Greetings,
We are flowing with anger today, acknowledging how much of it each of us has accumulated, contained and held on to. We get curious about the word itself and its perceived, yet deceiving, familiarity. When we sense into it, anger reveals itself through quite different sensations, locations in the body, expressions and forms.
We explore how anger builds and moves, gets contained, and expressed. We also share stories we carry about anger: what we learned an angry woman becomes, whose anger was allowed in our families, and how culture, gender and personal history shape our relationship with it.
We’d love for you to join us!
Some things that have been said:
Irina:
Building up the heat
It gets developed, evolving inside of me as the situation that triggers this evolves outside of me. It’s building up, it’s building up, it’s building up because the situation, the context, keeps triggering, keeps hitting the water.
If it’s just one impulse, then okay, it’s just an impulse and it doesn’t get any evolution. But that keeps adding, keeps adding, keeps adding. So in the end, the water keeps boiling, keeps boiling, keeps heating. And in the end, exploding.
From Parvati to Kali
It’s very much to the point of the angry woman. It’s about the pliable, very loyal woman who takes offense because she has not been recognized, or her husband has not been recognized, or her father. There are different versions.
When she feels this lack of recognition, lack of respect, that she has been deprived of her dignity, she becomes this uncontrollable force, a destroying force that destroys everything.
Born to be an ideal
This is conditioning that’s not even behavioral. It’s energetical. I was born to be an ideal. So there are certain things that were simply not available to me energetically because they don’t resonate.
I know that deep down I have this part that has a very strong connection to aggression, to anger, to all this. They’re too deep down. This is not what gets to the surface naturally.
Yulya
Volcano eruption
For me it’s like a volcano eruption, like an earthquake. It’s not about words itself. My whole body engages, wants to engage in a fight, be really loud and scream. So I would not be able to choose exact words or accurate words at all.
Unfortunately, I’ve done that in my life. And for me, a lot of energy that I would say is anger energy is in my hands. There is this tension in my hands, it’s as if it exists there.
Making oneself heard
What I’ve been really struggling with is just to be loud. Now it’s actually raising my voice, raising the intonation. As soon as you need to go up, you just brace and everything contracts.
To me, there must be something there about that history where raising the voice is associated with something like anger. How do other people perceive it? If this is how I perceive it, then how do the others?
Expressing anger
I think there is nothing like practice in inhabiting that energy and letting it have you back, or letting yourself have the energy back.
I had those experiences when I was encouraged in expressions of what’s come up as anger. I also had experience of yelling or just really expressing physical aggression readiness. I wasn’t fighting with anyone. I just went into full expression of what it is: what do my fists do and hands, do I want to yell?
Polina
One word - different experiences
Anger doesn’t quite capture the nuance of what I feel when I feel that energy. When I had to think about the Russian translation, I was also having a hard time because I started seeing all these variations in the different words in Russian that actually have a moral or some kind of other connotation to it.
I was wondering how that affects us when we relate to this energy. Are we naming the same experience? Are we having the same experience? Or what are we talking about?
Angry woman
I want to answer for myself the question of what did I learn an angry woman becomes. And my answer to that is absolutely and positively punished, shunned, disrespected, abandoned. The opposite of anything that would give me personally any cause or signal that this is an energy that is normal, part of the equation, and can and should be integrated and be part of life.
Being with anger
I didn’t quite see the containment pathway and how it is actually built up like a fortress internally. And it’s not necessarily a hot energy. Yes, it’s hot when it’s already bursting out of me, but it’s actually quite a cooling down in order to contain it.
I’m really curious and interested in dismantling in a loving, caring way, in a way that is healthy and easy for my system not to get scared, as potentially we’re taking down one of the main mechanisms of protection.
In Flow,
Irina, Polina and Yulia
We cherish your presence, and joining us in flowing.
These conversations are open explorations, that become richer with time and participation of others. We’d love to hear if anything touched you.
📍🕐Chapters
00:00 — Intro
01:17 — Welcome: What Does Anger Know?
02:59 — What Anger Brings Up in the Body
08:25 — The Language of Anger: Hidden Meanings
16:05 — Are We Naming the Same Experience?
23:26 — Anger Inside and Out
30:55 — Anger in the Fists
35:20 — Evolution of Anger: Raising the Voice
45:10 — What Does an Angry Woman Become?
50:24 — The Costs of Anger
55:52 — Unlearning Containment
01:04:46 — The Good Girl Conditioning
01:11:40 — The Punishment of an Angry Woman
01:15:28 — Family Patterns and Gendered Anger
01:28:44 — Closing Reflections
01:36:19 — Outro
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💌 Resources used under Creative Commons license:
Music “Echolocation” by airtone, source: CcMixter
