How To Deal With Anger In Healthy Ways

by | May 17, 2021 | Uncategorized

How To Deal With Anger In Healthy Ways to Catalyze Change

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In this episode, I dig into how and why anger is holy and sacred and how to deal with anger in healthy ways. I spend some time destigmatizing anger and looking at why we think anger is bad and how it doesn’t have to be.

I believe anger is one of the holiest, most transformational emotions people don’t want to face. It’s full of useful information. It’s fertilizer for healing and it can make us sick when we don’t face it.
Dealing with anger in healthy ways is about using it to catalyze change, healing, and/or transformation.
In this episode, I dig into how and why anger is holy and sacred. I spend some time destigmatizing anger and looking at why we think anger is bad and how it doesn’t have to be. I name some of the unhealthy ways we deal with anger for the purpose of contrast and ownership. I get into some healthy ways we can work with anger, and talk about how archetypes can help us work with anger.
I also go over the information available to us by working with our anger and how it can liberate us when we learn how to deal with anger in healthy ways.

In this episode of The EMBODIED Podcast we discuss:

  • [2:50] What I’ll be exploring in this episode

  • [5:02] The beauty in allowing yourself to feel anger

  • [8:41] Why so many people think anger is “bad” or a negative thing

  • [10:38] Unhealthy ways that people deal with anger

  • [19:41] How you can deal with anger in healthy ways

  • [30:43] How to transmute your anger

  • [37:53] What I like to do to deal with anger

 

Resources Mentioned in Episode 347 of the EMBODIED Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto…

 

Quotes from this Week’s Episode…

“Anger and grief and the holiest, most transformational emotions people don’t want to face.”

“Underneath what enrages us and why, are creative and miraculous actions, ideas, resolutions, and innovations.”

“Being nice, brushing things off (aka bypassing your anger), and trying or pretending to feel or be OK with shit you’re not is a wild disservice to everything.”

“When we hold things in and avoid conflict or confrontation we can become passive-aggressive because of the build-up.”

“I’ve learned that whenever I feel disproportionately angry with someone else, to gently check-in and see if I’m also angry with myself – often I am and it’s related.” 

 

 

About the EMBODIED Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto

Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.

If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussion on Instagram here.

 

Transcripts from Episode 347:

 

What’s up everybody. Welcome to episode number 347 of the podcast. Today, we are talking about how to deal with anger in healthy ways. If you are watching here on YouTube, just a reminder, I am always gonna be looking at my notes here, so if it looks like I’m reading a screen, I 100% am, and for anyone tuning in audio-wise from any of the myriad platforms where the podcast is available on audio, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Today we’re getting into dealing with anger in healthy ways.

This is about using anger to catalyze change, healing, and transformation. So in this episode, I’m gonna explore a few things, how and why anger is holy and sacred. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for years you have absolutely heard me touch on this before, but I’ve never taken a real deep dive into it the way I’m going to in this episode. Also, I haven’t talked about it before after having processed some intense anger like I have in the last year plus with the pandemic like pandemic anger is a whole next level of anger. So we’re gonna get into how and why anger is holy and sacred.

I will spend some time de-stigmatizing anger, so looking at why we think anger is bad and how it doesn’t always have to be or ever have to be to be quite honest, we’ll name some of the unhealthy ways we deal with anger for the purpose of contrast and ownership, we’ll list some healthy ways we can work with anger, we’ll also talk about how archetypes can help us work with anger and discuss the information available to us by working with our anger, and how our anger can really liberate us when we learn how to deal with it in healthy ways. So I believe anger and grief are the holiest, most transformational emotions that people don’t wanna face. We’re not really gonna talk about grief today. I will just say this one thing about grief, fairly often, underneath our unprocessed anger is also unprocessed grief.

And for women, especially it’s much more socially and culturally sanctioned and acceptable to be sad than it is to be angry. So often, women stuff and deny their anger but they feel sad or depressed or even anxious because they’re not allowing themselves to feel their anger. So I also really believe that anger is, I don’t wanna call it a gateway emotion, it’s not a gateway emotion, but it is, how do I describe this? I don’t think I’ve ever put this into words before. Anger is something, it’s just our chemical, period, that’s really what it is, when we allow ourselves to feel our anger, so much more than just anger gets to move through heal and be processed through our systems.

So anger is full of useful information, it’s fertilizer for healing, it absolutely can make us sick when we don’t face it, and it’s super worthy of our attention, it’s not logical or linear, it’s really inconvenient, it’s very uncomfortable, and we all know what this is like, you ever having like a great day, you’re like cruising along, things are going well, and then something suddenly pisses you off and like that’s it, and then whether it’s hours or into the next day or even the next couple of days, it’s easy to get stuck in something that really pisses us off, whenever I say pissed off, I always have to acknowledge my grandpa used to have this saying, it’s better to be pissed off than pissed on which as a kid I just thought that was hilarious, and as an adult, I’m like, what is the scenario where someone is pissing on somebody else?

And listen, I know there’s scenarios, am not judging anybody, but just as a kid, you don’t really think about, who’s pissing on each other? And as an adult, you’re like, all right, well, some people might disagree with that statement, but I digress. So listen, especially if you don’t have great skills or tools for dealing with anger, for how to deal with anger in healthy ways, it can become very consuming, it can really distract you and keep you from focusing on other things, so that’s another important reason to learn how to deal with anger in healthy ways. So you don’t have to be distracted and derailed from your purpose, from your relationships, from other things that deserve your time, energy and attention. And anger can really free us from a lot.

So this episode is about letting yourself feel it and learning how to deal with it again in healthier ways. And all of my podcasts always are meant to deliver some insights and create some openings for your healing, and it’s usually impossible to explore the full depth or nuance of anything we talk about here in just one episode. So don’t put pressure on yourself to fully get this, but do let your inner wisdom glean whatever it can right now from this episode. In the EMBODIED Living Center we have a healing meditation for transmuting big emotions and that’s really my number one recommendation for dealing with anger in healthy ways to transmute it. And I’ll say more about that in a little bit. I also really wanna de-stigmatize anger because so many people judge it as bad and therefore avoid it.

And again, we’re talk more about that too. And I’ve already said this but anger is our chemical, it can be fuel, underneath what enrages us and why are creative and miraculous actions, ideas, resolutions, and innovations. I even find that when I’m lacking inspiration or motivation, it’s because I haven’t tapped into my anger around whatever it is I’m wanting to do feel, be, change or see happen in my life or the world. So being nice, brushing things off, also known as bypassing your anger and trying or pretending to feel or be okay with things that you’re not is a wild disservice to everything. So let’s spend a little more time on why so many of us think or have thoughts that anger is bad, especially for the women, anger is not pretty, and a lot of women are taught, cultured and socialized to be pretty and desirable and pleasing and palatable. Anger is not soft or pleasant, and those are other things a lot of women are socialized to be.

Also if you’re in any type of spiritual or self-help or personal development, you know, groups or coaching programs or if you read books and join Facebook groups or follow all these different kind of love and light to all the people on Instagram or any other places, you might be under the impression that anger is negative or lower vibration, more than anything, most people just don’t know how to deal with anger in healthy ways, so when we express anger, it’s not well received, and sometimes it can create a lot of harm or tension or ruptures in relationships. It can also be violent depending on how people express it which obviously can make us think anger is bad, maybe you’ve been hurt by someone else directing their anger towards you or taking their anger out on you, maybe you grew up around so much anger you just don’t wanna engage with it in your own adult life.

This was partly my story while into my 20s, and none of these things, It’s okay if you do feel this way, if you believe these things, what I really want you to walk away from this podcast episode with is knowing that it doesn’t have to be a blanket generalization, it’s not an all or nothing, anger is it always one way or always another way, there’s multifaceted ways to deal with and experience anger. So what are some unhealthy ways that we deal with our anger, that people deal with their anger? The first is to just not to deal with it, to stuff it, deny it, pretend it’s not there at all costs, and when we do that, it is allowed to fester. Again, that used to be something that I did back at the day cause I grew up, there was a lot of anger, you know, some people in my family like yelled a lot, fought a lot, there was a lot of anger and I just didn’t wanna be a person who did that, I didn’t wanna be a person who was always fighting with people or who was taking out my stuff on other people or yelling all the time or stressed or things like that.

So I just chose not to deal with my anger, it didn’t mean I didn’t have any, it just meant that I didn’t acknowledge it, it meant that I couldn’t access it, that I tucked it away and kind of put it in this, you know, do not enter zone in my emotional landscape. Some of you can probably relate to that. And inevitably what always happens is something will happen, something will come up, we will either snap or we become passive aggressive which I’ll talk more about in a little while. So one of the unhealthy ways to deal with anger is not to deal with it, is to let it fester. Another way is to always blame others for us feeling angry, when we are so dead set on not wanting to deal with anger, we’ll often like disown it, and we’ll put it out on Other people, we’ll blame other people, it’s them, it’s them, it’s them, it’s them, and I find this a lot with women, especially women who are on the more fragile spectrum, who are really attached to their identity as like soft or delicate or things like this, if or when they do feel angry and they’ve really convinced themselves that they shouldn’t, they’ll blame other people for it, and they will really project that onto other people, and when people do that, they miss out on dealing with all the ways they are angry.

And when we do that, that can create a lot of things that can make us physically sick, it can come out what I call sideways, which again is passive aggressively, it can come out in some big explosion, if you’ve ever done that or been witnessed to like a big explosion, when you just stuffed it, stuffed it, stuffed it, denied it, denied it, denied it, and then one day just snapped, you know how bad that can be or how bad that can feel, and so on the passive aggressive note, I wanna make a distinction between passive aggressive behavior and passive aggressive communication. So passive aggressive is a way of basically expressing your feelings indirectly.

So if it’s passive aggressive communication, it’s gonna be indirect and vague communication where you’re not actually saying what’s bothering you, but it’s just clear to anyone that you’re communicating with that obviously something is bothering you, but you’re unwilling to actually name it and say what it is and confront it, and that comes out through vague and ambiguous and indirect communication that feels shady because there is energy behind it, there’s anger behind it, even if the words themselves are not matching the energy. And a lot of people can feel that, a lot of people can sense it, no matter if you think that you’re masking it or you’re hiding it.

Passive aggressive behavior is more in line with what we do, so sometimes people will do things to intentionally irritate or inconvenience people, or get their attention, again without actually saying what’s wrong. It’s like trying to get back at them or get even for how we feel without actually addressing how we feel. And I’ll give you an example. There’s a story, we’ll call it a legend, family lore of mine that there was an abusive male in my family back a couple of generations, and the story was that his wife, he had an ulcer, and his wife would put pepper in the chili or sometimes in other things that she was making for him so that he would get a really bad stomach ache, cause he was super abusive and he was super mean and emotionally abusive and sometimes physically abusive to everyone in the family.

So his wife, that was her way of, air quote, fighting back, was like putting too much pepper or putting ingredients in the food that would make him sick. That’s passive aggressive. Other forms of passive aggressive behavior, sometimes it’s unconscious, sometimes it’s a matter of people doing exactly what they know will upset you because they are upset with you, but they don’t wanna bring that up and talk about that. It could also be someone if you’ve asked for help or expressed a need or a desire or something and it’s absolutely within their capacity to do it, but they will continue not to, that could be passive aggressive for a variety of reasons. And so ultimately again, these are the things we say and the things we do without actually saying what’s wrong with us and without actually addressing how we feel, those things are passive aggressive.

So let’s also talk about reactions, when we hold things in and avoid conflict or confrontations, sometimes we’ll become passive aggressive because of the buildup. I had this happen to me, not that long ago, maybe like six or seven months ago, for personal reasons, I just, I had so much going on and I was just like maxed out, super stretched again as so many of you I’m sure can relate during the pandemic has a lot of us have felt various points more than others throughout the course of the pandemic. But I absolutely had this conflict brewing with a person in my life, and I just wasn’t in a place to have the conversation that I really needed to have with this person. And it got to a point where I could no longer be kind to this person because their fragility and inability to take responsibility for themselves was just like, it was too much, honestly, it was unprecedented. I had never seen anything like it before in my life.

And it was not only affecting me, it was affecting other people that we shared space with in community, and essentially, this person was trying to make me pay for how she felt without telling me how she felt. And you know, this is one of the things, I’ll put a little asterisk on this, especially if you’re empathic or intuitive or anything like that, other people not being able to express their anger or say what’s up or confront conflict and things like that, is so heavy for us because like we see it, we sense it, we feel it, depending on how your gifts work, you might even be able to hear it, and that’s just, it’s really hard to have to hold that.

But I was holding my own, in this situation I was also holding back my own because I was trying to get through a couple of hard months, so I could get to a place where I had enough energy to confront the conflict, and unfortunately, dealing with anger in healthy ways isn’t always conveniently timed, so sooner rather than later is always better in terms of, you know, leading into conflict, bringing something up, having a courageous conversation, but that’s not what I did in that scenario. I thought I was making a better choice to like wait until I have better energy and better capacity, but it ended up being so that I ended up being, not passive aggressive, but aggressive aggressive in my communication cause I just had so much resentment for this person built up in my system.

And then anyway, we ended up having to have the conversation when I didn’t particularly have the energy for it, and it went okay, it resulted in deciding not to have that person in my life anymore cause we were not really a great fit for the way that we were engaging and interacting, but it was, it just would have probably saved so much time and attention and energy and all these other things if I had addressed it sooner. So putting things off, you know, there’s just there’s never a good time, there’s never a good time, there’s never a best time, sometimes there’s a better time, but honestly I really believe the sooner the better, so it is unhealthy to put it off for too long and I will leave the discernment up to you around what is too long and what is not. So how can we deal with anger in healthy ways?

First of all, you need to be honest with both yourself and others. Consciously working with our feeling makes all the difference between being in the driver’s seat in our lives, or, you know, sitting in the back seat getting dragged around by your anger or even worse, feeling like, you know, it tossed you in the trunk, locked you up and now you’re bouncing around on the road and your anger is just 90 miles an hour going down the highway. So we need to feel it, we need to let it in, and you know, if depending on what you’re angry about, depending on your experience dealing with anger, how comfortable you are expressing and things like that and what it’s related to like the context is very important, you might need or want professional help, you might want someone to hold space for you who can help you move through, navigate process, some of your anger.

And you wanna be careful with this so if you don’t seek a professional and you’re going to your friends for this, just be aware that not everyone is comfortable with anger, not everyone can hold space for it, and again, the context matters like some anger, some of the things you might be angry about could be really triggering for certain people in your lives, so it’s definitely something to be discerning about like who you share and who your anger with, who you express your anger to, because you want that to held as skillfully and as carefully as possible so that you can really actually move it out of your system, move it through your system. More healthy ways we can deal with anger are really being honest as well with ourselves around when we’re angry with ourselves.

So this is another way I always like to refer to the quote from the Ice Cube song, check yourself before you wreck yourself, so I have learned that whenever I feel disproportionately angry with someone else or about something, and when I say disproportionately I mean, something happens that’s not really that big of a deal, but my response is like way bigger than what actually triggered the response, usually there’s something else going on there too. So I’ll usually check in with myself to see if there’s anything I’m also angry with myself about, and often I am, and it’s related to this. Other times I’m not angry with myself, but there are other related unresolved anger things going on amplifying the intensity of whatever it is that just happened.

The metaphor that I like to use for this is a guitar string. So I can, I can not pluck just like one part of a guitar string, no matter where you pluck that string, it’s gonna reverberate up and down and throughout the whole entire string, feelings and triggers work like that too, so if there’s anger around a topic, a subject or a person, and it gets poked in a different way or in some kind of tangentially related way, it’s likely to set off the whole thing, sometimes it’s like opening a Pandora’s box, and sometimes this is when you’ve like stuffed your anger for so long and finally, this is where the saying, the straw that broke the camel’s back comes from. Again, the healthy way to deal with anger is when you feel it bubbling up to you know deal with it as close to as in real time as you can.

Now, because sometimes anger might arise at inconvenient times, I do encourage my students and my clients to sometimes put it on a shelf, this is like conscious compartmentalizing, if you’re in the middle of a workday or something like that, or, you know, you’re doing something that requires your energy attention and focus, if you have the ability to say, okay, anger, I see you, this thing that’s pissing me off, I’m going to deal with you, I’m gonna get back to you later, maybe you pause like journal it out, make a couple notes about it and then come back to like process it later, but later being like later that day or like within the next two or three days max rather than being like, I can’t deal with that right now and then just like stuffing and putting it aside and not intentionally coming back to it shortly afterwards.

So the healthy thing to do again would be to be like, okay, let me pause, let me at least ride the initial big wave of the feeling, and then I could like put it on a shelf the metaphorical shelf, and then I’ll get back to it later, but soon later, not like indefinitely, never later. More healthy ways to deal with anger, how to deal with anger in healthier ways are to dig into the information. If we look at so big, hot emotions like grief and anger are often kind of like illness and injuries, the symptom is not always like the root of the problem, so for example, sometimes my hip hurts because I injured my ankle a number of times growing up playing sports, and so just like that, the chain on my leg, ankle, knee, hip, all those joints, can sometimes be a little out of whack for me. So it’s not always that anything is necessarily wrong with my hip, it’s actually the weakness and the scar tissue and the imbalance in my ankle that’s causing the pain in my hip.

So sometimes it’s similar with these big emotions where it’s a much larger issue, sometimes it’s a bigger, more systemic thing that’s making us really upset when a smaller thing appears to be what the issue is. This is when it’s so valuable to really look at, okay, why am I angry? Okay, why am I really angry? Why else might I be angry? What else might this be connected to or related to? And I’ll give you an example, a personal recent example that might just help you to see how I process through something like this, the context may not be relevant to you but just through how I process this, you might be able to see how you might process something like this in your own experience.

So I had an experience recently, there was something in my business with a person that I work with where first of all even being able to figure out like what the issue was, we had something going on on the website was that took a couple extra months cause they were busy and I didn’t get my shit together as soon as I could have, so then I had to wait to be able to have a call with them, and then by the time I had a call with them, I was gonna be so busy for the next couple months that we still weren’t gonna be able to handle everything that needed to be handled sooner than like three months out and not to mention, you know, they were also super busy, I, in that moment got so off when I was realizing that A, there were more things that needed to be done and fixed and addressed on the website that I’d already spent all this money on, like updating, improving and all these things last year, and then it wasn’t done, it wasn’t complete, something had not been done properly, and I didn’t know because when it comes to techie stuff, I don’t always know what I don’t know, and then because the two of us were so busy in our own ways, it wasn’t gonna be able to get resolved anytime soon, and it was going to cost more than I ever thought I was gonna have to spend to fix an issue like this.

And I felt myself getting so angry, and it first, fairly often when anger bubbles up, I’ll say this from my own experience, this might not be the case for you, but fairly often if I start to feel angry, I want my anger to go out, it doesn’t feel good internally, but the person I work with, I love this woman, she’s amazing, she’s brilliant, she’s also a dear friend of mine, so I was like, I feel like I wanna be pissed at her but there’s nothing to be pissed at her for, so I was like, okay, what am I really off about? And I was just so angry with myself for just straight up not knowing what I didn’t know because like four months had gone by that if I would’ve known I could have been doing something about, you know, these things that were going on behind the scenes on the like techie things on the website.

So I was like so angry with myself, and then I took a moment to be like, listen, this is not your jam, we know this self-like technology isn’t your thing, like, they’re truly like, there’s no way you could ever would’ve known this, so I kinda like walked myself through, okay, what am I really pissed about? Is this it’s not that it wasn’t valid, but is it, is this something worth being pissed off about? Is this something worth being angry, upset about? And I was like, it’s really not, but now what I’ve learned, so I was like, okay, so what can I learn from this? How can I prevent this from happening again? That’s a great question, like when you’re processing through and looking at your anger, is this preventable in the future? And it absolutely is, like, one of the things even though I’m not great with technology and stuff, something I learned through this experience was okay, there’s always gonna be things here that I don’t know what I don’t know, so I need to ask more questions, and I have to tell you all that has actually been on the other side of anger for me, so many times in my life, ask more questions up front.

And some of that comes from being, I know some of you you’re into human design, Some of that for me comes from being a manifesting generator because that’s how we roll, we’re like skip steps, we just wanna get to the outcome as quickly as possible, but then we will often have like little things to clean up after the fact, because you know, there are a lot of things involve a lot of details and you know, so this is one of the reasons why it’s super important to know how you’re built because sometimes the way to get to compassion, it’s not a bypass, it’s just being like, okay, I know this about myself, this isn’t my best, there’s no need to really be pissed off at myself about this but what can I learn from this? What can I do better next time? How can I prevent this in the future?

So this is what I mean by looking at, okay, if I’m angry, what’s really going on? Like, what’s the valuable information for me here? This isn’t about like finding a silver lining or anything, this is about, cool, how can I make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future or with such intensity or with such a negative effect or impact, you know, whatever it is depending on what’s going on. And then the other thing is one of my favorites and I think I mentioned this earlier at some point is to transmute the anger, take the thing that I’m so pissed off about, that I’m so upset, so enraged, so outraged about, and use that as fuel to do something about it. I find transmuting tends to be most appropriate for things that are related to bigger, more systemic issues, even if you’re upset about something that happened to you but it’s something that happens to like a lot of people, because even that story that had just told you about what what I was angry about, part of what was upsetting to me about that, there was some things related to capitalism that were really me off about that for a variety of reasons that I don’t need to dig into, but I was like, okay, this is cool, I can use this as continual fuel for my desire and my own business to be dismantling capitalistic practices and unhooking that system, even though we all are still, you know, living within capitalism, how can we unhook, unhook, unhook more and more and more and more, how can we create other ways of doing things that aren’t, that are more oriented towards our ethics, our morals, our values and commerce not just getting sucked into capitalism.

So when we transmute like that’s something I could use that energy for, so now when I feel that similar like texture, that kind of anger bubbling up around stuff related to and in my business, I’m like, okay, this is my reminder, I want to do things differently here, so let me take this anger, this anger energy and channel it into actions I can take, things I could do, things I can learn, conversations I can have with people, I could bring this to my team, we could talk about how we could do things differently and stuff like that. Another way to deal with anger and another healthier way to deal with anger is archetype work. So in the wild soul archetypes, we talk about anger most when we talk about the warrior goddess, so if you haven’t taken the wild soul archetype quiz, I’m gonna send you over to untameyourself.com/quiz, take the archetypes quiz, it’s super fun, it’s super revealing, there’s a whole email series that goes with it, that’ll give you a little nuggets every day or every other day for like a week or so, I forget how long that runs for, but let me read you the description of the warrior goddess, so you can kind of feel how working with an archetype, working with a certain type of energy can help you to navigate, transmute or work through anger.

So the warrior goddess shows us how to transmute our holy rage into powerful transformative and revolutionary action, a dedicated agent for change, she teaches you how to use your gifts and talents effectively through practice, skill and consistency so that you can both stay in the fight and take care of yourself so you don’t have to burn out. She’s a champion of bull dreams and visions, aligning you with higher good and purpose, always reminding you that you are not here to play a small role in life, she is a bringer of faith, divine order and fearless thinking, no challenge or conflict is too great for the warrior goddess. Her medicine helps you overcome internal and external battles using weapons of words, energy, prayer, focus, attention, wisdom and right action. Highly skilled, strategic and discerning with her energy, she’s the embodiment of fierce love, justice, courage, and loyalty. She’s victory personified, helping you find the resources and cultivate the strength and capacity you need to succeed in your highest, most passion filled callings.

So there’s so much in that description. I mean, we could do whole episodes about that, but actually if you’re interested in the archetypes, there’s an archetypes mini course, if you go to untameyourself.com/ I think it’s archetypes, but we’ll put the right link in the show notes, the show notes for this episode are untameyourself.com/347. We’ll put the right link to the archetypes mini course over there. But this is one of the ways we also get to see and remember that anger isn’t negative, there’s a lot of energy to the emotion and if we get, if we allow it to consume us, it absolutely can drag down our vibration and our frequency, but if we get to it sooner than later, when we transmute it, when we get the information from it, when we see what kind of actions we can take, what we can actually do about the things that are making us angry, really it’s something that can absolutely help us to elevate our vibration, get on our path, be on our purpose, follow our passions, use our gifts, talents, skills and ability for good, for collective healing and liberation. So that’s what the warrior goddess is about.

In the EMBODIED Living Center, we have some other tools for helping with working with each archetype, journaling prompts and things like that and also some other types of supportive meditations for dealing with big feelings. So to give a highlight here, that practice is about allowing yourself to feel it, getting the information from the anger and then using the energy of anger rather than taking it out or pointing it at anyone or internalizing it and letting it mess with your own system and your own energy, to point it at a system or the thing that created the circumstance for the violation or for the thing that’s making you angry. So sometimes it’s appropriate to be angry with people, that’s fine, but how we dispel the anger and move the anger and what we do with the directionality of the anger when we’re feeling it like where we send it, where we direct it, can make a really big difference in what we actually get out of the experience of being angry.

So we’ll dig into this much deeper in July, the theme for the workshop that I’m gonna run in July is gonna be alchemizing anger, so it’s not up on the website yet if you’re listening to the show here in real time in the middle of May, but that workshop will happen later in the month of July in 2021, so if it’s not up on the site yet, keep an eye out for it, all of our workshops are always at untameyourself.com/workshop, and as well for members of the EMBODIED Living Center workshops are included in membership, so if you’re again listening in real time, we open up enrollment for new members from June 14th to the 21st, and so can get access to the workshops that way as well. And it’s just important, I’m so excited to teach that workshop on alchemizing anger because we can really decimate people with our anger, and we can really decimate ourselves, relationships, all kinds of things with our anger, and we don’t have to do that, it might feel good in a moment, but ultimately is it effective for change, healing or transformation? That’s how I like to look at anger.

I like to use it as a tool for those things and to the best of my ability not allow it to be destructive, anger can be so healing, our chemical, and transformative, it does not have to be destructive, but left unchecked, it can absolutely be very harmful and very destructive in so many different ways. So again, dealing with anger in healthy ways is about using it to catalyzed change, healing and transformation, and whether or not you use an archetype to help you, again, when thinking about how to deal with anger in healthy ways, think about moving through your anger and getting to the other side of it, using it as fuel to take actions to do and create things that you want to see in the world or better experiences that you want to have in your life or for the people you love and care about, as well it could be fuel for living your values, standing up for yourself or what you believe in, to do your healing work, to have courageous conversations, to show up for things and take risks rather than play small and so much more.

So to wrap up, over the years since I started working with my anger in 2014, I now get really excited whenever I get angry because I know something amazing is always gonna come out of it on the other side, and I wanna wrap up by reading this comment, I wrote a post about anger on Instagram recently and my friend and client Nicki Innocent, we’ll give a shout out to Nicki who’s probably listening to the podcast. So shout out to you wherever you are listening from girl. Nicki left a really great comment that I appreciated so, so much. So I’m trying to pull this up here so I could see it. She said, and this is public, so I’m not violating anyone’s privacy cause it’s right there on my Instagram profile, she said, I spent so much of my life being ashamed or afraid of my anger, over the last few years when I get angry, I now start to get excited because I’ve learned there’s always some powerful wisdom within it.

I now actively work to resist the conditioning especially as a biracial black woman to stifle it or shove it down to become numb and wow has that shift changed so much mentally, emotionally, and physically. Always a work in progress, I’m loving the benefits of the reframe from something to be ashamed of to something to be honored, respected, and even celebrated. And I love that so much cause I also love that she added the cultural lens, depending on how you’ve been raised, socialized, culture, your race and ethnicity, may also affect how safe it is and where it’s safe for you to express your anger. So again, there’s always gonna be nuance, there’s always gonna be context and complexities to consider around and in conversations like these, but I hope it was useful, I hope it was helpful, as always I would love to hear from you, let me know how the episode was, share it up, share it with your friends, this is a great one to use as a conversation starter with friends or family members or whatever, siblings even to talk about, how was anger expressed in our family?

What did we learn about anger growing up in our culture? Or as women or whatever, or anything like that. Super great conversation starter, the show notes again are at untameyourself.com/347, and I also just wanna let you all know I’m bringing back something, I’m so excited to bring back, which is the I shine you shine challenge. Those of you who are OGs who’ve been around from like 2013 and 2014, you will remember the, I shine you shine challenge, after a year plus in the pandemic, which by the way, I saw someone on Twitter recently like within the last week call the pandemic the panini and I henceforth wants to refer to the pandemic as the panini.

And it just brings me like a little bit of joy in an odd time. But so after a year plus here in this frigging COVID 19 panini, I figured we could all use a little more shine, we could bring a little shine into our lives or a lot and into our lives. If you go to untameyourself.com/elc-waitlist, that will put you on the waitlist, not only for when we open enrollment for the EMBODIED Living Center in June, but to be the first people to get invited to the I shine you shine challenge in June. This experience is gonna be 11 days, it’s gonna be free, we’re setting up a whole awesome mighty network space just for the challenge. It’s gonna be really awesome, there’s gonna be a couple of free wild soul movement, erotic body movement classes, a summer solstice ceremony, a little group circle thing that we’re gonna do.

So there’s gonna be some cool stuff going on during that I shine you shine reboot. I’m super excited for that, so get yourself on the waitlist for that if you wanna make sure that you don’t miss that. And that’s it. I hope you enjoyed the anger episode. At the time that I’m filming this, I actually, this was like a long exhausting day, I’m on day two of my cycle, so my energy for this was a little bit lower. And some of you might be able to feel that or sense that or whatever, but, you know, this is life y’all, we got to show up with whatever we got for, you know, whatever we got going on. I hope he got a lot out of the episode, let me know what you thought, share it up, and I’ll see you later.