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Dynamic
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In this month's issue: The beginning of Fall - at least in the Northern Hemisphere - is a wonderfully rich time for inner and outer evocations. This month we look at ways to make use of your bodymind's sensoring capabilities for the benefit of you and your partners. Please forward 'Dynamic Living™' to your friends if you find it useful.
The Resident Quotation is repeated with each issue. It is chosen for its directness and clarity, and for its ability to combine thought and a basis for action in a way that is both reassuring and empowering. The current Resident, from the innovative, courageous and dynamic dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, exemplifies the essence and context of living dynamically: "There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. "It is not your
business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor
how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep
it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do
not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep
yourself open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open."
Profiting from your own intelligence system As a super-sensitive organism . . . You are . . . Megalopolis! You are . . . the Starship ‘Enterprise’! You are . . . bristling with highly sensitive visual, audio and other sensory perceptors; processing billions of bits of information; analyzing, forecasting, reviewing; fighting off millions of invisible invaders; progressing through the universe. You are . . . also sitting in your chair reading this e-zine. Unlike almost any other animal, the human is not well-equipped with built-in weaponry. We’re out-clawed by the cats; out-toothed by the alligators; out-hugged by the bears; out-jumped and outrun by almost everything, especially over a short distance. And yet here we are, for better or worse, the rulers of the globe. The reason lies in our ability to think and, in particular, to predict events and plan accordingly. Accurate planning and appropriate action depend on accurate information. Externally, we have all kinds of media feeding us the facts we need to manage our health, our finances, our careers. Internally, it’s a different matter. Partly because of the barrage of external stimuli, we tend to overlook the truest messages of all: those created and dispatched by our own organism. For this reason, a central plank of the dynamic living approach is: know thyself. The successful use of your inner world of emotions as a powerful source of information depends in large part on allowing yourself to feel and accept your inner signals. Then you are free to consider your responses to them and to act with reason rather than simply reacting in an involuntary, reactive way. The significance of this cannot be overestimated. At the international level, it would almost certainly have brought a very different and much more productive response to the events of 9/11. At the personal level, it might have saved you that last broken heart, or your child that recent, regretted, slap. The foundation of self-knowledge Full self-knowledge can only come about if the following three requirements are met:
That‘s a pretty tall order, but as tolerant, dynamic-living types we can honor ourselves for at least attempting it. In that way we get closer to the ideal, rather than shutting ourselves off from its possibility. Our physical nature gives us a wonderful and powerful source of information if we are open to its promptings and are prepared to learn what they mean. For example, years of confrontative group work has taught me to be much more aware of the occasions when I am projecting my feelings onto others rather than experiencing them truly myself. There is a particular spot in my lower right abdomen which makes its presence felt when I am ‘lying’ or projecting falsely. This spot often sounds the alarm when I am holding someone else responsible for something I perceive to be wrong in my life. You can imagine that it bellows lustily during domestic arguments! Once we’ve made the commitment to know ourselves, there are a number of techniques for exploring our true selves. The one that follows reminds us that we are not just minds, but bodyminds. A more holistic term would be ‘embodied spirits‘ but that may bother those who associate spirituality, not necessarily positively, with organized religion. What is your focus of awareness? This exercise is simple enough yet sufficiently revealing that people have been known to deny its results. Its conjectural basis is that at any moment there are millions of things with which we could preoccupy ourselves. However, we don’t make ourselves aware of more than a few of them. This suggests that there is an unconscious selection process constantly operating, governed by some aspect of our inner world and indicative of our intention in life. To discover your focus of awareness, find a space in the day when there are no overwhelming pressures demanding instant attention. Then, simply sit for two minutes, eyes open, and notice what comes into your awareness during that time. It sometimes helps to trigger the process by saying to yourself: "Right now, I’m aware of . . . . ". [It might be a good idea to do this now, if you can, before reading on.] Afterwards, review where your attention went and what were the most insistent signals, relating them to these three possible worlds:
The object of the exercise is not to be aware of as many things as possible - that can come later - but to discover your preferred focus. Which 'world' is the one where you place your emphasis? It’s also important to ask yourself which world you focused on the least. This is because the awareness we deselect can provide valuable clues to things we don’t want to see within ourselves. An obvious example: a man may avoid looking at an attractive woman because he doesn’t want his sense of inadequacy before her to show. Of course, unless he's very subtle it will make his discomfiture more obvious. Bodily sensations and body language are manifestations of our hidden conflicts and feelings. You might find yourself making a fist, or stretching, or stroking your thigh or playing with your hair. In each case, you could ask yourself: "In response to what?" Let's say you're sitting in a meeting and you find you're stroking your thigh, a very common behavior. Reflecting, you might deduce that it is a calming action. Then you can ask yourself what is agitating you such that you need calming, especially as you aren't conscious of any agitation. Then you might notice that the man hogging the limelight in the meeting has an abrasive voice which makes you feel assaulted. In fact, now you're aware of it, you realize it's such an awful voice you just want to shut him up! But you can't, so you shut his abrasiveness out and stroke your thigh, instead. Later on, he'll wonder why nobody at the meeting supported him. The others might even wonder the same thing, especially if his content was reasonably sensible. If he's lucky, someone will pluck up the courage to tell him his vocal presentation drove people away. Then he might ask himself what makes him talk in that way, when on some level he must know it's going to be ineffective. And so the awareness goes on, opening us up to ourselves. A rich addition to life Once you start to explore your awareness, you realize there's no reason not to constantly ask yourself, "What is going on inside me?" and, thus, become more self-aware. Next time you're in a social gathering or business meeting and feel agitated and want to interrupt, pause just a moment. Ask yourself: How am I feeling inside? What does my all-knowing self understand is taking place here? Then you might find yourself sitting it out, making thoughtful and facilitative comments rather than taking a confrontative position. In this way you gain a reputation for being effective in meetings - and you get your own way, often without anyone realizing it. Make a game of becoming open to all the feelings and sensations inside you, with the goal of becoming a fully experiencing person. You’ll notice subtle shifts in facial expressions, eye movements and tones of voice, first in others, then in yourself. Adopt ‘beginner’s mind’ in a familiar situation and try to see details you never noticed before. If you find yourself resistant to doing this, ask yourself what it is you may be afraid of revealing, even to yourself. Then remember that to an experienced, self-aware observer you are almost certainly communicating the truth about yourself, no matter what your words may be. Be warned though. When we start being aware it is a heady experience. Sadly, we almost always have it wrong, projecting ourselves rather than truly reading others. Still, as the Japanese say: "Fall down seven times, get up eight." Sooner or later you’ll start to be right more often than not. As a bodymind, you are forced to take your intergalactic spaceship wherever you go. It has more windows than Manhattan, more electrical wiring than Tokyo and more architectural elegance than Paris. Enjoy it and its intelligence sources to the maximum and it will reward you with a rich and effective life.
Have you hugged your anger today? Deep, dark, surprising and frightening, our ability to feel anger is one of our most powerful weapons in building a liberated and empowered life. It enables us to build friendships and other growth-oriented alliances. It keeps us safe from attack. It motivates us to make the changes essential to a rich and fulfilled life. Sadly, the feeling called anger is also one of the hardest sources of inner information to interpret. It is therefore frequently misunderstood. It can have frightening and even dangerous repercussions when not recognized and embraced. The message of this article is: learn to love your anger. This will protect you from its negative potential and will free you to understand others’ anger-driven actions. By doing this, you will free yourself from one of the most controlling dynamics in the human condition. The first step to embracing anger is to recognize that anger is a feeling, not a behavior. Anger is a feeling, not a behavior We’ve been pretty misled about anger. We see somebody shouting and we think: he’s angry. In fact, he could equally well be hurt or scared. We confuse the behavior with the feeling. Anger is not a screaming child or a screaming mother. These are manifestations of anger, behaviors designed to relieve us of the pain of the anger stimulus. Technically, anger is an emotional-physiological-cognitive internal state. It is a secondary emotion, which is to say it is a feeling which follows inevitably from another feeling. We always feel something else - a primary emotion - first. As an example, the feeling of anger is triggered by such events as being afraid, attacked, offended, forced, controlled, trapped, interrogated, or pressured. Anger also results from hurt pride, physical pain, and from being unable to meet unreasonable expectations. These sources are particularly difficult when they occur in childhood, when direct expression of anger is typically forbidden. Then the feelings must be managed in other ways, with results reviewed later in this article. What all these primary feelings amount to are feelings of hurt; of pain, not pleasure. Accordingly, we can say that anger is the necessary and inevitable reaction to hurt. The particular nature of anger benefits us in two ways:
Before we can do either of these things, however, we have to fully accept and invite our anger into our conscious awareness. This means accepting its inevitability and the fact that, being inevitable, it is always totally justifiable. The inevitability of angriness Unless your nervous system has been damaged, if you put your hand in a fire it will hurt. The hurt will prompt you to pull your hand away, and probably to say something along the lines of "Ouch!". I suggest that this sequence is a totally healthy, self-protective and inevitable consequence of your action. I further suggest that the "Ouch!", or other expletive, is actually a behavior related not to the initial burning, but to the secondary emotion of anger which followed inevitably on the pain of the burn. In linear format, the sequence therefore goes: pain - self-protective physical behavior - anger - angry behavior. Once the idea of the inevitability of anger is accepted, anger-motivated behaviors can be seen everywhere. A toddler walks into a chair and hits it: "Bad chair!" A commuter runs for a train, misses it, and sighs heavily, pained in his frustration. The pain does not have to be huge for anger to be present. We’re so accustomed to thinking of anger as overpowering and frightening that we forget the two-hundred times a day when we experience the minor hurts of existence. It’s only when we reach home and kick off our shoes that we realize how tense we’ve been. That is the measure of our effort in containing our anger. All anger is justifiable If we are to embrace and learn from our anger we must be totally open to it. That means we have to see it as it is: totally justifiable. As soon as we regard it as reprehensible we want to hide from it. However, the formula is simple: Anger is inevitable, therefore it must always be justifiable. Even as I write that, I sense my own resistance to it and have to remind myself: Anger is the feeling, not the behavior. Anger will not be denied As anger is an inevitable emotional response to hurt, there is no way to prevent it from happening. Yet many of us will say, with total conviction: "I’m not angry." Partly, this is because in addition to the conscious uses of anger, we also have unconscious ways to experience and apply it. We may unconsciously use anger to blame others for our own shortcomings, to justify oppressing others, to boost our own sagging egos, and to handle other emotions (as when we become aggressive when we are afraid). Any situation that frustrates us, especially when we think someone else is to blame for our loss, is a potential trigger for anger and aggression. Back in 1972, L. Madlow identified many of the clues to anger in his book: "Anger: How to recognize and cope with it." He categorized many behaviors and verbal comments, some of which would be said to others while others might only be thought to ourselves. They may help identify the presence of anger you have not previously been aware of. Recognizing our and others’ anger The search for anger inside ourselves repays immeasurable dividends because it means we are mining our deepest needs and desires. It’s no problem recognizing when we’re really angry, but it is the minor hurts that guide us each day. These prompt the behaviors, particularly in group settings at work or in personal life, which end up dictating our direction in each moment and therefore through life. The more things we recognize in our lives that cause us pain, the more clearly we will be set on a successful path of pleasure. Our angers, tiny as well as huge, are our guides onto the rewarding path. Here are some of the indicators Madlow identified to look out for:
Direct verbal or cognitive signs; words and attitudes that reveal anger:
These are phrases and styles you hear so often you may not register the anger beneath them.
These are the indicators you especially need to watch for in families, where microscopic changes in behavior can go unnoticed until they suddenly appear as a fully-fledged trend:
The extent to which anger is integrated into our moment-by-moment behavior and interactions is made much clearer by such a list. However, there are also times when it is a highly significant but invisible factor in interpersonal dynamics. It is then referred to as concealed or passive anger. Passive anger is such a frequent and potent source of disturbed relationships that it warrants a considerable section to itself. Remember, all of us are capable of manifesting our anger in any of these ways. Passive anger: the scourge of relationships for angry and angered The persistent passive management of anger is one of the hardest personality traits to contend with in a relationship. This is because it is rooted in a kind of false innocence and denial which can be hard to dent. Most of us associate anger with nastiness. Typically, we are reluctant to think of ourselves as potentially nasty, but we have little trouble believing that others are capable of it. The predominantly passively angry person - often designated ‘passive aggressive’ - takes this to its ultimate conclusion: they act as if they believe that they are pure as driven snow while everyone around them is a disaster waiting to happen. Given that we suffer small hurts hundreds of times a day, we should expect fairly frequent expressions of anger. One of the clearest indicator that someone is passively angry is that they don’t express anger in a direct way often enough. Our passive-aggressive tendencies can be seen when we show our feelings through our behaviors rather than by open expression of our feelings. Procrastination, inefficiency, and forgetfulness are passive-aggressive behaviors commonly used to avoid doing what we need to do or have been told by others must be done. When being passive-aggressive, we will appear to comply with another's wishes, and may even say that we want to do what we have agreed to. However, the requested action is either performed too late to be helpful, performed in a way that is useless, or otherwise sabotaged. "Oh! Is that what you meant?" is a passive-aggressive form of apology. It escapes blame while subtly holding the other responsible for not being clearer. 'Passive-aggressive personality' is often used as a label to identify those who make extensive use of this coping strategy. However, it is important for us not to fall into the passive-aggressive trap of seeing these traits as just existing in 'them'. Passive aggressive qualities are present in all of us. Passive-aggressive signs and qualities The 'goal' of passive-aggressive behavior is to get the other person to feel and perhaps show the anger which is actually present but denied in ourselves. The ways we go about this are almost infinite, but some signs are:
Not even the most passive-aggressive individual is going to display every single one of these traits, and none of the rest of us are going to be entirely free of them. These behaviors are underpinned by a fear of authority and thus a need to avoid its effects. So we hide out. This goes hand in hand with another common passive skill: the ability to apologize with great charm and frequency. Finally, in case you think there’s no way you could ever fit into the passive-aggressive model, consider this statistic from Psychology Today (1983). The magazine asked, "If you could secretly push a button and thereby eliminate any person with no repercussions to yourself, would you press that button?" The result? 69% of males and 56% of women said yes. The answer to passive-aggressive behavior? Learn to identify what's going on and develop safe ways to express the primary feeling that prompts the anger response. Fear and anger Fear, that great opponent of love and growth, is a major source and sustainer of anger. Indeed, the more physiologically damaging and overt anger reactions seem to occur when we feel utterly helpless. In this, they exactly emulate our condition when anger first appears - in early infancy. Fear is also a major factor in triggering passive or concealed anger reactions in our relationships, especially:
Another fear-promoted manifestation of anger is seen in our need to present as the victim. In this mode, we believe that someone or some situation has mistreated us. More chronically, we might believe that the whole world is against us and that we’ve been singled out for bad treatment: "Born under a bad sign," as the Willie Dixon blues has it, "I’ve been down since I began to crawl./If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at at all." There is a major advantage for our victim selves in feeling helpless. It means we don’t have to take responsibility for what has happened to us. Phew! In case you've missed the pleasure of seeing the victim in yourself, here are some of the signs. Victims:
When we victimize ourselves we are locking the door on growth out of fear of our own anger. That fear may be of our own inner violence, or 'murderous rage', or it may be of a less extreme nature. None of us wants to be seen as ugly, nasty, mean-spirited, bad, or any number of other negative characterizations. However, those are the behaviors which are prompted by anger, not the anger itself. Much better to embrace the anger, take responsibility for ourselves, monitor our responses and grow a little stronger each day. It is also better for the world in general. It benefits all to be open with your anger Poet William Blake, writing a couple of hundred years ago, expressed the reasons for speaking your angry mind as succinctly as anyone: A Poison Tree I
was angry with my friend: And
I water'd it in fears, And
it grew both day and night, And
into my garden stole William Blake
Another reason for articulating our anger is to stop it surfacing 'by surprise'. Many violent crimes are committed by people described as gentle and good natured. Everyone is surprised when ‘the nicest person on the block" turns out to be a serial killer. More clinically, psychological tests frequently describe persons who have committed violent acts as being over-controlled. By this they mean they are not emotional or impulsive and are very inhibited about expressing aggression against anyone. It’s doubtful that too many readers of ‘Dynamic Living™’ are potential murderers, but all of us are capable of letting our anger build up as we smile our way through the day. It’s only on the way home that we find ourselves overreacting to a perceived insult on the highway, or shout at the children unfairly. Other psychological effects of repressed anger include fairly major signs of distress, such as depression, eating disorders, self harming and sexual acting out. And don't forget the increased possibility of heart attack or stroke. Wow. Time to start shouting! NOW! Or maybe not. In reality, if we are aware of our anger and accepting of it, we can actually use it to our own advantage. We do not have to shout and scream and turn red in the face if that doesn’t seem tactically wise at that point. How to make anger work for you The ‘typical’ response to anger is to demonstrate our displeasure by one of the many behaviors designed to keep others away. We might shout, grimace, swear, threaten or so on. The problem with all these standard techniques is that they alert and alienate others without passing on any usefully specific information. This comes about partly because secondary feelings do not meet the originating need. Thus, if the hurt at the base of my anger is fear, swearing doesn’t resolve it. The person I swear at can’t know what to do to help and my stance probably makes things worse by driving away the person who might help me. What would be more useful? You'll have your own ideas, but here's a start:
The answers to these questions will help you decide what course of action to take in view of what your goals are. Simply being aware that you have multiple options and that you can decide to pick the best one helps soothe the anger. If you can give yourself the time, you could follow this sequence of steps before expressing yourself:
As soon as we begin to think about our options and their consequences, we start to feel more in control and less threatened. Then we can make appropriate plans and escape from the automatic stimulus-response mode which is the root of anger's danger and universal dislike.
Anger is an intense emotion. It is evidence that we feel strongly about something or somebody. We don’t feel angry with people who don’t matter to us. If we allow it to, it can help show us what we value and what we lack, what we believe and what our insecurities are. It can help us become more aware of what we feel strongly about and which emotional needs are important to us. Anger which is embraced helps us in several ways. First it raises our self-awareness. Second, it helps us communicate more precisely. Third, it helps us learn more quickly who respects our feelings and who we want to spend time with. Paradoxically, embracing our anger helps us feel more in control. When we allow ourselves to acknowledge that we are feeling provoked, we can take control of our response. Pretty much every study on the subject shows that people feel better and are healthier when they have a sense of control over their lives. Anger, then, is the much-maligned essential clue and motivator to a richer life. Embrace it, enjoy your malign fantasies as fantasies, and try only to act in thoughtful response to the primary, triggering, emotion. You won't succeed a hundred percent - after all, under stress we regress - but you could feel a lot better for trying. cjc
"Always saddle your own horse." - Connie Douglas Reeves, 1901-2003 Reeves was one of the first women to attend the University of Texas Law School but dropped out during the Depression to teach riding. A Cowgirl Hall of Famer, she died at the age of 101 of injuries sustained as the result of being thrown while encouraging her steed into a canter. She had always said that she preferred to die in just that manner. As recently as 1998, she was still conducting three two-hour classes, six days a week. An ordinary heroine.
It's
now possible to take a look through the back issues of Dynamic Living.
Just visit: http://www.santafecoach.com/dl/dlintro.htm.
Copyright ©2003 by Christopher J. Coulson. All rights reserved. Contact Christopher at: 4, Eaton Manor, The Drive, Hove, East Sussex BN3 3PT, UK Telephone: 01273 749636; or toll-free from the USA:1-866-761-1392. Christopher
J. Coulson |
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