Subtle to Threshold - “Being With” Different Types of Anger

The spectrum of aversion includes irritation, judging, not liking, anger, rage, hatred... and whatever other synonyms you can think of. You'll notice that the subtler aspects of aversion like irritation and small judgements can go unnoticed more easily. Sometimes judging and not liking can even feel pleasant or enjoyable on some level. While the more extreme aspects of aversion like rage and hatred bring us up-to and beyond our "threshold". The difference in these impacts influences our capacity to bring presence-awareness to our experience.

The subtler aspects might require a stronger intention to even notice them - "let me see all the places I am judging people, or let me see all the tiny irritations that get in throughout the day", etc...

Anger, rage, hatred, on the other hand, might need you to broaden your awareness, step back, even distract. When we are gripped with hatred, looping in stories of anger and rage, caught off guard by the strength of emotion, or even literally have blurred vision from the relentlessness of fury, we have reached our threshold of being able to "be with" our experience, let alone see through it, learn from it, or let go.

When we are overwhelmed like this, even our most noble intentions to understand the pattern will not get us clarity. Reaching threshold means we need to get some balance. You can do this by walking, running or some other type of movement that gets your body involved, "orienting" (placing your presence-awareness externally on sights and sounds), being in nature (even bare feet on grass, or staring at trees), writing or journaling, and/or broadening presence-awareness to include your entire physical body from head to toe, as well as your emotional, energetic, and ethereal bodies that extend outside and around your physical body. The idea is to get you away from fixating or burrowing, to pull you away from the strong magnetism to obsess and churn in the thoughts, emotions or felt sense.

The emotion can still be noticed, but from a place of broader awareness. This helps to soften the intensity, and allows a slow easing of the pain of the emotion. In a way, we are trying to not focus on it. Not by avoidance, but by more openness.