While sometimes we have very good reasons for getting angry, there are often subconscious reasons which cause us to erupt needlessly and create a lot of damaging situations in our lives. So let’s look at why we get angry and what to do about it.
The subconscious’ role is to guard us from pain. Things we find too hard to deal with get buried inside of us so that we can get on with life.
But deeper than the subconscious, is the unconscious. Why are we unconscious? This is the same as asking about the meaning of life!
To answer this question we need to look at consciousness and how it orchestrates the show of life.
The primary intention of consciousness is to fully experience itself. In order to do so it must first experience what it is not. And in order to do that, it creates the relative field of experience. So far so good.
So from One blissful field of awareness which doesn’t have a form, it becomes many different forms, including human beings in all their complexity of life experiences.
As it duplicates itself and goes on about its business of experiencing itself, it gradually looses awareness.
Bit by bit, experience shifts from being blissful to being more and more negative until there is an equal amount of negativity and positivity.
The downward journey continues and once negativity is dominant we start to suffer. This is starting to sound familiar, isn’t it?.
The less awareness there is, the more suffering there is. Right? We have all seen friends (dare I say … sometimes those friends are ourselves…) who consistently get into trouble over and over again for the same reasons.
Once they can see the patterns, they can grow out of it. Whenever such situations occur, you can bet this is an acute case of densification.
Densification is the process of loosing awareness. And, shocking but true, it is meant to be that way!
While the process of densification works on the global level of the whole of humanity and it’s evolution, as you have probably noticed, we also experience this at our personal level in our own lives.
As above, so below so to speak. When we get angry we gradually relinquish however much awareness we have and our body-mind-spirit contracts.
We can feel our muscles tense and our mind get out of control. Pay attention next time you get angry. See how the tension manifests in your body-mind.
In fact, no! Do it now. Remember a situation when you were very angry or even enraged and recollect the physical sensations.
Maybe the shoulders were tight, the jaws clenched, the face muscles hardened, the body movement more jerky, the mind re-hashed the unpleasant events over and over again, etc…
The quicker we are able to leave the situation behind the less potent the effect of a single anger episode. Getting angry in and off itself can be a natural and healthy response.
What isn’t healthy however is to keep on harboring those feelings once the situation has dissolved or even worse, to keep on projecting that response on seemingly similar situations.
So the process of densification can stop or can last depending on how well we are able to focus on the positive. Exercise is also great help in dealing with pent up energy.
In a single day we may go through the process of densification and expansion many times. for instance everything may be going fine for a while and then we hear some bad news and all of a sudden everything is different.
This can happen in an instant. We can go from relaxed to tense just like that. However the reverse is not quite so true, as in once we are in a dense/tense state, it is hard to relax again.
By developing the ability to let it happen and observe the process we gradually train ourselves to let the event pass without having long lasting ripples.
The Buddhists call this mindfulness. Embrace it, run with it and then you will outrun it. As we get better at staying aware no matter what, the process reverses and we start our upward journey back to the light and enjoy life more.
So if you find you get angry too often and for the wrong reasons, learn to meditate.
