Finding strength in the shadows…. (rage)

I came to a place in life within the last couple of years, where my rage was really awoken. I guess it all started after I gave birth to my daughter 7.5 years ago and experienced postpartum rage, which I had never heard of before and was really scared at the feeling..

Previous to that, I didn’t know this rage existed or needed to be expressed… But it was sure obvious as it started coming out of me, that there were deep untapped wells of it within me…

I’ll never forget my first breathwork experience, in a tent full of 120 other people… my soon-to-be-teacher Anahata (pictured, photo by Kimberly Mufferi) came up to me as I was breathing and started deeply massaging my liver. I didn’t really feel much at that time, but she told me afterward and in subsequent healing/learning sessions with her that she could sense that I had a lot there, that that is where rage is stored in the body.

She was correct haha :)

Over the course of the following months and years I started expressing that rage.. initially during breathwork sessions (the most epic and clearing of which was breathwork in the midst of my aya retreat last year… forever grateful to Zaia and her expert space holding and breathwork facilitation, which allowed me to really tap into and express the depths of my rage without feeling any shame or judgement at all)…

… and then eventually just on my own when I felt triggered and could feel the deep chasm of rage within me beginning to rise up my throat. I would create my own rage expression ceremony space for myself…

I never felt fully expressed though.. like there was always still a never-ending pool of it just seething somewhere at the fringes of my energy body, even after I felt tapped out in those closing moments of my rage ceremonies.

I started to feel the gravity of this rage… it stopped feeling so much “mine” but that I had opened myself as a channel to express the rage of ALL of the feminine, from ALL of time.

Overwhelming… and at some point as I began to feel thrashed uncontrollably by the waves of our collective rage, I thought.. “Oh… this is no longer mine… and it is actually starting to not feel completely aligned for me to hold this anymore.”

I had indeed become an open channel for collective rage to seep through, and the rage really seemed to relish that it could finally express itself more and more often through me as a willing channel.

I made a point to create some space for myself to tune into my own experience, so I could possibly shift this experience…

Where do I store rage?

Where did it come from? What is its purpose in my life?

What became clear during my contemplation was that my childhood was filled with other people’s rage. My father’s felt most notable.

He displayed many instances of rage and — what felt to me — very extreme and abusive anger, which I won’t go into much detail here because though it was traumatizing to me, it doesn’t really matter the past or the details of the story, but how it was showing up in my present lived experience that mattered most to me…

So, my father seemed to carry the most power in my family, as well as the most rage.

Ok, one quick relatively (comparatively) benign example: I’ll never forget once after we had watched a family movie together and he had fallen asleep on the floor during the movie, and I bent down to give him a kiss on the cheek as he slept before I went upstairs to bed, and he punched me in the face in his sleep, maybe thinking he needed to defend himself against some sort of assailant…

Amazingly, he has become a much more tender, gentle man as he has aged and has had time and space to process his own pent-up rage.

He had a lot there…

And as an adult.. I felt I did too.

But circling back to my growing awareness of how I had viewed him as powerful and rageful as a child… I realized that in my life as an adult, I had felt that same “power” coursing through my body as I tapped in to the chasm of collective rage.

There was some child piece of myself that felt tapped into power as I raged for myself and for the collective.

I had gone from this life period of feeling so withdrawn and meek and powerless in the face of the life and deaths I had experienced… to feeling tapped into a deep well of rage.. which I equated on some level (my wounded child self level) to power.

I had to then choose to reprogram that piece of myself..

I do feel that my expression and my ability to tap into my own rage is important for my child self to remember and realize that I DO have a voice… That I CAN express myself and protect myself in a way that I never was able to do as a child…

But also my adult self needed to step back in and give that rage some boundaries.

I didn’t NEED to be the channel for all of the rage of the entire collective… It wasn’t mine and there was actually no power in that for me. It was causing a boomerang effect of slingshotting me back into a feeling of powerlessness, actually…

It felt good to be able to call upon an adult and knowledgeable and empowered part of myself, to sort of take the reigns and pull my energy back into my own form…

To give myself a container and framework of power that actually felt true for ME..

And as soon as I did that… I felt SO much more myself and at ease. So much more in my ACTUAL power.

And I realize that my life, the flow of my life, had been WAITING for me to make this realization.

I needed to step into my TRUE power in this way, before other things in my life could fall into place nicely.

I needed to show myself and Great Spirit that I could be a good steward for the power and energy that would be a part of my future timeline, by making these realizations and stepping into my true power, not a false sense of power that my child self had been directing me to.

She didn’t know, she didn’t have the perspective.

I feel there is such value for me, of swinging from one side of a spectrum to the other, before I can find my place in the middle. The middle path…

And I have a feeling that we are all going to be having experiences like this… of an awareness that dawns as we tap into a depth of emotional and spiritual experiences that our parents or prior generations just never were able to access..

And if YOU’RE in the midst of this balancing act, this finding-of-your-own-middle-path, I see you and bless you! I know it’s not the easiest journey to take… And I value the work you’re doing for us all as a collective.

If you’re interested in being guided through these same sorts of processes I take myself through, I offer 1:1 sessions to tap into the WHY behind what we’re experiencing in life… where it stems from… what the purpose is.. and how we can move through that and come out on the other side more ready and able to journey toward our actual desires in life.

We are all navigating this… this transformation from operating from our outdated patterns and wounding.. and stepping onto the path of our actual True Essence.. and it can be helpful to have a friend along the way :)

Just reach out via email, or book a free intro call below. I am here for you <3