Healing Deep-Seated Fear And Anger
Rediscovering the Self beneath the sorrow
You are sitting at home on your sofa, scrolling through funny memes on the Internet. Or, perhaps, you are shopping for new shoes. Either way, you are munching on caramel popcorn and sipping on root-beer. The sun is shining outside. The skies are blue.
You are at complete ease, not a care in the world. There’s nowhere you have to go, nothing you have to do.
In this moment, you are aligned with your natural joy, which is who you are. You are Joy. When you are joyful, you know your Self. This is the state of Grace.
A sudden change comes over the air. A long shadow falls into the room. The pungent scent of wild beast meets your nose. You look up, spilling popcorn down your front. There, blocking the doorway, is an enormous beast with yellow eyes. Those eyes stare at you, without blinking, boring into your soul.
It takes you a long, chilling moment to understand what you see. It’s a tiger.
And not any tiger, but an enormous, hungry, drooling tiger. The tiger licks its lips and snarls, revealing enormous fangs…
Part One : The Tiger in the Doorway (The Fall from Grace)
This moment of terror may only last seconds, but it could stay with you for a lifetime. Perhaps it will etch itself into your soul and haunt you through many lives.
Your heart hammers as you break into cold sweat. Stomach and throat and teeth clench. Fingernails dig into your palms.
You are in danger. Something is very wrong. You are no longer safe. Your trust in the world, your faith in life, shatters. Terror and shock replace the peace and joy you knew only moments before.
This is the moment of trauma. These are the pivotal seconds of Self abandonment. You are Joy and Peace, but you no longer know yourself. This is the proverbial fall from Grace , the primal trauma. The pain reverberates through the psyche of humanity, reemerging in countless forms.
From here, you seem to have but three choices: Freeze, Flight, or Fight.
Choice 1: Abandon the moment (Freeze)
You respond with Helplessness
You do nothing. Your terror is so immense that you neither move, speak, nor react. Your root-beer slips from your limp fingers and crashes to the ground. The horror of the moment consumes you, rendering you helpless and inert. You are petrified, frozen in time. You abandon your Self, no longer in your body, no longer truly there.
The tiger crouches, ready to pounce… You don’t struggle or react. You allow whatever happens next to happen…
Choice 2 : Flee the moment (Flight)
You respond with Fear
You leap up off the sofa! Your laptop, popcorn and root-beer crash to the ground. You spin on your heels and dash into the book-room to the side of the living room, behind the sofa. Slam!!! You bang the door shut.
Clambering onto the window sill, you shove the window open, squeeze through, leap to the ground. You are barefoot and the ground is gravelly, but you hardly notice as you race away.
The tiger has found a way to follow you outside. It paces behind you, hot on your heels. You can hear its enormous paws padding on the ground. You don’t look back. You run and run…
Choice 3: Resist the moment (Fight)
You respond with Anger
You stand up and hurl your root-beer, popcorn and laptop at the tiger as hard as you can. Making yourself as large as possible, you spread your arms wide.
Using your loudest, deepest, most commanding voice, you boom,
“Be gone, oh tiger! For I am lord and master of this domain! You SHALL not eat me for your supper! Be gone, I say!”
I don’t know why you have a medieval English way of speaking-or perhaps it’s a bit Gandalfesque — but stay with me here.
You glare at the tiger, repeating your commands with increasing rage and intensity,
“Be gone, foul beast, I say!”
The tiger stares back at you, but you never look away. You continue shouting with fury …
Part Two : Post-Tiger
You’ve survived the Tiger episode. Life goes on. But you are forever changed. The moment of the tiger in the doorway haunts you. There is now a tear in your wholeness. Your trust in life has gone. Your awareness of who you are has been destroyed.
Your subconscious sets out to heal this tear, to find your lost awareness of your Self. You are Joy and Peace, but you’ve forgotten this. The trauma has caused you to abandon knowledge of Reality. Without understanding this is what you are doing, you set out to remember who you are.
From now on, you replicate your Tiger in the Doorway Moment. You draw in energetically similar situations and try to regress to that one moment of trauma. You want to fix the rip in your psyche and return to the moment-before-tiger when you still knew yourself.
So you prod at the wound. You bring in yet more traumas, difficulties, and complications into your life. And you respond with one of these three behaviours, or a combination: Freeze, Flight or Fight. Another way of saying this is: abandonment, fear or anger.
Freeze / Abandoning the moment
I am helpless
When we abandon the moment, we also abandon our Self. In reality, we cannot be anywhere else than this moment. There is nothing else. So we abandon everything when we abandon the moment. We lose our knowledge of our own Life Force and Being.
We no longer take part in life as an active player. Nothing feels vivid. Our senses are dull. We go through the motions and don’t show up for our life. Helplessness, infantilism, and lack of self-responsibility are our modus operandi.
Life is like a blurry black and white movie, gazed at from a distance. We hardly live our lives. Perhaps we are depressed, despondent, or low energy. We make no effort to improve our lives because we don’t feel we can. There is an absence where we ought to be. We may swallow our anger or fear impulse as we stay stuck in a listless deep-freeze.
When we stay frozen, we let things happen. Even horrible things like obesity, poverty, abusive relationships, illnesses. Addictive behaviours might be ‘fallen into’, with no effort to change or resist. We are never proactive. We are a perpetual victim, and never consider we can be otherwise.
The tiger is perpetually pouncing and we do nothing about it.
Flight / Fleeing the moment
I am afraid
Flight feels preferable to freeze. At least it’s active, and not hopelessness. We may continuously move around, uproot, change, run away. Or we may hide things from ourselves, bury things deep, refuse to face up to things, lie to ourselves. Or we may drift through life, lost in thoughts of the future or the past.
Flight may also take the form of drug-addictions or alcoholism . Perhaps we watch too much T.V or spend too much time on the Internet. We seek escape into other states of mind.
Broken relationships, abandoning responsibility, or an inability to commit may be flight responses. So is losing ourselves in delusions and fantasies — ‘flights of fancy’. We may get lost in constructed narratives, cults, abusive religions, politics, and ideas. Or we might fall into consumerism, obsessive relationships, vanity, pornography. Workaholism and career or money obsession are typical flight behaviours. So is the drama surrounding money issues and struggling to pay bills.
The tiger is always on our heels, and we keep running.
Fight / Resisting the moment
I am angry
Anger is an expression of terror turned out to the world, or in on ourselves. It is resistance to what is. Our rage feels terrible, but it’s better than freeze or flight. It seems more empowering and active to us. Anger may appear to take more courage, or make us feel valiant or righteous.
We may return over and over to thoughts of the tiger and pour our wrath out on the tiger in our minds. Or we take our rage out on the original person who hurt us, now we are older and braver. More commonly, we attack ourselves because the tiger didn’t love us. There must be something wrong with us, and we ourselves become the target for our own rage.
Many will purposefully bring things into their lives that make them angry. An incompatible spouse, friends with contrary outlooks, unfair bosses. Money issues or the evils of politics may be great outlets for our anger.
We may also imagine things to be angry about. That person looked at me in a certain way, or that person is thinking this or that. We may have other names for our anger. Sometimes we call it bitterness, jealousy, resentment, judgement, stress, annoyance, or irritation. Or we turn our resistance to reality inwards. We call it lack of self-confidence, inadequacy, low-self-esteem, or self-hatred.
Many people suppress their anger, and it manifests as poor health. We fight our own body. Immune and inflammation issues, in particular, may result from repressed anger. Poor lifestyle habits, physical accidents and injuries may be expressions of anger.
Or you might become a tiger yourself. You may abuse others, and traumatize them the way you were traumatized. You re-traumize yourself in the process. It’s better to be the angry tiger than the hapless victim on the couch. Or you try to punish the tiger by punishing your innocent partner or other family members.
Abusers are also trying to find their lost wholeness. They are also traumatized and seeking ways to return to their own pre-Tiger in the Doorway moment.
Abuse is an attempt to recover lost Joy.
Guilt is self-attack. We may be abusive, so we create scenarios to feel guilty about and confirm our own self-loathing. Then we have excuses to attack ourselves. Or, we may invite abuse so we have someone else to blame, and therefore project our own guilt onto.
Part 3: Healing the Tiger in the doorway Moment
Getting in touch with the sorrow
Let’s return to the moment when the tiger appears in the doorway and our knowledge of Self is lost.
If we are still enough, we start to see there’s something else underlying the helplessness, fear, and anger. It’s like a river running beneath the surface of the ground. The burble of flowing water is ever-present, but often missed in the noise of our lives.
Its name is Sorrow. We may believe our sorrow is because others hurt us, or betrayed us. That may be true, but it’s runs even deeper than this. Our grief is because we lost our knowledge of Reality. We forgot our wholeness, goodness, safety. Our faith in the seamless, impeccable flow of love was lost. We abandoned our Self.
We are Love. Without knowledge of the Love that we are, we are strangers in a strange land. We are Children of Peace and Joy, wandering the deserts of oblivion, fear and death.
Can we go back to that initial moment of thinking something is wrong? Can we allow ourselves to feel the sorrow of that thought? Will you acknowledge you abandoned your Self, long ago? It’s time to shed tears for the years the locusts ate.
When we feel our grief, sit with our own sorrow, allow it to move through us, we break through the walls of our heart. Perhaps it comes as a trickle, or like a flood bursting through a dam.
Now, inside your heart, feel your Self. This is where the true you lives.
Forgiving the dream
Did the tiger feel guilty for hurting you? Do you feel guilty for making the tiger feel guilty? Are you blaming yourself for fearing or hating the tiger? Perhaps you think you should forgive the tiger more? Do you still wonder why the tiger didn’t love you? Is it your job to heal the tiger?
And on and on it goes, thoughts of the tiger, replaying through your mind.
Stop right there.
Nothing ever happened. We thought there was a tiger, but there was only a dream of a tiger. It was true then, it is true now. And, in truth, there is no ‘then.’ You are Spirit, dreaming you dreamt of a tiger.
At night, you may dream of someone you know well — a family member or close friend. Is that person really there in your dream? Or is it all your own mind, recreating that person? Isn’t it amazing, then, how our sleeping minds often create exact replicas of ‘real life’? It’s not so amazing when you realize that our minds are also creating ‘real life’.
We invent other people. Only the Love that creates all life is real. Everything else is stuff we made up. Something disturbed your dreams, but it wasn’t real, and it still isn’t real. The Spirit that animates the tiger is real. The stripes and teeth and growls and snarls and anger of the tiger are a dream.
The Empty Boat
There is a Taoist parable that appears in the Zhuangzi:
A man is floating in his boat downriver. Suddenly, another boat runs into his own, but there’s nobody in the other boat. It’s an Empty Boat. Because the boat is empty, the man doesn’t get angry. He simply moves around the other boat. But when there is somebody in the other boat, the man is furious! He is in a rage, shouting and cursing and very upset.
Do you see how this slight adjustment in seeing can move you into forgiveness, into letting go?
There never was a tiger. There was a dream of a tiger. It was an empty boat. Consciousness is the only Reality. There was no ‘you’, sitting on the couch. There is Spirit, Truth, Life, Joy. Nothing can ever threaten Reality, we can only dream it can.
Conclusion
We can go back to that moment of trauma and reclaim our wholeness. We do this by giving the original thought something is very wrong to Love for healing. It was always our misperception that caused us pain . There was an error in our thinking , but nothing was ever wrong. Nothing happened.
We dreamed someone invaded our boundaries, abused us, hit us, shouted at us, played mind games with us. A horrible nightmare of being raped, molested, tortured came over us. We imagined we were cast out of the Garden of Eden, but we never left. Grace is still here, where it has always been, waiting for us to open our eyes.
Through all your dreams of suffering, the Reality of the Life that you are remains. It cannot be attacked. A child may catapult pebbles at the sun, but the sun remains unaffected.
If there can be no attack, no one can ever do anything wrong. When we heal our belief in attack, we also heal our belief in guilt. Humanity is as innocent as a bird, a bee, a cat, a dog. Those who we dreamed harmed us are also as innocent as a flower, in Truth. It was a bad dream, nothing more.
As you release your blame of others, so do you release yourself.
Released from our belief in guilt or attack, freed from our helplessness, fear and anger, we see Reality with cleansed vision.
Who are you in this moment? What is the Life that you are? What is breathing you?
This moment welcomes each of us back with open arms. It is only ourselves who can keep us from returning.
This moment is Truth. It remains eternally pristine, and entirely safe, where it has always been and where it will always be. Instead of freezing, fleeing, or fighting this moment, reclaim it. Know it.
This moment is Reality. Here is your Wholeness. Here is the Joy which you are.
Paper tigers…🐯