Get a Grip

 

Sometimes I hold on tightly to how I want things to be unable to be with how things are.   I can get angry and irritated when things aren't turning out how I had hoped.  But through the yoga which calms the mind, strengthens the nerves, opens up the heart, I have cultivated the strength and courage to pause when irritated.  Rather than react from anger, I can be with the vulnerability that underlays the anger and act when and if I am ready with more calm and skill.

 

My father had a hair trigger anger reflex.  The smallest of things could set him into a rage that could get dangerous for you if you got in the way or just were in the vicinity.  While going out for a meal was a special and usually happy family occasion, too many were ruined by my father’s angry outburst at a waitress who didn’t bring enough bread or a maître d who kept us waiting too long for a table.  His road rage was particularly scary and all too common if someone cut him off in traffic, drove too close to his car, or snared a sought-after parking lot.  Stuck in the backseat during his shouting and swearing was fraught since he might turn that anger on me. I put up with this well into my thirties until I stopped riding in a car that he was driving deciding that I would not allow myself to be subject to this kind of car rage any longer.

 

I inherited some of this hair trigger rage that came out when I felt hemmed in, put on the spot, disrespected, unacknowledged.  While as a child I could not protect myself from my father's rage and the inner disintegration that it caused, I could as an adult protect myself from being hurt with anger.  But this was an anger that was not right sized or well modulated. It was a low bar that could unexpectedly set me off and at people that I cared about.  It felt as if I had no control over this irritation, this anger, these outbursts.  Until I began to heal from the abuse that I had grown up with.  The bridge to living more peacefully came through the path of grief for the rage I encountered as a child and for the burden of responsibility I carried for inciting it.  Yoga has been a big part of the healing helping me to develop the physical, physiological, emotional, and spiritual strength to bring the grief up from the unknown into the known so that it could be released.

 

I can still feel irritated and angry when the world doesn't cooperate.  The meeting where someone talked over me, the car that tailgates, the customer service representative who puts me on hold again.  But through healing, which is an integration of the wounded parts into a fuller wholeness of embodiment, I have found a way through the anger into the underlying vulnerability.  Vulnerability feels in my gut like I am jumping off of a cliff.  But if I stay with this feeling, not cover it up with anger or irritation, I can sense that the landing, when it comes, will be soft. I have found through yoga a way to discharge the stress of frustration so that my heart might be more open and tender, my spirit more free.

 

 My father's anger killed him.  He suffered a series of strokes when he was only 76 from an embolism released from some deep vein up to his brain. The embolism fed by a lifetime of heart deteriorating anger and toxic stress.  As a man of his time, generation and background, he had no access to a means of spiritual healing to help him discharge his psyche's grief, to come into a fuller wholeness of his embodiment.