I don’t feel I have been slacking off.

But I decided to schedule an on-line personal constellation for a one on one session with a facilitator after attending a free group class she offered. At the end of the class, I volunteered to discuss what I experienced with the little objects she had us set up to represent different energies in ourselves, our lives, and our families and her responses left me feeling intrigued and interested in understanding more.

It wasn’t a small decision as this required a decent financial commitment on my part which speaks to how much it called to me.

We scheduled our call for Thursday at 11am. That is usually a day I feel quite free. This blog is complete and I schedule it for you to receive in the morning. It was early when I woke up to see the sunrise and then wandered into the kitchen to make my cup of cacao. I had spoken to the young men here prior to this about cleaning up their dishes and respecting my things, and then written to you about how well it all went. Heart to heart communication. I do believe we achieved that.

The problem is, it wasn’t enough.

Now I want to say that my sense at this point, is that I am dealing with some addiction energy in this situation. It really hit home when I saw that they had gotten into my cacao. My SACRED cacao. Torn open a bag I use to make my tea and additionally taken a spoon to a jar of similar chocolate I have, with my name on the lid in big black letters and then left the dirty spoon with chocolate clinging tenaciously to it in the sink. My new organic butter seemed to have disappeared from the fridge as well.

Looking back, I believe this is when the constellation session I had booked for 11 am actually started for me. My experience is that I live in an energy field and everything is connected. I scheduled that call to potentially transform some energy in my system and so I imagine God figured it was good to bring it all up to the surface…you know, so I could access it more easily. (“Thank you God.” And yes, there is a tiny bit of sarcasm in those words. It didn’t happen gently, but I can own my part in it all.)

Our childhood traumas often create feelings of deep vulnerability in a particular area of life. To cope, we learn to block out those uncomfortable feelings. However, blocking them out makes it impossible to heal or transform them, so we continue to shut them out of our awareness, because that is all we know. Since we have never learned to acknowledge and experience our discomfort, we tend to revert to a fixed, defensive script based on a past scenario—we get “triggered” and begin to react blindly. In doing so, we may simply be creating a homeopathic magnet that repeatedly draws the same situations into our life until we really begin to see, feel, and heal them. It seems that the universe will continue to provide the curriculum necessary for the evolution of the species. What we resist persists.

—p. 71, Take Off Your Glasses And See, Jacob Liberman OD

As I saw what they had done, I felt sad, disappointed, slightly ashamed (I thought the great communication with them had worked and I had even WRITTEN about it and now this?), and then angry.

I don’t usually get angry. Or not outwardly. I will feel tension in my jaw. Since I have been told many times that feeling one’s anger can be healthy, I try to find it and make friends with it, often unsuccessfully. I search for it in the dusty crevices I tucked it in as a child when I learned it didn’t serve me. The repercussions for it were unpleasant and often led to isolation. But this time it wasn’t hiding.

I gazed at more than just the usual mess the young men had been leaving for weeks. This time, I could feel the addiction energy around it all. The disorganization. I felt the focus on self and one’s own desires and needs. The pain and quest to fill it with substances, sex, food, and money. The lack of respect for others, which in this case, was me. All of it was permeating that kitchen along with my own past experience with someone of a similar age going through similar things. I learned the hard way that I couldn’t live with that someone when they were in that energy. Now I was feeling it again.

So I was angry. “Where were they?” I wondered. I was going to give those boys a piece of my mind. Because now, certainly, these young men were simply boys to me. Boys who didn’t respect the sanctity of my things or the beautiful house where I have been living.

The house was another big part of the problem for me as everything feels alive to me in various ways, which includes this beautiful mansion I feel filled with Magdalene energy, now spewed with boxer shorts on the railings, plastic bags on the floor from Uber Eats, and general disarray. I have a tendency as well to be tidy so all of it in that moment, especially the remnants of my chocolate on the spoon in the sink, was simply too much.

I knew the communication route had not solved the issue as I imagined it had. “So why not?” I asked myself. “Why not let myself be angry and do something with what I was feeling?” I was not a kid anymore and they were not respecting me.

I looked around like a hunter with a gun targeting a deer, and didn’t see them anywhere, so I had no place to fire the energy. I fumed as I began to make my heart opening cacao morning drink. (I know, it is a bit funny looking back now).

Then I heard voices. Kind of sleepy voices near the bedroom door of one of them. Ahhh…success, the deer were moving.

Anger is healthy right?

Well, I was going to give them a piece of my mind. I stomped my way over and started talking without saying good morning. I am not exactly sure what came out. This version of anger was not healthy after all, but I had to learn that later. We will get to that.

The cannon ball I shot at them had words in it regarding them behaving like addicts, and at some point I called them “boys” which I later learned is a big no-no when it comes to immature grown men, while I told them again to stop using my things.

They trailed after me into the kitchen, while I pointed accusingly at the open cabinet with my cacao bag and the dirty spoon in the sink. The one with swollen eyes which spoke to his activities the past evening when he was likely digging through my pantry, leaned forward with his arms on the counter which he gazed down at dejectedly. The other, with a huge devil tattoo on his solar plexus and a new black tattoo on his hand that said “bad boy” in graffiti looking letters, plopped himself in a chair and eyed me with irritation.

The anger didn’t feel good to me. It never really had which is probably why I had a tendency to stuff it in the cracks. But I didn’t see another option and I had tried communication techniques. The boundary issues I was having with them were starting to feel more like personal assault and I was having none of it.

Large Tattoo-man took an issue with my calling them “boys.”

“Terra, I have only shown you my good side up to this point. But you don’t know I have a dark side,” he said in a deep voice as he gave me a black stare. (Really, devil tattoo man?).

“And I take issue with you calling us boys, Terra. Terra….you don’t want to get on the bad side of me.” His tone was highly threatening.

That was followed with a bucketful of gaslighting, which I can recognize at this point in my life like a truffle hunting pig. Except the truffles in this case are stinky.

The Gaslighting started like this: It seems the same thing had happened to them (we were the only three people staying there). It seems that this is just how it is in shared living situations. It seems a gremlin (clearly not me…he didn’t try to say it was me, with eggs in my own pantry) had stolen some of their eggs. He pointed out that people come and go from the unlocked house all the time (they are either employees or a lot of random women the two of them find on Tinder for one night flings he explained to me a few days earlier is biologically healthy). Then he warned me again that I made a big mistake referring to them as “boys.”

It was abundantly clear, as his friend with the swollen eyes muttered, “no, no, no…” as he was speaking, that I was being physically threatened.

That sent me immediately into a young place, emotionally. I am fairly adept at tracking my emotional age, having practiced it for years now in various groups, and I felt about the age of three. I began to shake inside. Adult-me was observing that my attempt to try anger as a strategy was going rather poorly, so I left the room quietly and went up to my room.

I called the man who had rented the house to me and told him what had happened and that I couldn’t stay.

Then I got my wallet, attempted to lock my door (no luck, I had never locked it before and the key did not seem to be working) and called an Uber to have breakfast at my favorite restaurant owned by Dr. Luis, where I told myself again that I was not in my right mind when I wrote that post last week on communication strategies.

While I was getting ready to leave, my landlord texted and insisted on meeting me at the restaurant, which felt kind. Which led me to start sobbing.

The uber driver, surprisingly calm, handed me some napkins and dropped me at the restaurant with a friendly and compassionate, “Buenos Dias!”

I realized there was no hiding my state, so I walked in and found a corner table surrounded by plants and tried to pull myself together. But I kept crying. The guy had frightened me badly.

Soon after, the landlord showed up and gave me a hug. He told me the young men needed to leave and that he would need a few days to handle things. Then he suggested I come stay in an extra bedroom at the condo he shared with his girlfriend.

It was now around 9:30 am and I had that constellation meeting coming up. We agreed I would return to the house, pack my things and finish the meeting. Then he would come get me.

I felt ok about that. Construction workers redoing the pool would be at the house by then and I planned to stay in my room. I arrived back about twenty minutes before the call. Still feeling shaky, I fumbled with the door knob a bit and tried to lock it from the inside. It wasn’t working, so I gave up.

I figured it might be nice to have a little table to put my computer on and I had left one nearby on the balcony, so I stepped out to get it.

At that moment, a gust of wind blew through the room and the bedroom door slammed shut behind me. This time it locked. The key, my computer, wallet and phone, were barricaded in the room, safe from anyone, and inaccessible to me. I stood with the little table staring at that door and wondered what I was going to do now?

Suffice it to say that for the next fifteen minutes, I ran all over the house and found some workers who tried my kitchen knives and then various screwdrivers to pry open the door. The owner of the house who I had never met before was there as well to check on how the work on the pool was going and he jumped in to help me. A few minutes after 11 am they succeeded and I rushed into my room, fired up my computer and opened Zoom.

“Waiting for the host to start the meeting,” were the words that greeted me.

Really? I was five minutes late.

So I took a few slow breaths and waited. And waited. After about fifteen minutes, I remembered I had a solstice meditation I had been thinking of listening to, so I put on my headphones, and opened the email on my phone and dove in.

It was from Findhorn, a place I have been, and included soothing words and imagery. I found myself slowing down and reorienting to the reemergence of the light, of which they were speaking. My state began to shift. It felt like just what I needed.

Then the realization hit me that my eyes had been closed for a long time, and maybe I should check my computer screen? I opened them just a crack to make sure she really had not shown up for our call and saw her eyes staring back at me.

My adrenaline kicked right back in like I just spied an unexpected tiger. I realized I had headphones plugged into my computer, different from the ones I had been using on my phone, and couldn’t hear the little beep announcing her arrival. I nervously asked if she had been waiting long, even though she was the one who was quite late and not me. (My old codependent coping strategy around worrying about other people in an irrational way took a gasp of air to prove it is still alive and kicking even though generally, it has grown a bit weak). She apologized back and then we got going.

Now let’s get to the gist of things. The part that you might actually find useful as long as this has not caused you to lose trust in me after my very different post from last week.

I do believe it is true that that constellation started first thing that morning and that everything that happened was part of it, including her getting the time wrong by half an hour and an angel in the form of the wind, slamming my bedroom door shut in my face and locking me out. The young men were part of it as well and facilitated my little experiment with expressing my anger. I told her about the happenings of the morning.

Then she and I began to use various objects to represent me, my immediate family, and other energies.

I chose random objects to choose from to represent things for my on-line constellation meeting. Some of these objects represent me, family members, support, anger, and energetic dynamics between people. This is the set up at the end. It looks strange, but each of these objects represents a dynamic and the photo is quite useful to me to see a healthier relationship with all those things which emerged at the end. I find various forms of constellation work quite useful and fascinating.

The part I think is useful for this post, is that she had me use an object to represent the anger I feel in my family, now and as a child. I chose a black necklace she said reminded her of a tarantula. I could feel the energy of it and I realized that that was the same kind of energy I used earlier in the morning with the two young men. No wonder it didn’t feel good.

Then she suggested I choose another object to represent my own healthy anger. I chose (without thinking) a small bottle of some natural substance that remineralizes teeth. (This is getting funny as I am sure, at that point, my energy field did need some remineralizing).

She had me hold the little bottle that symbolized the energy that would serve me and it felt so very different from the tarantula energy. It was a different frequency and felt unfamiliar to me.

After about a three hour call (she gave me 30 minutes for free since she was late), she suggested I practice using those two objects to feel the difference between the two kinds of anger energy.

In the constellation at the beginning I was represented by the ring (the object for me changed at the end, so you will not see the ring in the earlier photo above). This photo shows the ring (me) embodying healthy anger. The other object is a different frequency of anger that I experienced in my family.

Soon after, I found my way to the condo (as my landlord had appeared to take me and I was deep in the middle of what looked like a floor covered in a child’s playthings and didn’t open my door or respond to texts while it was all going on). An Uber delivered me to a tall building. The elevator swished up to the 8th floor and let me off directly into their living space. There was a security code I needed in order for it to open the doors for me which made sense as who would want people appearing by mistake in their living room? What struck me was that he was right, his place was nice.

Like the Magdalene Mansion, it had a pretty view of the city from a large outdoor patio.

Over my few days there, I played with the two objects and felt the different frequencies.

The healthy anger didn’t feel at all like anger the way I imagined it to be. As I sat holding it, I closed my eyes and wondered…how would it respond to the situation I just experienced?

And I could feel the energy inside my body. I felt calm, and strong. I, while holding the little bottle in my hand, replayed walking into the kitchen that morning. And my healthy anger was not ok with it. It knew what to do. I had already communicated with them and it wasn’t working. There was addiction at play. It was clear that I was no longer willing to stay in that energy. Healthy anger called my landlord and told him…not in a “it’s them or me” threatening energy (which is the only way I could feel prior to the constellation)…that I could not stay with the young men in the house. Should I make plans to leave?

Healthy anger did not put me in a dangerous situation. It took care of me. It didn’t judge the young men. In fact, as I sat with my eyes closed replaying things, I saw the light I knew was their soul, burning inside each of them and I knew it was simple: They were not ready. They were not ready to change. They were on their own journey.

I wasn’t going to speed it up with better Non-violent communication strategies. I didn’t need to blame myself for things. I had picked up the only frequency of anger at the time that I knew: the messy kind I learned in my family.

I don’t say this to fault them for their response. It doesn’t feel good to be targeted by that energy. And it doesn’t make their response ok. It is just that like me, they are working at their own level and capacity, based on the references they have learned on how to handle situations from their own past experiences and examples of how to be.

Now, finally, I have a new reference, a new frequency, which I can feel and practice embodying. And I will. When I sit in the morning and feel my body fill with the energy of phrases I like to say such as: “The process of writing the book is fun for me,” or “I am worthy of care,” I will also take time to hold that little bottle that represents healthy anger (even just in my imagination) and I will feel the energy of it so my body can learn to embody and play it like a new note that floats into a song from a symphony. It is a beautiful thing.

Picking up the tarantula anger and trying to “just allow it” “express it” “feel it more” and “give it a voice” was not the best strategy no matter how many wise people had told me those things.

The frequency of things matters a lot.

When I feel the expression of my healthy anger, I don’t feel what I call “angry”. I feel centered. I feel clear. I feel like I am able to assess a situation and feel what I need. Then I can say it, without excuses or threats. Very simply.

A lot more has happened around all of this and this seems the most important to share as it ties into what I wrote last week. The guilty part of me says I may be making a confession to you regarding my “mess up” around it all. There is also the childhood part of me that makes any bad situation my fault so I will feel more in control in the midst of uncertainty.

I know those parts.

But I am honestly glad for the whole experience. I feel what I have gone through is a little like something I tried as a child. People told me never to touch the metal in a plug when it was part way in a socket. So at some point in elementary school, I tiptoed in when no one was looking and tried it out.

I never touched it again.

And the cool thing about that is that I was able to demonstrate to my own children that it hurt to do that. They were only two or three and they understood by then that some things were painful…like hot pans on the stove or sharp knives. When they saw me demonstrate that it hurt to stick things in those sockets, or to touch the metal of plugs in them, they never tried the same experiment. Words are one thing, but sharing the energy of an experience with people you care about is another.

So, ultimately, that is what I am attempting to do with you this week. To show you that anger has frequencies. Some are very messy and disorganized. They lash out and blame people. Healthy anger doesn’t feel like that. It feels like power, clarity, and sovereignty. Honestly, I believe it is a form of powerful care that is quite new to me.

I hope with all this, perhaps you may choose to do something similar? Pick a couple random things to represent healthy and unhealthy anger and hold them one at a time to see what they feel like.

Maybe replay a scene in your own life and see how healthy anger would speak or what it would do. It could be a different scene from mine. Maybe one where you didn’t speak, but stuffed your feelings. It doesn’t matter. I just want you to know that there is another option and I, like anyone learning something new, am practicing embodying it and obviously when it comes to my life at least, the process can be messy.

Yesterday was Christmas for you and I did not write from a Christmas theme. Or perhaps I did…as one thing about Jesus always stumped me. Did he get angry as I have been told, when he threw the money changers out of the temple? And if he did, how did he do it in a healthy way? How could he do that and also say, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do?”

I have wondered that at the edges of my thoughts frequently.

Now I like to imagine the anger he embodied was healthy, however it was described by other people. And that would feel like clarity, care, and respect, for everybody.

So I really feel this has all been a great gift and learning opportunity.

I hope your Christmas was peaceful and if it was hard or messy in some way, that you found a hidden gem of something in the experience, perhaps one you are still unpacking. I am thinking of you now, and wishing you well.

Until next week…

Janusz came from Poland to El Salvador and created Sovereignty Beer “Don’t Tread On My Beer” (or eat my chocolate) Rebel Brew, a lager from Squirrel Eye Brewing Company in San Benito, San Salvador. I rarely drink alcohol and I enjoyed one of these and saved the can.

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