A fiery, volatile energy swept through our land last week. The anger energy was present, it moved through us like a tornado, sweeping everyone up in its path, away from solid ground. And then it passed quickly, leaving fragility and tenderness, yet also clarity and tentative new insights, and a swift return to love, in its wake.
I came to a new understanding about anger and conflict on this day. It has its place, it has its wisdom. It’s a part of the human experience and we deny it at our peril. For once I allowed myself to feel my rage. It was cleansing, liberating, illuminating, efficient. It felt good to give myself permission to fume. A new feeling that ‘I count’, that I’m allowed this expression of humanity too, like anyone else. And it felt more honest than keeping it all under wraps, then leaking it out in insidious passive-aggression later down the line, my twisted inners tortuously clinging to a resentment and sense of injustice that I just couldn’t let go of. Conversely, I felt how when anger is expressed honestly in the moment, it can lead to win-win justice for all and fast resolution.
Something has shifted in the wake of this storm. I am more aware of my inner monologues that stem from a life-time of unexpressed anger that lingers within me, evident in barbed comments, impatience, stiffness, reactivity, jumping to conclusions, suspicion, harsh judgements, bitchiness and small-mindedness. This is disempowered, occluded anger that only harms myself and others. I am determined to clear this back-log now and be transparent going forward. Work in progress absolutely, as these old patterns love to dig their heels in, but it somehow feels lighter and easier since the conflict day.
At the end of the anger day I saw an incredible spectacle of nature. I witnessed two huge ant colonies locked into an epic battle of mind-boggling proportions. The whole car park area was a gruesome battle-field, littered with thousands of dead bodies. Huge selected warrior ants grappled to the death, smaller ants fought in frenzied clusters, the smallest ants of all dashed around, de-limbing and decapitating their enemies whenever there was an opportunity. It was bedlam, mayhem, carnage, it was weirdly anthropomorphic. It mirrored the human day perfectly.
Later that evening I returned to the scene and an eerie quiet had settled over the space. It was almost peaceful. Strangely, almost all of the dead bodies had disappeared. It could have felt like a dream but for a few limbs, heads and mangled bodies still scattered around. I felt touched by this incredible event I had witnessed. It had some gem of treasure for me that I couldn’t yet put my finger on it. ‘War energy exists in nature’, was the mantra in my mind, but without yet any meaning.
I later discovered that ant colonies will occasionally battle to the death like this, for example when there is insufficient food resource or space for both colonies to co-exist. The victorious colony will absorb the losers in order to bolster their much-reduced numbers and the losers will accept this with no further resistance. The victors will also remove all the dead ants and the newly merged population will eat them, as vital nourishment to regain the colony’s strength after such a loss.
Nourishment. That was the word that stuck with me. Can conflict, war and anger energy, when healthily expressed as a part of the human psyche, offer us nourishment? My experiences on this day and the days that followed would suggest so. But I struggled to reconcile this with why war is such a destructive, toxic, heart-breaking energy on our human stage, at every scale. My sense is that it comes down to its honesty and purity. When expressed in the moment, from a true place, anger gives a boundary, it shows an edge, a line that cannot be crossed and this points the clear way forward for us. But, when anger isn’t honest, when the motives are hidden, when the truth is buried deep within us, when the wounds are unrecognised and unhealed, the twisted stories so convincing we kid ourselves, then it rots into another substance. A sticky power-play substance of victim and aggressor, you versus me, winner and loser, good versus bad, control versus controlled. It is contraction, not expansion, and it cannot lead to justice or resolution, only pain within and without.
Let us look within, seek out and heal our wounds, find deeper levels of truth within us, own our anger, find ways to express it honestly and healthily, hold healthy boundaries, stand up for ourselves, seek resolution without closing down our hearts, stay connected to each other as we find the places where we cannot go together, where we do not meet, trust that when we stay in our truth we all rise up together. Let us be nourished by the insights and inevitable change this brings to us.
It’s a tall order, but I know it’s our deeper truth. War and peace, two sides of the same coin.
frond yoga with Rebecca May 