Make Your Anger Your Best Friend: Learning to Work with Your Most Misunderstood Emotion

In this episode, Emily explores anger not as something to transcend or eliminate, but as a powerful catalyst for necessary change. Drawing on neuroscience, Buddhist wisdom, and real client experiences, she breaks down the critical difference between repressed anger (when we don't even know we're angry) and suppressed anger (when we consciously push it down)—and why so many of us never learned to recognize this emotion in the first place.

Emily shares how buried anger manifests through our bodies (migraines, digestive issues, chronic pain), our minds (depression, numbness, exhaustion), and our relationships (passive-aggression, misplaced reactivity). She debunks the myth of "venting" and rage rooms, revealing what actually works: mindfulness practices that lower physiological arousal while honoring anger's wisdom.

Most importantly, she reframes anger as sacred information—a teacher showing us where boundaries have been crossed, what we value, and what needs to change. From collective rage about injustice to personal anger about being dismissed or taken for granted, Emily offers practical tools including the Three Rs framework, somatic practices, and a step-by-step anger processing guide. This is about developing a mature, conscious relationship with one of our most powerful emotions and learning to channel its fire toward meaningful transformation.

https://www.bloomingwand.com
https://www.youtube.com/@bloomingwand_emilyoneal

Transcript

Naming The Sacred Work Of Anger

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Blooming Wand, your home for grounded spiritual content. I'm Emily O'Neill, Evidential Psychic Medium, Intuitive Healer, and Mentor. And on today's episode, I really want to talk about anger and just in general the sacred work of anger, understanding, processing, and honoring this powerful emotion. I do think that sometimes people think that spirituality doesn't involve engaging with anger and that everything needs to be, quote, love and light. And there's a lot of bypassing around difficult emotions such as anger. But I think anger is a really important element to everyone's spiritual practice. It can be a great teacher. And the reality is that the world feels pretty heavy right now. We're watching immigration enforcement escalate, if you want to call it enforcement, escalate into violence. And an American citizen was killed in the street by ice. And people are being detained without due process, and the news cycles brings fresh outrages every day, at least it does to me. And closer to home, we're navigating difficult relationships, workplace injustices, family tensions, and the constant pressure to keep it together when everything feels like it's falling apart. So we have this global, national stuff that's going on, but we also have the stuff that's going on within our individual lives. And anger is not only present in our lives right now, it's necessary. It's an alarm bell telling us that something is deeply wrong and needs our attention. We're taught so many conflicting messages about anger. Don't be angry, it's unspiritual, unfeminine, uncivilized, or punch a pillow, scream into the void, let it all out. But what does the science tell us? And how can we approach anger as both a spiritual practice and an act of self-care? What if anger isn't something to transcend or eliminate, but a vehicle for necessary change? What if the real spiritual work isn't about becoming perpetually calm, but developing a mature, conscious relationship with one of our most powerful emotions? At a neural level, anger involves the amygdala, our threat detection center, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, our emotional regulation hub. Think of anger as your nervous system's alarm bell. It's information. It tells you when boundaries have been crossed, when something matters very deeply to you, or when a situation requires attention. Unlike fear, which makes us want to flee, anger mobilizes us to move towards the problem. When you feel angry, you want to do something. Anger is empowering. This is precisely why it becomes a vehicle for change, both personally and collectively. In her book When Things Fall Apart, Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron writes, feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is we're holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we would rather collapse and back away. They're like messengers that show us with terrifying clarity exactly where we're stuck. And I believe this can be applied where we're stuck individually or collectively. Your anger about what's happening in the world, about being dismissed at work, about being taken for granted in your relationship, that anger is information. It's showing you exactly where change needs to happen. Understanding repression. What is it and why do we do it? Let's define our terms clearly. Repression refers to the unconscious process of pushing unwanted emotions, particularly anger, out of conscious awareness entirely. Unlike suppression, repression happens without our awareness, we genuinely don't recognize that we're angry. The anger gets buried so deeply that we lose conscious access to it. Suppression, by contrast, is a conscious choice. Suppressed anger involves the conscious decision to hide or push down angry feelings that we're fully aware of and experiencing. We feel the anger but we choose not to express it. Why do we repress or suppress anger in the first place? Much of what children learn about behavior and communication comes from primary caregivers. Adults with repressed emotions often had caregivers who rarely showed emotion or talked about their feelings, or they were shamed and punished for them, for expressing them in particular. Or they were told their emotions were wrong or denied their experience. Someone who represses anger may fear that if they directly expressed it, they would be rejected or abandoned. This fear often originates in childhood but continues to operate unconsciously in adulthood. We've been taught by society that it's not nice to express your anger. People won't like you if you express your anger. For many women, there are additional gendered messages. Research shows that when women do express anger, they're more likely to talk about it with others or experience it through physical symptoms like headaches, digestive issues, or chronic pain. However, cultural norms often pressure women to camouflage their anger or redirect it inward rather than expressing it directly or outwardly. We're taught to be nice girls or good girls. Don't rock the boat, whatever you do. For men, the pattern is different. Expressing anger outwardly may be more socially acceptable, but the vulnerable the vulnerability or hurt feelings beneath that anger often feel too threatening to acknowledge. So anger becomes the only acceptable emotion while sadness, fear, and pain get buried underneath. The common thread, we learn that anger threatens our connections, our safety, our belonging. So we bury it. We become nice, we accommodate, we people please, and the anger goes underground. But here's the thing repressed anger doesn't disappear. It transforms, shape shifts, and finds other channels. The consequences ripple through every dimension of our lives. Now let's dive into the psychological effects. Psychoanalysts have long known that when anger is repressed and turned inward, it turns into depression. The anger becomes self-directed. As people divert their anger towards themselves, either consciously or unconsciously, they suffer from depression, anxiety, and somatic somatiz somatiz Oh my gosh, somatiz somatization. That was a hard one. So I think that's really important one because I know that I've personally experienced having a lot of physical pain, and I do think it was connected to me not being fully connected to my anger. As a 45-year-old woman, that has definitely changed, and I'm I'm happy to say that, but it did take a lot of work. Possible psychological consequences in the long term include mood problems such as anxiety and depression. We've talked about that, but also feelings of powerlessness, numbness, and problems managing emotions in general. People with repressed anger may find that they rarely feel angry but experience chronic lethargy and numbness. Raise your hand if that resonates with you. Oh my gosh, that resonates with me. I could tell you up until recently, I would tell you I rarely feel angry, but I would often feel like tired or worn out or numb. And I will say that now that I'm more able to connect with and process and be with my emotions, that's not so much the case. And my energy levels have changed. Now the energy it takes to keep anger buried, it's enormous. It takes a lot of energy. And just think about it. If you're if that's happening and you don't know it and you're like, I'm feeling lethargic and tired all the time, I mean, there could be something else going on. I don't want to say that that isn't the case, but it could be from all the energy that's being channeled towards suppressing your emotions, and you don't even know that that's happening. It's a completely unconscious thing. That's mind-blowing to me. The other thing is that paranoia can emerge when someone projects repressed anger outward. Rather than acknowledging that something has caused them to feel hostile, they project these feelings onto others and perceive others to be hostile to them. The world begins to feel dangerous when really it's our unfelt anger that we're encountering everywhere we look. Now let's get into the physical health consequences. In his influential book, When the Body Says No, Understanding the Stress Disease Connection, physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Mate writes that when emotions are repressed, this inhibition disarms the body's defense against illness. Repression disorganizes and confuses our physiological defenses so that these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors. Now, I want to say that while I was doing this research, I came across some folks who challenge a little bit Gabor Mate's work around this a little bit. We do know there's a connection between emotions and pain and illness and even some diagnosable maybe mental things that are that are happening, um, like maybe even ADHD. But I do think that there's there's probably more to it than that. So I just wanted to add a little side note in there. His work is very interesting. I do recommend this book and looking at it and diving into it. But as always, just remember to look at the sources, look at the studies for yourself, and to always, you know, think about what you're what you're reading and you're taking on board. And if it resonates with you, that's great. But also know there are possibly other possibilities. So the physical toll of suppressed emotions is measurable and severe, and the possible long-term impacts of suppressed anger on physical health include hypertension. Studies have found that suppressed anger is linked to higher systolic blood pressure, digestive issues, so repressed anger can be held in our gut in the form of irritable bowel syndrome, and chronic stress. The constant physiological stress of unexpressed emotions activates inflammatory processes in the body, potentially contributing to the conditions like hypertension and digestive disorders, chronic pain syndromes, and compromised immune function. Now, if anger repression is an ingrained pattern of response, the individual can experience prolonged exposure to high levels of cortisol, which is linked to a whole bunch of disruptive effects on the body's normal processing. So, as they say now, the body does keep the score, and the anger that you don't express gets expressed through your body instead. And that does make a lot of sense to me. So let's dive into real relational damage. People transfer their original fear of abandonment and the need to placate their parents to people in their lives now. All authority figures become people they are deeply afraid of offending. Even with friends, peers, colleagues, and random strangers, they do not dare speak up when lines are crossed. The anger leaks out sideways through passive aggressive behavior, resentment that builds into sudden relationship cutoffs or explosion explosive reactions to minor triggers while the real source remains unaddressed. We damage the relationships that matter most while never actually addressing what we're really angry about. And when you can't express your anger about your boss undermining you, you snap at your partner for leaving the dishes in the sink. That's just an example. And when you can't acknowledge rage about systematic injustice, you become irritable with everybody around you. The anger finds a way out, but it goes in the wrong, it goes to the wrong address, like goes out, but it's not maybe getting uh processed the way it needs to. Now, this is something that I found really interesting because I know that people are always like, you just need to vent your anger. I think that's a really common thing that we we hear about, and that is spectacularly wrong. There's a myth around venting. The idea that we need to blow off steam or get it out through intense physical activity has been thoroughly debunked. A 2024 meta-analysis of 154 studies involving over 10,000 participants found that arousal increasing activities like hitting punching bags or going for an angry run were largely ineffective at reducing anger. In some cases, they actually increased it. So that rage room you've been eyeing, it's not doing what you think it's doing. So what worked instead? Activities that decreased physiological arousal. So that's what we're gonna dive into next. Deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, and progressive muscle relaxation showed significant effectiveness. The research described it as a turning down the heat rather than a stoking of the fire, which it sounds like venting was more of a stoking of the fire, whereas muscle relaxation, mindfulness, meditation and breathing was sort of a turning down the heat. Now, this doesn't mean anger should be ignored or stuffed down. It means that we need to learn how to be with anger in a way that allows us to access its wisdom without being consumed by its fire. So if punching pillows doesn't work and repression creates illness, what does work? The answer lies not in eliminating anger or amplifying it, but in fundamentally changing our relationship to it. Now we're gonna dive into how we change how we handle anger really does like the way it matters. Recent research has identified consistent patterns. Anger correlates positively with avoidance, rumination, and suppression, and negatively with acceptance and cognitive reappraisal. Translation: when we avoid dealing with anger, obsessively replay angry scenarios, or simply stuff our feelings down, we create more problems. When we accept the emotion and reframe the situation, we fare better. Of course, I am talking to you guys about all of this, and I will give you some tools and techniques for engaging your anger, but like I said earlier, it took me a long time to understand what people meant about being in connection with emotions and quite unquote holding space for emotions. That wasn't something that I was taught. I mean, I think a lot of us fall into that boat. We're raised the way we're raised and in the environments that we're in, and sometimes they're not conducive to learning how to engage our emotions in a healthy way. I think oftentimes they're not. So a lot of us are learning how to do this as adults. So just hold this gently. And if you're like me, be okay with learning something new. Like this is new to you, because I, like I said, I used to, it's been a been a long road for me learning how to process my emotions and be with them rather than just narrate them in my mind or basically suppress them or completely dissociate. It's a work in progress. Interestingly, mindfulness practices, particularly non-judgmental awareness and non-reactivity, appear to work through reducing anger rumination. The practice isn't about eliminating the anger, it's about changing your relationship to the angry thoughts. You can feel furious without replaying the triggering event 47 times in your head, each time stoking the flames higher. Boy, that must be an interesting practice because I still find myself replaying triggering things in my head a lot. Maybe not as much as I used to, but I do it. Now I want to talk about wisdom from the Buddhist masters, and a lot of this comes from many years ago I practiced yoga in a wonderful community that has since evolved, but it was a long big chunk of my time, and we would often have dharma discussions before we went into any of the physical movement practices and would look at the sacred texts and the wisdom of other mindfulness practitioners. And I was writing this and putting this together for this episode, and I couldn't help but return to that time and some of the work of TikNothan and Pema Chodrin because we would often refer to them. And I remembered we would talk about anger during those Dharma discussions. So for my friends and yogis who are listening, who are in that community, it's as a shout-out to our practice. You will remember some of this. So both TikNothan and Pema Chodron offer profound guidance on working with anger, not as something to eliminate, but as something to understand and transform. In his book Anger, Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, TikNot Han teaches to understand ourselves, we must learn and practice the way of non-duality. We should not fight our anger because anger is ourself, a part of ourself. Anger is an organic nature like love. It's of an organic nature like love. And we have to take good care of anger. I really I personally really believe this. And because it is an organic entity, an organic phenomenon, it is possible to transform it into another organic organic entity. The garbage can be transformed back into compost, into lettuce, and into cucumber. So don't despise your anger, don't fight your anger, and don't suppress your anger. Learn the tender way of taking care of your anger and Transform it into the energy of understanding and compassion. I think this is really interesting because your anger isn't garbage to throw away, it's raw material for transformation. Now, this learn a tender way of taking care of your anger, of course, is implying that you're aware that it's even there and that you can make space for it. So just know that we're all kind of entering into this idea of working with our anger, maybe from different points and different experiences. And some of this might resonate with you more than others. Like I said years ago in my yoga practice when I was in community and we were talking about anger, I would hear these words of TikNot Han, and I would just think, well, I don't really have any anger. You know, I'm not like I just didn't have any connection to it. So I would hear what was being said, but I did not embody it or fully understand it because I didn't have any connection to my anger. And once I had connection to my anger, I realized that I actually had quite a bit of it. I wonder what your journey with anger will be like. But moving on, in her book, The Places That Scare You, A Guide to Fear Fearlessness in Difficult Times, Pemetrodran asks us to see difficulties as teachers. Life itself will provide opportunities for learning how to hold our seat. Without the inconsiderate neighbor, where would we find the chance to practice patience? Without the office bully, how could we ever get the chance to know the energy of anger so intimately that it loses its destructive power? I think there's a lot going on in the world enough that is probably helping many of us come into connection with our anger. And I think how we tend that anger is really going to shape how perhaps things turn out. Now she also writes, recognize just like us, millions are burning with the fire of aggression. We can sit with the intensity of anger and let its energy humble us and make us more compassionate. When we become aware of our various emotions, we learn why we feel the way that we do. And I think that's what I'm really trying to get at. Why do we feel the way that we do? And when we learn why we feel the way we do, our emotions become productive rather than destructive forces. Anger usually appears when we fail to set healthy boundaries. This is a big one. I hear some of my blooming wand folks laughing at me, especially if you work with me one-on-one, because I say this a lot and it's something that I've learned, it's something that I've studied, but everything almost comes back to boundaries and being aware of what our needs are and our essentials are and what our boundaries are. And I know that when we're angry, it's because a boundary was crossed. Something isn't right, right? And if we don't recognize that our anger is trying to tell what our anger is trying to tell us, you know, the wisdom of our anger, that is, it soon descends into violence, hatred, fear, and destruction. And I think we're seeing that playing out in these times. A spiritual approach to anger, tools that work. Here's what a healthier relationship to anger looks like, supported by both ancient wisdom and modern science. Number one, feel it fully, but lower the arousal. The paradox of anger work is this: you must feel the emotion completely while simultaneously calming your nervous system. Anger has the power to blow the cork off your emotional volcano and release the turmoil below. Sadness, grief, and depression are all disempowering emotions, but anger is empowering. This is why anger can be a vehicle for change. It contains energy. The key is learning how to harness that energy rather than be consumed by it. Number two, mindfulness for anger practical practices. Mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy shows promise for reducing anger more effectively than either approach. Why? Because it addresses both the thoughts that fuel anger and the physiological arousal that makes it feel overwhelming. Mindfulness meditation helps calm the part of the brain that controls emotional regulation, making angry outbursts less common. It also strengthens the area of the brain responsible for executive functioning, giving us access to a wider range of cognitive tools and responses. So I want to talk about a mindfulness practice for anger. So it kind of starts like this: find a comfortable seat and check in with your body and feel where it makes contact with the chair or the cushion or wherever you're sitting. Notice your breath without trying to change it. Now bring to mind a situation that angered you. Where in your body do you experience the anger? Explore this feeling. You may be tempted to try to push it away. Instead, investigate how it feels, noticing what sensations emerge. Does it increase or decrease in intensity? Does it change or move? Does it warm or cool? Practice bringing compassion to anger. The feeling of anger is normal and it's part of being human. See if you can cradle your anger like a mother cradling a newborn. What happens if you hold it in this way with tenderness and care? Slowly bring your attention back to your breath as you do this and stay with it for a while. You don't have to change anything, you don't have to do anything, but you just sort of feel and cradle with your awareness the sensation of anger in your body. And you just be present for it. Letting your emotions settle into the spaciousness of your breath and awareness. The first step in dealing with anger compassionately is to simply recognize that anger is present inside of us. If we resist or try to suppress anger because we don't like the way we feel, then our anxiety and negative feelings tend to actually increase and realize that, frankly, it's okay to be angry. I'm just something's dawning on me as I'm recording this for you guys, is in my shop there is a freebie. It's called the six-part check-in. There's a PDF and there's also a guided meditation. And while it's not specifically about anger, it is about a practice similar to this where we recognize sensations in the body and be able to describe them. And that is where I started my practice. I created this for myself actually, and then offered it to clients, and I'm offering it to you now as a way to develop a practice of being present with what my what was happening to me in my body when I was experiencing emotions, having my awareness be with it, and then learning to describe the sensations of it. And that was really a huge part of my practice and remains central to my practice today. So I just want to remind you that that's available to you. It's at bloomingwand.com. Just click explore or just go to yeah, explore and go to my shop, and you should be able to find the six-part check-in. It's free. So the three Rs of mindful anger. Number one, recognize that the anger is present. Number two, realize it's okay to feel this way. And number three, return to your breath. When in doubt, return to your breath. That's like kind of a golden rule. This is the most powerful anger mindfulness technique. When we're angry, we we tend to become the anger, and the breath becomes quick, shallow, and agitated. The mind and body become disconnected. You might even dissociate. Now try this simple practice. Take three deep breaths, breathing in for a count of four, and then holding for four, and then exhaling for six. So inhale four, exhale four. What am I talking about? Inhale four, hold for four, exhale for six. And this longer exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system and begins to calm the anger response. Now we've already talked about this to some extent, but I want to talk about it again. Anger as a vehicle for change. When we stop repressing anger and start working with it consciously, something profound does happen. The anger reveals what we value. I think that's one of the things that really hit home for me in these last couple of weeks. I did have something that made me so mad. And it made me realize it clarified my boundaries, it clarified my values, it clarified my worth. It brought me so much clarity. And I do think that's why we associate anger with fire and a flame. Fire can be very clarifying. When you think about fires in the land, it can clean, cleanse, and clarify the land so new things can grow and emerge. And I do feel like my anger of late has cleared some things up for me. And I'm kind of, I have this vision now and this sense of what's important to me, what I value, and what my boundaries are. And it's awesome. I love it. And, you know, we're talking about anger reveals what we value, but it shows us our where our boundaries need to be drawn or reinforced, and it illuminates injustice that we might otherwise tolerate. There's a crucial difference between righteous anger or righteous rage and destructive rage. Righteous anger fuels sustained active action for justice. It drove the civil rights movement, the labor movement, the suffrage movement, every major social transformation in human history. And destructive rage, it burns hot and fast, leaving wreckage but creating no lasting change. The difference isn't in the intensity of the feeling, but in our relationship to it and what we choose to do with the energy, because anger is energizing and empowering. Why we ever feared it? You know, now that I'm developing more of a relationship to it and I see its value with greater, with a with a deep, I have a deeper sense of its value. I'm just like, dang, I wish I was better at tending my anger years ago, but that's okay. I'll just take what I've learned and move forward with it. When somebody oversteps our boundaries, obviously anger teaches us to say no and to protect ourselves. In assertive anger, we are harnessing this natural emotion to reinstate our boundaries and fight for our birthrights. This is anger as a vehicle for change, not the explosive, destructive kind that burns everything down, but the clear focused kind that says this is not acceptable and means it. It can connect you with others who also refuse to accept this as normal. And whatever it is you're angry that you're angry about, it can be a way to connect with people and to mobilize because it is so energizing. And like I said, it wants us to do something with it. Your anger at being dismissed or undermined or taken for granted in whatever situation, that anger can help you set boundaries that you've been too afraid to set. It can give you the clarity to see what's no longer working and the energy to change it. The spiritual work isn't transcending anger. It's developing the capacity to feel it completely without being consumed by it, to use it as information about what matters to you, to lower the physiological arousal so that you can think clearly, to choose a response that creates the change you want to see, to transform rage into focused strategic action. So let's kind of put this all together. What is your what does that mean putting your anger into practice? A mature with mature relationship with anger might look like this. Excuse me. When anger arises, notice it immediately and name name it. Be like, I'm mad, anger is here. Located in your body, where do you feel it? Chest, throat, jaw, belly. Rate its intensity on a scale of one to ten. Take three deep breaths to begin lowering arousal or do that breathing exercise. Inhale for four, pause for four, exhale for six. And ask what boundaries crossed. What value does this protect? What is this anchor trying to tell me? And wait, you don't have to like mentally, intellectually search for the answer. It will just you'll just know. It'll just come to you. At least that's been my experience with working with myself and working with others. It's like when we do this exercise and we let the thinking mind go, this deep knowing just comes. Now, for processing anger, you can use mindfulness to hold the anger with compassion. You can journal about what the anger is teaching you, and you can identify the specific change that needs to happen for expression. Separate the anger from the action. You can feel furious and still choose how you respond. Communicate assertively, not aggressively. Focus on the behavior that needs to change, not attacking character. Be specific about what you need. Take action that aligns with your values. And I want to give you a concrete example. But before I do that, I'll also say that I think some of the times that I'm processing anger has been through art and creativity. When George Floyd was murdered, I created a whole piece around that. It was like something came to me, and I just took all that anger and created an art piece that I showed and that I intend to donate to help raise raise funds for Black Lives Matter, although I haven't had the opportunity to do that yet. And then other times I've written poetry or journaled, but it often will inspire some kind of creative act. And I just wanted to also add that into an action that we can take is that anger can inspire art. So let's get a concrete example here about anger. You notice anger arising when your boss takes credit for your work. You locate it, tight chest, clenched jaw. You rate it. It's a seven out of ten. You breathe, and then you ask what boundary was crossed. And the boundary would be my contributions deserve acknowledgement. What value does this protect? Professional integrity and self-worth. What needs to change? I need to document my work and speak up at the next meeting. Anger hasn't disappeared, but it now has direction. This is a simplified example, but you you can use this to work work through or journal with examples that you might have. You can find this podcast and the transcripts and stuff like that on my website if you want to go back to some of these things and maybe journal through it or practice with them. Again, it's always bloomingwand.com. Click explore and go to the blog. You'll also find sources that I referred to to create this episode there as well. So the sacred function, anger when honored and worked with skillfully, becomes a compass. It shows you what you care about. It reveals where injustice lives. It demands that you take yourself seriously. And your anger is not a spiritual failing, it's a teacher, a protector, and sometimes it's revolutionary. Right now, in this moment of collective difficulty, your anger matters. The anger you feel watching the news, the anger at systems that harm vulnerable people, the anger at being silenced or dismissed in your own life, all of it's valid. And all of it contains information. All of it can be transformed in energy that creates meaningful change. Yeah, it makes us uncomfortable. Yes, it makes others around us uncomfortable. And that discomfort is often a sign that the anger is pointing to something true, something that needs attention and something that demands transformation. If your anger feels uncomfortable, leads to violence, or stems from unprocessed trauma, you have to find somebody to help you work through that. And that would be maybe a licensed therapist trained in anger management or a trauma-focused approach. And there's no shame in seeking professional support when working with difficult emotions or anger. It's like I said, I had to go to somebody, I had to get a therapist to help me with mine. I had no connection to it, but I was having all these symptoms of basically both repressing and suppressing it. And I won't lie, it was, it's been challenging work to come into more communion in connection with my more intense emotions, including anger, but so worth it in the best way. Avoiding the emotions is a lot harder and more energy consuming than actually like doing the good work of learning to commune with it. Plus, you get the benefits of that communion. And so do people around you, and so does society. The question is, are you listening to what your anger is trying to tell you? And more importantly, are you willing to let it move you towards necessary change? And that's the hard thing, right? Think of anger as fire. Unattended, it burns your house down, suppressed, it smolders in the walls until everything collapses. But tended skillfully, contained, directed, and honored for its heat and light, it can forge tools, warm communities, and illuminate what's hidden in the darkness. The fire isn't the problem. The question is, have you learned to work with it? So I really never thought I would write a whole piece or do a whole episode on anger, but like I said, I've had a lot of anger lately. And in doing my self-care and spiritual practices, I was reminded of Tik Nut Han and Pema Chodron's work and my community, my yoga community many years ago diving into anger. And I what for one thing, it made me realize how much I've changed and how far I've come in terms of emotional intelligence and emotional awareness, and I'm proud of myself for that. And if you're doing the work, I'm proud of you too, because it is it's a lot. But no, you're not alone in that. We're doing it together, you're part of this community. That's why I create these episodes, is so that we can talk about this stuff. So don't forget to follow along, like and subscribe. You can email me at emily at bloomingwand.com if you want to share your experience. I do love to hear from you. I really do. And you know what I'm gonna say now because I say it every time. Take good care of yourselves, get those journals out, and I'll see you soon.