Month: July 2019

Love and anger

Whilst these two make an unlikely partnership, I find them both equally fascinating. As I do the relationship between them.

They are universal emotions that we all experience to more or lesser degrees.  Hopefully more of the love than the anger but either way, they are two of the most powerful and enlivening emotions.

I’ve been thinking about them more closely recently as I facilitated a teaching on anger a few weeks ago and I’ll be teaching on love, this weekend.

As such, I’ve been paying more attention to both than usual.

It has reminded me that what I regularly see through my work is how the human difficulty in acknowledging let alone tolerating, valuing or understanding anger, can serve as a barrier to the flow of love.

I’ve seen this again and again. 

The person who cannot even speak to another such is their suppressed anger towards them.  Yet after allowing said anger to be felt, expressed and released in a healthy, contained way, they realise that their ability to see, speak and listen to said person has been restored!

Now, I’m not suggesting that deeply entrenched, complicated matters can be so simplistic but I am saying that unacknowledged, unprocessed, un dealt with anger does block love.

This applies whether it is anger to another, anger to the self or even anger to God. 

Whilst anger is a healthy and important emotion that points to where our boundaries have been broken, an injustice has been experienced or an unmet need requires a response, if we don’t acknowledge this honestly, it will seep out indirectly as well as harming us to hold it within.

Anger is a such a necessary emotion but if we hold on to it, it prevents us from fully loving the one it is felt towards, be it, us, another or God.

It blocks love.

It is as if you cannot have love and anger travelling down the same heart lines at the same time. We can feel love and we can feel anger but we cannot have both flowing through our hearts together.  Like oil and water, they are not compatible.  They cannot mix.

And if we fail to deal with and release our anger in appropriate ways, it acts as a barrier to the flow of love.

Yet when we examine, explore and expunge our anger, the heart becomes free once more for love to flow forth.  The degree to which the love flows is directly linked to the degree to which we deal with all those horrible love blocking feelings, of which anger is the most powerful.

And if love is the most precious thing any of us can ever receive or give, doesn’t that make anger, as its biggest threat, worthy of our acknowledgement and attention?

I was recently reminded of the power of anger to block love. 

An ongoing, minor, yet irritating situation has evoked a strong sense of injustice and anger within me.  The effect of which was a total block of love and an uprising of angry words that I wasn’t proud to be spitting out.  I was experiencing how powerfully anger can arise, wiping out any kind of loving thoughts or actions in the process. Whilst I had to deal with what was triggered within me, it was a timely reminder that whilst holding on to that anger, I could not also house love. 

I needed to make a choice.

Hold on to what I felt to be justified anger, causing myself to behave in a way even I disliked and was taken aback by, or actually acknowledge it, work through it and make a choice to let it go.

What I couldn’t do, was pretend it wasn’t there and fill up with, let alone share, love!

Whilst the anger had a hold, the love couldn’t get a look in!

And whilst I’m all too aware of the unavoidable experience of and necessity for anger, I have no desire to hold on to this at the cost of losing that flow of love.

I’ve tasted both and I know which I prefer! 

It’s just that sometimes I need reminding that I have a choice. 

Otherwise I fall in to the trap of unthinkingly reacting badly to what I experience to be inconsiderate behaviour from another.  Whilst I’m not willing to be anyone’s doormat, I can’t respect myself if I use an annoying experience of another to excuse my own poor response.  And of course responding badly fuels and invites more of the same.

And I guess that’s the thing, whilst all kinds of stuff, serious and inconsequential will come at us in life, we get only to choose how we will respond. 

Will we add more anger and horribleness in to anger inducing situations or will we acknowledge our honest emotions, let them go, be filled with love once more that we can send that back in whatever way is appropriate whether actions, or prayers from a distance.

My first reaction in this recent situation wasn’t one I’m proud of.  But then God did that thing He does.  He reminded me that I was preparing a teaching on love and I might like to reflect on how loving my own behaviour was!

I kind of love and hate that He does that!  Because as uncomfortable as it is to admit to my own poor behaviour, it is also liberating to own, acknowledge and choose how to deal with it.  In doing so, I can choose not to allow it to fester to my detriment and not to continue the cycle.

Anger requires dealing with promptly.

Life is too short to hold on to anything that blocks love.

Loss & Life

This week has seen me enjoying a bit of space to simply be, in between the usual commitments.

What a treat.

It has enabled me to do a little processing of recent events such as the sudden death of a young woman.  This has also tapped in to the death of my spiritual mother.

I was aided in my ability to engage on a heart level with these deaths via a book a friend lent me.  It is called Love, Interrupted, by Simon Thomas.  It is an incredibly honest account of Simon’s experience of losing his wife, the mother of his child, within the space of three days. It is quite simply, heart rending.

It serves as a painful reminder of how utterly cruel life sometimes is as well as illustrating the subsequent suffering that such heartache inflicts upon those experiencing it. Not just the death but all the losses that ripple out afterwards; the loss of how it was, the loss of no longer being like others or having what others have. It is almost a series of mini deaths of life as it was known, that follow the initial death.

And, due to the lack of honest conversation around the reality of death or loss, those losses that follow often go unnoticed. At least they do by those not experiencing them. This can really add pain to a process that can already feel unbearable.

I haven’t quite finished reading this book yet and part of me doesn’t want to. Ironically I’m avoiding it ending! I just find it so refreshing and reassuring to read of someone being so honest about the harsh reality of death, the losses that follow and the messy impact it has upon the human heart.  

It is rare for someone to resist the urge to down play such a process for fear of whether others can handle it.  But I have only the utmost respect for the writer’s courage in sharing this deeply painful, isolating, lonely, angry, messy experience whilst also managing to find moments of utter beauty and joy as him and his son continue to create new ways of living alongside the ongoing loss.

For anyone wanting a better understanding of how grief can be, I would totally recommend this book.

Death and loss are of course an unavoidable part of life.  

As much as we don’t like to talk about it, death will come to us all and none amongst us know when.

And whilst death is the most obvious form of loss, it is most certainly not the only form.  Loss comes in many guises, lots of which are not visible or acknowledged. Loss may come via the ending or death of a certain situation being what it once was whether a career, health, relationship or anything else. It may also be present via the loss of something that has not happened or been the way we have wanted or anticipated.

Loss infiltrates our lives subtly by continuously.

Things change, situations change, we change.

Death happens.

Life happens.

Change is unavoidable.

And loss runs throughout these realities.

I was reflecting upon these themes during my precious free moments this week.  Loss and death are such inevitable and yet painful aspects of our experience of being human.

And yet, all around us, new beginnings and life are equally at work. They don’t cancel one another out or render each other any less meaningful or painful, they simply co-exist.

It has given me great pleasure this week to see the new buds of life that continue to appear in my garden at the moment, from roses to sweetpea’s to clematis.  They symbolise such hope.  For whilst parts of life are constantly ending and changing, my garden reminds me that new parts continue to emerge and develop.

I love this.

Well, I love the new growth more than I love the old endings and loss! But I do love the way both make up the whole picture.

It is not always easy when there is a loss of the way things were but the more we allow ourselves to engage with the emotional reality of this, the more we become able to notice and embrace the new life that begins to peak through.

I’ve experienced clear moments of the spark of life and joy erupting back through me this week following the stunned haze left by the recent death.

I’m grateful.

Death and loss keep happening.

But so does new life and growth.