It’s All True

“Anger is always the bodyguard of our woundedness.­ There’s the trauma, ­there’s the anger, ­there’s the rage, but healing is about moving through that. Not distancing, not distracting, but moving through it to that really fundamental sadness and hurt that’s beneath the anger.”

Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens in the Harvard Divinity School’s newsletter

A few decades ago, I sat in a week-long workshop with a teacher I’d long admired. Noticing how we were passively note-taking, he suddenly threw down the gauntlet, asked why we’d each spent the considerable time and money to attend a program devoted to authentic leadership when we were, at that moment, like sheep grazing in a pasture?

I knew in my bones this was the invitation I had to accept and so, taking a risk by being the first one to reply as honestly as I could, I said that for several months, I’d been feeling a low-grade anger with so much of what I’d been seeing, experiencing, feeling both at work, and in the world. That I was irritable, quick to judge, hypercritical of myself, and those around me. That I’d lost my spark, my joy, my initiative and creativity. That while I didn’t feel depressed, I wondered if I was.

And he said, looking me straight in the eye, that my anger was my response and in direct proportion to my heart’s deep sadness for the state of the world and my life.

I felt my shoulders drop, my gut relax, and almost wept with relief for this re-framing. Later in the week, he also dropped another belief bomb: that as leaders, we had to learn to keep our hearts open in hell.

Right now, and for the past three months, I have again been feeling anger. Though more the righteous outrage variety. I’m irritable and hypercritical. I’ve lost my spark, feel flat and less inclined to engage in conversation. I haven’t written a poem in ages, and wonder if the fallowness has given over to being stuck in frozen-solid clay, a nearly impossible medium from which any creative seeds might sprout and emerge. Right now, I’ve wondered if I’m depressed.

In quiet moments, when my heart softens and my eyes well with tears, I remember this is truthful protection. The urgency I’ve felt to shake up and ask for action and accountability from those who have helped create this current hell, IS my deep sadness, though its origins are from long ago. The inherited trauma from generations who lived silenced by threats, abuse, and death. The small child in me – who was me – who, sensing things were terribly wrong and seeing no one do anything, felt betrayed and anxiously compelled to do something to fix it.

I’m leaning into the realization that NOW I’m feeling the same betrayal, first felt as a child, at the hands of people who should have known better and done better, and now towards people who are intentionally making it so much worse. Its fear and anxiety have been both driving and distancing me from an almost wordless sadness and hurt. I’ve been acting out from this long ago wounding.

To continue – mindlessly – would be further wounding.
To continue – mindfully – is keeping my heart open in hell.
“It’s all true,” the mantra I learned from another wise teacher.
May it be so.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.