There are certain emotions that I find difficult to directly access, and I’m still coming to plausible stories for their structure, and reliable ways of experiencing them.
A pattern I’ve begun tracking is that there are certain emotions that I can experience after physical fatigue, that the impact of fatigue loosens specific kinds of internal holding, and that this holding is so default to my experience that it’s practically invisible to me. So far the most reliable route to reaching this fatigue-ease threshold has been Annelle’s Corepower Yoga classes (I highly recommend!). In her classes she consistently has engaging flows that push me to my physical limits, which is immediately followed by a shavasana where she sings to class. The combination has consistently made a powerful impact on me, first putting me into a deep flow state (the last three classes I didn’t even think of the time), then pushing me to my physical limits, and finally the singing which allows me to surrender into ease and drop invisible layers I’m holding. Reliably I end the class crying, I suspect because the end state of ease approaches bliss, and there’s incredibly relief in no longer needing to hold so much.
Today a much deeper and more powerful version of this occurred. I typically go to C2 and Sculpt at Corepower, C2 is more yoga-inspired, while Sculpt has more HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) aspects which include weights, core and cardio; reliably Sculpt is more strenuous for me. Today was my first Sculpt is several months and I started with a weight which I thought would be too much for me — 15, 12 and 8 lbs. For whatever reason I felt more empowered today and the flow was both particularly smooth and holistic, it tested me along many dimensions — my strength, mobility, endurance, etc. I pushed myself particularly hard, which meant I felt even more fatigued than normal by the end.
When the shavasana singing began, I asked myself a simple question: yesterday in my conversation with Santi and Utsav was I accessing all my anger when they asked me to? I thought I had, I thought it had cooled into sadness. But in a split second, I pictured myself as a little boy telling my father to get away from my mother. In that moment I felt a boiling rage, it felt like a son ignited in my chest, and all the external fatigue was nothing, it felt like 1% of my total energy. I felt like a nuclear bomb, I would have annihilated him, melting him with the raw fire of my pain and anger. A sob nearly escaped, but I held it in; in spite of the intensity of the moment I noticed another layer of my holding: I was compulsively tracking the class and hiding myself.
At the end of Annelle’s classes, she’s particularly encouraging of students staying as long as they want in shavasana, provided there’s no following class. It occurred to me: why don’t I just follow the thread of this emotion and see how far it goes? lets play. I eased back into flow, and followed the emotion. I don’t remember the exact order of insights, but here’s a rhyme of what happened. I felt myself tracking the class as they cleaned up and left, and I was compulsively limiting just how much I cried so I wouldn’t be noticed. And at the same time, I kept following the thread.
So I didn’t show Santi and Utsav my rage, I didn’t even know it was there — why did I withhold it? Perhaps I sublimated my anger into sadness to protect Santi and Utsav from it. As a kid I remember feeling like sadness was the most perfect emotion, because it contained within it all the summer of joy and fulfillment with the winter of loss and devotional remembrance. Maybe an unstated reason for this attachment to sadness was that it allowed me to escape my own anger? This belief did correspond to me dropping my anger, perhaps its the first layer of a cope against my anger. But why hide it?
Perhaps it was for the same reason I was tracking the class? Why was I hiding? I’m hiding because I expect to be hurt in my vulnerability. In this moment I thought about all the times I had been betrayed. My father terrorizing me from literally my earliest memories; my speech problems which would trigger dad and provide him an excuse to lash out at me at my most vulnerable; mum judging and shaming me for my anger, implicitly communicating it was unacceptable to have, I was unacceptable, despite being the natural response to so much transgression and hurt; my sister, my best friend and literally the only person who understood me, suddenly disappearing and leaving me to face it all alone; my classmates in Japan throwing stones at me, and being bullied and antagonized for my speech problems; family members blaming me for my father’s alienation. I was so fucking alone. I held in a few more stifled sobs.
And yet, I never gave up on them. Another flashback came to me — one of my early memories (around when I was 3 or 4), Anna was being bullied at school in Japan. Despite being younger and smaller, I defiantly told her “Anna, tell me who they are, I’ll beat them up”. I was so young, and I’ve always wondered where that instinct to protect her came from. It suddenly came to me, the root of my caretaking of others comes from being so utterly transgressed myself, and even as a 3 year old, I didn’t care how old or big her bullies were, nobody was going to mess with my sister. By now the class had cleared out, and I started freely sobbing.
And despite the betrayal, I had never given up on any of them. I’m still the only one talking to dad, trying to offer him support, I never want him to be as alone as I felt. I see myself in him, to abandon him is to abandon me, and I can’t abandon that little kid. Dad’s still that little kid too. I felt so responsible to keep him from Anna’s wedding, to not ruin such an important day for her, after it all went off without a hitch I was sick for two weeks straight. Mum, I’ve been with her every step of the way, being her trusted person even if I couldn’t trust her to me hold me in mine. I’d read her books to connect with her, always wanting to connect with her, and so rarely met on my terms. I have so much care for them all, and so much hurt.
I hide because, despite all my earnest care, I know I’ll be betrayed, betrayed by the people I love the most, and everyone else too. Both in the deep relational ways, and in the shallow group ways. I believe it because it’s been my lived experience. I know from speech problems, and Japan, and moving schools, that the mob wants a victim. The mob wants someone vulnerable to sacrifice to their fear — if someone else is being attacked, everyone knows they’re safe, at least in that moment. I’d been there. I’d seen Nick destroyed by it.
The insights kept rolling in, it felt like I was in a kind of embodied flow state where my narratives mapped to full emotional expression far more clearly than usual, I felt like I was kind of conduit of experience, far more layered and rich. At each point somehow I kept asking the right questions and connections, and they would trigger another realization, and with it another layer of awareness and pain, and another round of increasingly unrestrained sobbing.
I asked myself: if this anger had been accessible yesterday, what would it have looked like? Magma rage. I savagely beat Utsav and strangled him until I saw in his eyes, I saw in his soul: “I will never transgress her again”. I compulsively imagined how the group would perceive that: from the outside I’d be the perpetrator, they wouldn’t have the context, they wouldn’t know the continued pattern of transgression this man has. And yet, I could also be wrong. What gives me the right to wield righteous anger? I could be the perpetrator, just like Dad was.
It felt like my anger was a deadly tool, a deadly lineage. I have my father’s rage, and I hold his shame. Without knowing why, I thought of Aragon from Lord of Rings, heir to a lineage of shame, reclaiming and redeeming his line. My rage was my Andúril, Aragon reforged his sword when he owned his shame and wielded it to protect and lead. In a moment of psychedelic imaginary, I imagined my rage as blinding white light, my sword. This is an era of dragons, it’s an era of monsters and knights, and my rage is the razor edge between the two. I would never ask for this life, I would never ask to walk that edge, but it is my life, and I have no other choice but to live it. And there’s a need for it.
But how can I walk that edge? What determines whether it’s used for good or for harm? What is my compass? My rage isn’t at any individual, it’s not at Dad or Utsav, it’s at the chain of suffering within myself, within them, that sours and warps our best nature. That’s where my rage goes, it exists in direct proportion to what I protect, to all that I earnestly love of myself, and of them. Dad-in-essence and Utsav-in-essence have my infinite love and compassion, the chain of suffering that creates our patterns is where I put my magma rage. That distinction is my compass.
I asked myself, at Sleepawake V2 Retreat in the fall, how will this play out? How will my anger reveal itself? I imagined my rage breezing through all the facilitators, sweeping them away like leaves in the wind, leaving only Jeff. I imagined facing Jeff, pressing hand to hand and applying the nuclear anger I had. In that moment my whole body convulsed and I felt like a rod of pure energy. In the imagery when I just began to apply this strength to Jeff he was shot back twenty feet, but unscathed and safe. I came out of the experience, I was trembling, it felt like I had just been electrocuted. That, that, is your anger. It felt like we were being introduced.
I zoomed out, looking at the threads of my story, and it felt like it melted into my lived experience; I was stepping into a mythopoetic life, and in that life, it was time to take up my sword. It occurred to me that in two weeks I’d be going to the Mankind Project’s retreat, and my explicit intention was to meet my anger. That feels like the right container to meet it, to step into my anger surrounded by brothers who can hold it, guide it, and help me step into my power, and transmute my lineage of shame. I snapped out of the experience, I knew it was over, time to rejoin the world, feeling lighter and clearer.