Hello!
In case you missed it, you can read
Part One
Of this post here.
Today we are going to dive into pain and pleasure and how these two forces feed into our experience of anger.
We’re going to look at the true ROOTS of anger, why it’s there, how it’s trying to help us and why seeing it as something ‘bad’ only serves to keep us stuck.
We are going to look at why anger is a RESPONSE to pain, not a CAUSE of our pain, and how we can start to lovingly accept our anger in order to move forward with healing.
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Pain And Pleasure
Pain is simply a result of bumping up against the limits of reality. It is moving AGAINST the structure of really in some way. Pain is there to let us know that on some level we are being hurt or harmed - that biological function isn’t running smoothly, that we aren’t getting our emotional needs met, that we are heading down a path that isn’t going to lead to the outcomes we actually want - and we can also experience pain when we BELIEVE that something harmful is happening even when it isn’t, or when we are interpreting our reality in a way that is out of synch with actual truth. Pain happens both due to internal and external misalignment/misunderstanding - and it’s something we want to pay attention to and something we again want to process instead of assuming we understand it right away.
Pleasure on the other hand is the messenger that says we are creating within the structures of realty. It lets us know that we are, on some level, getting our needs met - or that we are stimulating ourselves in some way that resembles getting our needs met (remember, our pain/pleasure wires can get crossed and we can be interpreting something as being helpful when it actually isn’t/harmful when it actually isn’t and that’s when we will likely be experiencing BOTH pain and pleasure at once! Leading to a situation where we really need to take time to sort out what’s happening in real reality!).
Both pain and pleasure help us understand reality more than we did before, when we can objectively observe them both.
Pain alerts us to where we are going out of sync with reality, where those around us are going out of synch with reality and we are collateral damage, or where what is needed for optimal function isn’t happening - and it’s our job to figure out how and why this is happening - and again to remedy that to the best of our ability, which isn’t always complete control and power!
That's where the logical mind comes into play.
Emotions let us know the big picture - the logic then comes in to fill in the gaps practically.
Pain is not wrong and pleasure is not right.
When we are ‘enlightened’ (aka, when we have had the time to process our pain to a degree that we are able to see it as a messenger and not something wrong with us, and when we are in a space of feeling like we have some power to make life better for ourselves), we understand that there will always be both - and we know how to learn from both of them - thus we never feel trapped by either. Pain we don’t understand is where we get lost most of the time.
If we look at the vibrational scale and DON’T project our human value systems of ‘good and bad’ ‘higher or lower’ judgements onto any of the emotions - what we see is, at the BOTTOM of the scale is shame.
This makes sense because in a state of shame we are trapped in DELUSION. When we experience pain that we don’t understand - this is what kicks us OUT OF the enlightenment experience. That’s right. The enlightenment state is actually a NATURAL STATE for the human being. It’s the state we are in as children when we are open to all new experiences, when we are able to have pain, learn, change, evolve, be curious, express, not judge - this is all natural human stuff. To laugh. Cry. Sing. Dance. Explore. Get lost. Get confused. Learn. This is the enlightenment lifestyle. This is actually TRAINED OUT OF US - we are indoctrinated into a culture that disconnects us from our natural enlightenment state through introducing us to pain - that which tells us we are out of synch with reality - but then doesn’t help us figure out WHY we are in pain.
Rather it tells us that there is something wrong with US that we are in pain. Or that we are simply trapped in that pain forever because we don’t know how to solve it. Most of us are never EMPOWERED in our pain - rather we are disempowered by being trained to turn our pain in on ourselves ‘I am BAD for this pain, this pain means there is something wrong with ME’ or ‘pain is something we have no control over so if it happens we are trapped and we have to just hope it goes away on it’s own, or we have to numb it, suppress it or cope with it in some other way to survive it.’
Most of us have experienced pain in our lives because SOCIETY, CULTURE, our FAMILIES and so on - what is ‘normal’ is actually OUT of synch with REALITY. Being normal hurts. We are hurt over and over and over in our childhoods as we are being indoctrinated into culture - and we are then told over and over again to deny our pain. That our pain means that WE are messed up - because the system is right. So if we are having a negative reaction to it there must be something off in US. Our caregivers were indoctrinated in the same way and don’t see it. Society doesn’t see it. We have sky high levels of depression and anxiety, fear, hopelessness and so on because we have a culture built upon false beliefs. In a lot of circumstances (not all - again for instance we can have chronic illness or mental health issues that aren’t ‘because’ of anything we did or didn’t do that DO affect our capacity to feel good that we can’t fully remedy and so on) it’s our way of life that is causing us pain.
In a lot of ways as a society, we aren’t learning. We are perpetuating norms and pathologizing the SYMPTOMS of living out of alignment. Our guidance systems are working - we are in pain - but we are so indoctrinated that we now believe our pain is a flaw in us. That not being able to do life normal is a flaw in us. That our anxiety and dread, our depression, our physical illnesses, our emotional instability - is a flaw in our character that must be spiritually improved or self helped out of us.
Shame and guilt says that the way to solve our pain is to try to fix ourselves. That we are fundamentally broken/wrong/bad/not how WE should be. With this we get trapped in a perpetual cycle of feeling terrible, blaming ourselves (ie. if I could just fix my relationships, get the right career, make my body look right, change my personality enough so that others would like me and so on) and trying to get rid of our pain via fighting against OURSELVES.
Reality says that pain is a sign that something needs to change in either our perception of self (we believe we are bad/wrong/not ok because of x, y, z factor when in reality we actually ARE ok), that there is some healing that needs to happen in terms of the conditioning we received and the experiences we had as children that are still affecting us today, or that something in our immediate environment isn’t working in terms of actually SUPPORTING us and our lives and that needs to shift. It’s a sign that perhaps our interpretation of reality needs to change, our way of being needs to change, the way we are operating needs to change, we need some support that we aren’t getting, we need some processing that we aren’t doing/don’t have the tools to do or a combination thereof, so that we can come into a state of RELATIVE alignment with what is best for us, to the best of our capacity.
Shame and guilt are the LOWEST places we can be in terms of vibration, because they are the FARTHEST from our natural state, and farthest from us being able to accurately identify why we are hurting and what we can do about that pain - from TRUTH itself. In real reality, pain is not a bad thing, and we should never be in a state of shame and guilt - enlightenment gets us there.
Enlightenment is a state where we can make mistakes, have pain, have trouble, have problems we don’t understand - and rather than going into denial or shame and guilt we go straight into investigation - which then allows us to expand our perception and in THIS we LEARN WHY the pain is happening, and we can then climb up the scale by working WITH reality to create better conditions for ourselves - either through changing our perception OR through changing our circumstances (the ones that are antagonistic to us and thus causing us pain) so as to be in a better state. We can go into the enlightenment state by naturally going through the emotions and allowing them to inform us and empower us - within and without.
The flaw in the design is when we pathologize pain. Internalize it as a flaw in us or externalize it as something we can’t do anything about. THAT is when we get STUCK.
What Does All Of This Have To Do With Anger?
The real reality of anger is this - when we travel up from shame and guilt, we pass through apathy, grief then fear. These are normal states and we need to allow ourselves time and space to VALIDATE these states/feelings BEFORE we start to try to solve our problems and understand reality.
This is an important part of emotional processing that most people miss/try to skip over/believe is the act of ‘wallowing.’ To allow ourselves to simply BE UPSET about what’s happening to and around us WITHOUT blaming ourselves - this is that first step OUT of the victim/self blame state that keeps us trapped in perpetual self improvement and unable to see reality for how it is.
We must be validated in our feelings of hopelessness, grief, wishing that what happened or what is happening didn’t happen or wasn’t happening. We need to be allowed to feel like life is unfair and we just wish it were another way. We need to be given a safe space to hear ‘how you feel makes sense and it’s not your fault, you’re not a bad person and there’s nothing wrong with you.’ THIS is KEY.
Validation is key.
When we don’t get this, when we rush into ‘how can I ‘take responsibility/how is this my fault/what do I need to do about this?’ or when we immediately believe that because we can’t see a way forward from this low state that there must NOT BE a way forward and thus we should just give up - we get stuck. As much as we are going to WANT to barrel ahead to action or as much as we are going to be fully convinced that we are seeing reality for how it is and therefore there is no solution if we can’t immediately see one - we have to remember that this EMOTIONAL validation part is the WAY we eventually help ourselves to step forward into clarity.
We have to make the grief, apathy and sadness SAFE FIRST so that we don’t get trapped in shame/hopelessness - as those are the only two options.
When we don’t give ourselves the time and space to feel those low feelings without attaching blame and shame, we tend to move into a life of addiction, coping, self sabotage and anxiety and depression we can’t ever understand or escape - we are in pain, we do things to try to numb that pain or that we think will solve the pain, which feel good in the moment but lead to painful outcomes (those pain/pleasure wires getting crossed) and we then think that the addiction/self sabotage/coping/negative emotions are the PROBLEM when really they are part of our REACTION to the problem - leading to even MORE attempts at ‘self help’ that cover up the real issue - making it all about the REACTION and never about the ROOT CAUSE.
We plunge into the habits of ‘normal’ - which are slowly killing us, but we continue to believe that our lack of ability to ‘get on’ and ‘be happy’ is a flaw in US that we must FIX, leading to more shame and blame and further separation from truth.
We are then promised happiness through religion, new age spirituality and self improvement - that these things can ‘get rid of’ our negative emotions and habits (which are the symptom of our pain not the cause.) They promise freedom from the negativity if we just focus hard enough on the good, if we just jump through all the spiritual hoops. That we can have success and be good in the eyes of the world and still be spiritual and righteous - which is a fallacy.
If, on the other hand, we allow ourselves that VALIDATION of our pain, so that we can then move into CURIOSITY around what may ACTUALLY be causing it if it’s not us being terrible/helpless, we allow ourselves to go past fear, we hit DESIRE.
Desire for something NEW.
For change.
For expansion.
For this desire to be fulfilled, we must first understand WHAT IS HURTING US - so that we can figure out WHY it's hurting, and then can use that information to understand ourselves and reality better - and in THIS we can transform our way of being so as to serve us BETTER. THIS is the path towards enlightenment.
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We will take one more break here, and wrap up this series next week!
<3
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