The Color of Anger: My Rage Art Ritual Story
POV: I’m working on being an angry person.
That's something you wouldn't expect a spiritual mentor to say. You probably wouldn't expect your Success Coach to say it either. But the truth is in order to express the truth of who we are we must learn to paint with the full spectrum of emotional colors in our palette. You need icky grays as much as you need bright yellows and soothing blues. All of the colors tell a story, each with their own flavor and energy.
The past few years I've been through a lot. I lost my dad suddenly. He was far too young and in perfect health. The shock alone took a long time to absorb. Then came grief. Then a melancholy hopelessness. I felt like people who’ve just been through a tornado and are coming up out of their shelter to survey the damage. The shock and the damage is so great it can be devastating and overwhelming to even think about how to pick up the pieces and begin again. That was 2022 for me.
Bit by bit we began picking up pieces and finding our way through this. I used art, journaling, therapy, books, every tool I could find to help me feel it to heal it and express what I was experiencing. As I cleaned up the mess, things started to become more clear. I wanted to move back home and help run the family farm. The only problem? My long term partner of 6 years didn't want to go with me. I spent a year hoping and praying and waiting. Maybe he’d change his mind. He did love me afterall, didn't he? When the inner nudge inside of me told me he wasn't changing his mind and I still had to go, I left. I left our new home and community we had moved into just 6 months prior (oh yeah did I mention we moved across the country during all of this?). I left our deeply melded life together. I left him and his family, that I had come to call my own. I left it all behind to follow my visions and my inner niggling to begin again in Oklahoma. My second cross-country move in a year.
My plan was to stay with my mom for three months while I prepared our farm for my mobile home. I wanted to be up and on my own sooner rather than later. As life would have it, 3 months turned to 6, which turned to 9, which turned to 12 plus. As I write this my home on the farm still isn't ready for me and it's been a long, emotional road through it all. Frustrations. Roadblocks. Anger. Grief. Lots of grief.
Somehow not receiving a house brings up the grief I carry from my past relationship as well as the grief I carry from losing my dad. And then there is the micro-grief from the tiny relationships that came and went in my first year being single again. After being in a committed partnership you crave that level of depth with another human, and yet your brain has a hard time understanding that that level of commitment doesn't happen overnight. And so you’re jolted back to the other end of the spectrum where you're going on first dates, judging the crap out of the other person; swiping around, partying, you're looking for something you aren't going to find for a long time. You have to build it, and that takes time and yet meanwhile, no matter how excited you are to move on, your poor heart is still very very fragile. I have likened my heart to a cat that is hissing and backed into a corner. She is angry, wild and wants you to leave her alone. Yet deep down she truly wants to be loved and held by you. She used to be a nice, cuddly, sweet kitty, but someone was very mean to her and now she is wild again, unsure of who to trust or how to get back to that calm, house-cat life she once had.
I don't know your story, but I can imagine bits and pieces of my own story may bring up emotion for you. We all have trauma. We all have stress - big and small. We all go through life's ups and downs. The journey is learning how to feel it all. The journey is riding the ride, even though you know it’ll be scary, disappointing, exhausting and trying for bits. You know that in order to truly feel the thrill and excitement of the good parts, you have to go through the scary parts too. That's painting with the full spectrum of the colors in your palette.
Anger has been the color I often shy away from. It feels uncomfortable. It's weird. It's foreign territory for me.
Over the years I've learned to speak the language of sadness. I can cry almost on command now. When life gets me down, I’m a great cryer. I can let the tears fly and it is honestly a beautiful, delicious release. But lately my body and my mentors have been whispering to me -try out the anger button. You need to release that too.
It's easier for me to cry, though. So I go back to my default mode and I cry.
My body flares up with some minor illnesses and speaks to me. “Hey doll, let this anger out. I know you dont think it’s in you, but it is and you’re holding onto it and it’s hurting your physical being.”
Unsure of how to begin, I started holding rage rituals for myself. I got the idea from Alexandra Roxo in her book Dare to Feel. I also studied with her extensively several years back, so I had an idea of what rage rituals were all about. Then I incorporated pillow beating, screaming in my car and channeling my anger into a round of golf. My body spoke again, “Great start. But keep going, there is so much more.”
Honestly I was already being stretched expressing any anger at all. Anger is just something my family didn't do growing up. I rarely saw it displayed much less did I express my own. In high school my friends pointed out that they’d never even seen me angry. Actually they had never seen me cry either. One girl suggested, “maybe you don't have any emotions.”
With the help of my Energy Healer and Holistic Health Practitioner I searched for other ways to express my anger. Everyone encouraged me to write and paint and honestly I would sit down to do it and nothing would come out. This language was so foreign to me I had no clue how to try to even speak it.
Then one day, as I was getting ready for work, a song came on the radio that reminded me of my ex. My instinct was to cry, which I did for a few seconds, and then….there it was…the color of rage. I sat down and grabbed a yucky brown crayon and began to write a nasty letter. Something I hadn't done in the 12 months since the break up was blame him or curse him or be angry at him. Today was different. I wrote the nastiest, meanest letter I could muster up. I pushed back my life coaching and mindset practices and I let it allllll out. Angry, rude, mean, nasty. This alone felt so good to write, but then I was really pissed off. I put on “Rage Against the Machine” and challenged myself to keep going. I grabbed a big sharpie and cursed his whole family. Even though I still loved them so much, I needed to be mad at this moment. Even though the breakup was mutual and it was a very good thing for me, I needed to be mad in this moment. I needed to express the pent up emotion that I had been carrying for years even before the ending of us. “Whoa. There was actually a lot of anger”, I thought to myself.
For me personally, frustration is the word that came up. My anger comes through frustration. This word cracked me open and gave me permission to let out this color of myself. I scribbled angry words all over the page, then I stopped and beat the heck out of a pillow. I went back to the page. What color did I feel this rage was? I smeared that all over the page. Bit by bit I walked through my journey over the past 5 years, smearing colors of how each step felt. The anger. The grief. The frustration. The hurt. Layering the pain I felt, I knew this paper was my journey. A smeared mess of goo was right on point. I remember wanting to claw my way out of the frustration, so I clawed at my painting. Then I looked at it and saw a yucky, mucky mess of highs and lows and love and hurt and pain and toil and resentment and anger. I paused. This really happened. This is really my life. What did I want to do next?
I pressed the wet paint onto a new page - because I know I can't erase my past, I can only build upon it. To my surprise the effect was totally cool. I looked back at the mucky page and I ripped it up and burned bits of it too. Chills ran down my spine as I felt a release of the past. When I turned back to my new page I felt excited. You could see the underlying of the hard journey I had walked, but there was space around it now. Space to create something new. To receive something new.
I saw bright, light, colors again and swiftly added them to my page. I felt my empowerment and my sensuality perk up so I painted that too. I was rebuilding my life one bit at a time. Not completely erasing the past, but not letting it hinder me either. I was moving forward.
Anger Journaling Prompts
My questions for you today:
✍️Is anger easy for you or hard?
✍️What about sadness?
✍️What about joy?
✍️How do you let your emotions out?
✍️In what ways do you most like to express what you are feeling?
✍️Do you have a community of trusted people to hold you when you are feeling a lot?
✍️What rituals do you use for life's difficult moments?
Why is anger hard to express?
Maybe like me, you were raised in an environment where anger wasn’t exactly encouraged. That’s okay. After a little research I learned this.
Anger = breaking free from freeze state
Sometimes our body’s response to conflict is to freeze. To do nothing. To be silent and sit still. I know that’s what I traditionally have done. But freeze state is a nervous system response that can be changed by allowing anger to move through you. In fact, anger is a very healthy emotion. It only gets a bad rap when it is expressed in a way that harms others. In my opinion, the best way to express anger is alone, through one of the suggested rituals below. Your whole body needs to move the energy of this emotion through it. Even if it’s very old anger. When we move it through our body it loses its power and we are able to let go and move on. Otherwise, stuffing down anger can make us sick and throw off our body’s natural energies.
In her book, “Follow Your Tao: A Simple Guide to Balancing Your Energy for Inner Harmony”, author Stephanie Nosco shares the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) belief that anger is connected to the liver and gallbladder.
She shares a bit about what anger is and how to healthily express it. “Anger is merely an expression of energy, and a strong deference mechanism that is usually pointing to an unmet need within us or someone else.” She continues, “We get stuck when we become our anger and fully embody it, rather than relate to it.”
Anger can be coming from the place of your inner mama bear. Perhaps someone has overstepped your boundaries and anger is your natural reaction. That is a good thing.
Again, it is vital that we express our anger in a healthy way, rather than suppress it. Later in the book, Nosco relates suppressed anger with gynaecological issues in women. She writes, “One of the most common issues of anger suppression I have seen in the qigong clinic are women with endometriosis, tumors of the ovaries or cervix and other gynaecological issues. Perhaps one of the reasons why this issue is more common is because women have been taught to suppress anger and told that anger isn’t pretty or nice or wanted. Suppressing anger will eventually lead to blood stagnation, which can lead to physical complications in both men and women.”
This makes sense to me, as it is parallel with what Northrup says in Women’s Bodies, W…
She says most issues below the belt in women are a result of a woman overgiving herself to others and under nurturing herself. Of course, if this is the case, it makes sense that the person who is overgiving would feel angry and taken advantage of, even if it is of their own doing. However, highly compassionate people are rarely the angry type, so suppression would become the name of the game.
Alexandra Roxo, author of Dare to Feel, says “Overworking is a socially acceptable way to not feel, or not deal with, what’s really happening inside.”
I’ve also heard it said that if you are someone who constantly worries if others are mad at them, it is likely that you always had to scan for safety growing up. Perhaps you had a parent who withheld love and affection when they were mad or disappointed in you.
✍️Do you tend to over give yourself to others? How does this feel in your body?
✍️Do you ever feel angry about this?
✍️Do you tend to suppress your anger, express it, or let it take over you?
✍️Describe a recent scenario when you felt angry. How did you handle the situation?
Exercise: Different colors of Anger
Rage
Frustration
Irritability
Resentment
Jealousy
Envy
Guilt
Shame
✍️Review the list above. What other colors of anger can you think of? How would you describe each one? For example, “Guilt and shame are expressions of anger turned inward towards yourself.” Nosco says.
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