After my morning meditations, I notice that sometimes I feel very angry and it sits on me like a cloud for the rest of the day. I mentioned this to one friend who suggested that I am releasing anger through the meditation instead of suppressing it. I believe this to be true. And yet, I don't want to spend the rest of my day in a rageful fog. It is akin to the rage, I feel while cleaning my house, as an uncensored soundtrack of vitriol plays in my head to whatever thought, object or person crosses my path. I have to restrain myself from sweeping my four year old out of the house just because he is playing in the path of my broom. At these times, my rage is so gargantuan and out of proportion to whatever I am reacting to that it is comical. Even I can laugh in the middle of it at the image of myself as a furious housekeeper with a broom, like the romantic lead in a twentieth century Irish drama. The corrupt Boston Mayor James Michael Curley was venerated because he brought the Irish cleaning women of Boston, including his mother, off their knees by giving them mops instead of rags to clean the floors of City Hall. I understand this veneration. This essay by Thich Nhaht Hahn which includes a walking meditation to release the anger is interesting. He compares anger to festering compost which I like:
"When anger is born in us, we can be aware that anger is an energy in us, and we can accept that energy in order to transform it into another kind of energy. When we have a compost bin filled with organic material that is decomposing and smelly, we know that we can transform the waste into beautiful flowers... We need the insight and non-dual vision of the organic gardener with respect to our anger. We need not be afraid of it or reject it. We know that anger can be a kind of compost, and that it is within its power to give birth to something beautiful. We need anger the way an organic gardener needs compost. If we know how to accept our anger, we already have some peace and joy. Gradually we can transform anger completely into peace, love and understanding."
He also discusses the futility of focusing on the target of our anger, replaying the scenarios that enraged us and thus feeding the outrage. My partner has a similar response to the problem of the messy house (as well he might, since he is a great contributer to its messiness): "Within the messy house is the clean house, within the clean house is the messy house." I have a mediation book which includes cleaning as meditation, which it can be if you do it slowly, with intention, without aggravation. I can see clearly how acknowledging the anger you are feeling is helpful. It diminishes it by stepping outside it to describe it. I already feel better by writing about it.
Another helpful suggestion, I received about dealing with rageful feelings after meditation is to come out slowly from your meditative state which I haven't been doing at all. As soon as my guided meditation is over, I am up and off to the next task. It is recommended that you sit in silence for a few minutes or even lay down and rest for ten minutes or so before you get up to continue your day. I will try this tomorrow.
This suggestions reminds me about the importance of transitional moments, which I tend to ignore. I just jump from one event or conversation to the next without marking and ending what went before. Often, I leave a party without saying goodbye, or hang up the phone midgoodbye. We need time to make these shift in consciousness or activity. I remember when my boy started pre-K, much was made of the several months of transitional time, where he was weaned onto his new schedule, with the parents in the classroom, then outside the classroom, then off site over a period of several weeks. Some children needed several months to adjust.
I was chatting with my friend MLB about the challenges of scheduling your day (life) when your schedule is primarily your own. This is something I am continually working on even though for almost twenty years I have created my own schedule. I realized recently that it is not the work time it is difficult to schedule but the free time and sometimes I allow my work to take up more time than it needs because I feel it should take more time in order to be good enough and also because I am unwilling to face the power and the joy of unscheduled time where I can dream and plan and let the muses come speak to me which of course is when all our best work begins. By not acknowledging the separate moments in the day, I will write now and I will dream then and I will play with my boy here and I will make dinner here, and I will meditate here, sometimes the separate moments bleed into each other and it all seems like brown soup where nothing ever begins and above all nothing ever ends or is finished.
And yet, I have created a life that resists the tightly scheduled week where I give over my time to another organization or person and yet I now recognize that we have a schedule to our day whether or not we carefully create one just as we have a morning practice, an eating philosophy and so on whether or not we consciously design them. I am slowly waking up to the idea that I should consider designing all moments of my day so that the hours spent relaxing are not filled with the anxiety that I should be working on something else.
Namaste.
