There are times when I’m really disturbed; moments where I could be described as extremely annoyed, excessively worried, pissed off. They’re rare, depending on a number of factors – my moon cycle, how much I’ve meditated, who’s involved – but when they come they bring a feeling so big, filled with so much energy, that it soon becomes emotion and it’s all I can do to contain myself.
I used to believe these rampant emotions were a signal, that they pointed to a failure in my carefully reprogrammed mind-body connection, that I should know better.
I would tell myself that it represented a lack of control, to let a set of circumstances bypass every boundary and emotional checkpoint I had set up. As I heard myself repetitively complaining or ranting to those who would listen, I would simultaneously witness a separate stream of consciousness occurring. In this parallel stream, I would be asking myself whether the other person thought I was failing; whether as they helped me they wondered why I was not practicing what I preach, why I wasn’t meditating, working magic, communing with my spirits. And even as I saw myself through the eyes of another, I couldn’t stop. The emotions would continue to pour from me; dirty, raw, unprocessed.
This was until I began to see things differently, before I reframed it. During an astrological reading, I suddenly realised that there was a vast difference between my ranting and the type that I openly cannot tolerate in others. What I was doing wasn’t fruitless, it didn’t end in a lack of action, or even the wrong disempowered action, it ended with certain and aligned steps that I would take.
These moments of big emotion were not a bypassing of my carefully constructed systems, or something that I needed to eradicate, but instead part of a personal process for shaking off the excess energy clinging to me from fresh events. The emotional mastery to be found in this moment was not how to remove the original feeling, but how to accept the chain of events my physical body needed to go through, in order to allow my mind space to deal with the situation at hand.
There are some instances in life that go so far as to cast a spell over us. Not the traditional or cliché depiction of spells that we see in movies, but those with more subtlety that take us over just as completely. Distinguishing between whether you are under the spell of a person or thing takes practice, but acknowledging the possibility of both is a huge step in the right direction. Personally, it has enabled me to quieten the stream of consciousness that had me wondering what others think of me. It has allowed me to focus solely on how much excess energy my body is trying to dispel. I’m able to concentrate on losing as much of the baggage around an event as possible, before moving forward with a solution.
The image that comes to mind when I see myself going through this process is from nature. If you have ever seen two ducks fight, you’ll know the first thing they do afterwards is vigorously flap their wings. They then go about their day, like the incident never happened. That’s all my ranting is, a steady flap of my wings.
If you recognise any element of this within yourself, I have the following questions for you:
Are you aware of when your feelings become emotion?
How much of your emotion – ranting, crying, screaming – is really your body simply trying to cope with an influx of unexpected energy?
And once the energy has left you, is it free-flowing positive action that follows, or the stickiness of powerless resignation?
Having this knowledge of yourself is one thing, but you need to know what to do with it. Don’t allow yourself to move blindly from one wing flapping incident to the next. Figure out where the power is in between. In all of your aftermaths, chose your new direction wisely.