Soul Lessons: Rage and Forgiveness

Be a Wild Woman

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All emotion, even rage, carries knowledge, insight, enlightenment and can teach us. The cycle of rage is like any other cycle; it rises, falls, dies, and is released as new energy. The sooner an injury is dealt with, the chances are best the less it spread or worsen. The same goes for rage.
Trying to remove it all without dealing with it allows bits of it to stay and fester, and eventually, like shrapnel, it will rise and surface again. By harboring rage, instead of questing for solutions to it, what caused it, what we can do with it, we seal ourselves into a room full of it for the rest of our lives. It takes a conscious practice to contain and heal it.

But we can do it.

Mastering the reclaiming of the Wild Woman, the ancient, the intuitive, the passionate means many things. It is to carry through, to take steps to make our ideas manifest, to draw closer to friends and mates who are in accord with our personal rhythms, to choose mates that nurture our creative and instinctive lives. Mastery also means to learn to deal with the rage that rises within us. We feel anxious to disperse it, for it is distressing and noxious. But repressing it will not work, and neither is it good to scald ourselves or someone else with it. It is like toxic waste, no one wants it, and there are few places to dispose of it.

There is a tale of the Crescent Moon Bear. The understructure of this tale reveals a model for dealing with, and healing from, rage.

1. By seeking a wise and calm healing force ö going to a healer

2. Taking the challenge of going into psychic territory one has never approached before ö climbing a mountain

3. recognizing the illusions ö dealing with climbing the boulders, running under the trees

4. putting oneâs old and obsessive thoughts and feelings to rest ö meeting the muen-otoke, restless spirits without relatives to bury them

5. soliciting the great compassionate self ö patiently feeding the bear and the bear returning her kindness

6. understanding the roaring side of the compassionate psyche ö recognizing that the bear, the compassionate self, is not tame. 

I understand that I must recognize this bear within me and feed it. Give into it appropriately by being patient with it.

The story shows the importance of bringing this psychological knowledge down to earth in our real lives ö coming back down off the mountain. And that learning that healing is in the process of questing and practice, not in a single idea, a magical formula, the hair or the eyelash that is retrieved. The healer advises one to go home and apply all of these principles to oneâs rage and all will be well.



I've always liked the Buddhist references in the chapter, and I have always loved Clarissa's words about sitting down with our rage for a good talk, having tea with our rage, and summoning the wise healer to be there with us.

Clarissa's words parallel the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my favorite Buddhist writers and peace activists. He also talked about processing rage in a different way. He spoke of the transformative power of rage and its immense potential as a tool for change, goodness and enlightenment, of embracing this violent motion with affection and tenderness rather than giving it free reign, and of incorporating it into one's spiritual practice. I equate Hanh's journey to enlightenment with our own quest to find our authentic nature and the wild wolf woman self.

Rage is something natural to the human condition, and something which has been with us since the beginning time, but it is not simply something corrosive and destructive - it really is an emotion with tremendous transformative potential, rather like raw food which can be cooked and transformed into a nourishing meal or garbage which can be turned into nourishing compost.

When rage visits us, we are in the grip of something which is violent and destructive, and we tend to forget that it is something out of which good may come, if we are wise, patient, courageous and willing to undertake the journey up the mountain. Along the way, as we drop our veils, lose our illusions and recover our compassion, we will be transformed. Both rage and forgiveness are part of the journey to the wild wolf woman, she who has been waiting patiently for us to come to her.

Rather than battling my rage or expressing it violently, now I try to acknowledge it, to greet it and spend some time with it. I hold it lovingly in my arms and rock it gently to and fro. Sometimes I sing to it.......



I always had trouble getting through the chapter on rage and forgiveness and I suspect that this is because it is where I need to do most of my soul work - I also suspect I am a bit addicted to the high of self righteous indignation and am relunctant to examine that aspect of myself. This next paragragh really hit home for me on page 381 of WWRWW

 

"... A negative use of rage concentrates destructively in one tiny spot, like acid creating an ulcer, it burns a black hole right through all the delicate layers of the psyche..."

 

Part of me doesn't want to examine this because it is just the medicine I need. I can be like an insane dog with a bone or a manic gerbil on a wheel, feeling justified in my relentless pursuit of "being right". Rather than focusing on what part of my psyche feels outnumbered, voiceless and bullied and directing my attention inward - I try to do this soul work in the outer world. I am so reluctant to sit down and examine the original trauma that caused this but at the same time I am excited to grow and move on. On page 382 Clarissa writes... "Attention to the matter of rage begins the process of transformation... Allowing oneself to be taught by ones rage, thereby transforming it, disperses it ... Untransformed rage can become a constant mantra about how oppressed, hurt and tortured we were." This time, I would like to learn from my rage rather than just react to it.



I am not great with anger, so it was good to reread this chapter. I have to say though I skipped bits. It made me angry, can you believe it? So I processed my anger and sat with it....

As I read the story and realized that the words "for she was a woman who loved" were used more than once. This is important, for if you don't love, then your anger would not come, you would just walk away. Love and anger go together, for in the protection of love you can express old hurts and then finally let them go.

I also realized that she says "arigato zaisho" to everything. She expresses gratitude for the journey, gratitude for the healing forces brought into play because of anger. So both gratitude and love play a part in the healing force of anger.

Lastly she is tenacious, she doesn't say, that is too hard, oh I'm tired, I better not go on, she doesn't back down.... her love and gratitude keep her on track in the journey from anger to healing.

I realized the parallels at my work. It's like unpicking stitches, it is hard work to deal with the anger of being treated badly, of being overloaded, taken for granted, spoken down to, insulted...but because my boss and I had a good relationship, till he got sick, and I love him I stick with it... I have not backed down yet. Goddess it is a tough journey...



"So rather than trying to 'behave' and not feel our rage or rather than using it to burn down every living thing in a hundred mile radius, it is better to first ask rage to take a seat with us, have some tea, talk a while so we can find out what summoned this visitor."

"We want to use anger as a creative force. We want to use it to change, develop and protect. ... When there is calm, there can be learning, there can be creative solutions, but where there is firestorm, inside or out, it burns hot and leaves nothing but ash. We want to be able to look back on our action with honor. We want something to show for feeling angry."

And so, sometimes we take to the mountain when we don't know what else to do. The mountain can be an  analogy for the levels that we need to master, the foothills is the maturing consciousness. The middle part tests the knowledge that was learned thus far. And the higher mountain represents intensified learning. The peak is the confrontation with the ultimate wisdom, such as the old woman that lives atop the mountain.

In the story the mountain allows the woman passage and trees lift their limbs, this is a lifting of illusions. Buddhism speaks of the 7 veils of illusion, as each is discarded a person is said to understand another aspect of the true nature of life and self.

We lose our illusions when take the risk to meet the aspect of our nature that is truly wild.



ãIf a woman is instinct injured, she is typically faced with several challenges regarding rage.  First, she often has a problem with intrusion recognition, she is slow to notice territory violations and does not register her own anger until it is upon her.  · Her temper comes upon her in a kind of ambush.

 This lag is the result of instincts injured by exhortations to little girls to not notice dissension, to try to be peacemakers at all costs, to not interfere and stand the pain until everything calms down or temporarily goes away.  Typically such women do not act upon their rage at the right time, perhaps jumping the gun, or having a delayed reaction weeks, months, or even years later, realizing what they should have, could have, would have said or done.ä

 This is usually not caused by shyness or introversion but by too much thinking, too much trying to be nice, and not enough acting from soul.  The wild soul knows when and how to act if a woman will only listen.  Right response carries insight and right amounts of compassion and strength mixed together.  Injured instinct must be arighted by practicing and enforcing strong boundaries and by practicing firm and, when possible, generous responses, but solid ones nevertheless. 

A woman may have difficulty releasing anger even when it impedes her own life, even when it causes her to obsessively dwell upon events years old as though they happened yesterday.  Dwelling on trauma and doing so intensely for a for a period of time is very important to healing.  But eventually all injury has to be given sutures and be allowed to heal over into scar tissue.ä

 That was a lot to quote but I had trouble deleting any of it, it describes so many women, and it was a perfect description of the woman that I was.  So many things happened that I should have been furious about, but that I just muted my responses, afraid of my own anger.  I think of those events at time and feel shame for not knowing how to respond at the time, but I have learned to realize that the girl I was needs to be forgiven as well · it is so important to allow old injuries to heal, and ultimately to forgive, not only those that angered us, but ourselves as well.

Dr. Estes describes four stages of Forgiveness:
• to forego- to leave it alone
• to forebear - to abstain from punishing
• to forget - to aver from memory, to refuse to dwell
• to forgive - to abandon the debt
Forgiveness is the culmination of all foregoing, forebearing, and forgetting.  It does not mean giving up oneâs protection, but oneâs coldness.  · Forgiveness is an act of creation.  You can choose from many ways to do it.
How does one know if she has forgiven?  You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him.  You tend to have nothing left to remember to say about it all.  · You are free to go.
We experience rage in this den from time to time, others and our own at times.  Different women deal with it differently, some think that we should be allowed to flame throw, to release the anger at everyone around us, that we have that right as wild women.  Some think that we should be nice, that we need to just stop talking when the discussion feels tense.  Neither is right for wild women.
We need to talk to our rage first, sit and hold it, have tea with it · do this alone, rage is an ugly companion and should be calmed before she is invited to the den.  We need to discuss the rage, do not ignore it, do not walk away with it.  There is much healing that can happen for everyone when discussion moves through tenseness through honesty and then to understanding.  When the one that youâre talking to walks away, leaves due to the emotions they are feeling, we are left with trying to heal on our own, without the understanding, without the suture and closure of the wound.
>We can use rage to understand ourselves better, to grow to the wild soul that we wish to be, but only if we use it wisely, and with great compassion.  And then it must be laid to rest, nestled into the ground, with a small cross over its grave that says forgotten or forgiven.  If we carry it with us, it will come to the surface time and time again, like the shrapnel that hurt us originally, the hurt can be felt over and over again.