As I understand it, anger is a negative expression of our emotional fire.  We have done with it what we’ve done with fire in the forests in this country—we see it as a dangerous force that should be suppressed at all costs instead of an impactful and inevitable force that needs to be handled skillfully.  This organically creates a tinderbox effect where the potential for fire to be unleashed grows until it ignites.  Because we haven’t been willing to do our part to help this fire burn through the landscape in a constructive and nurturing way, when fire is released, it always does so in a way that works against the wellbeing of the world it’s a part of.  We then use these destructive experiences as evidence of how dangerous fire is instead of being able to accept the fact that fire isn’t the problem.  How we sit in relationship with it is.

You can think of anger release work as the practice of progressively lighting small fires in your internal emotional forest so the buildup of dead wood can be burned off and fed back to the earth while you clear things out and make space for life to exist and thrive.  We all experience frustration and anger in life.  That’s inevitable as we experience loss, fall short or fail to achieve things, or when we have to struggle against things in life.  You can’t stop your emotional fire from getting torn up and flaring into anger.  What you can do is accept the fact that this occurs so you can attend to your anger in healthy ways so it doesn’t cause problems.

When we suppress and ignore our anger, it gets stored inside us and its pressure builds as more of it is added over time.  As with pressure that’s contained within a pressure cooker, that pressure wants and needs to come out.  When you don’t use a release valve to sustainably release it, which is what anger release work is in its most basic form, a time will come where the buildup of pressure will force its way out, either in large, explosive bursts or with a slow bleed.  This type of release tends to organically nurture conflict and distance within our lives.

The practice of anger release work is pretty simple.  You need to connect with and feel your anger, and then you need to use a technique to direct it outside of you in a healthy way.  Since fire needs to burn and consume, you never want to turn it on anything living.  Fire is meant to be shared with dead trees, not live ones, and it’s meant to burn in small, controlled bursts instead of big, out of control rages.  This means anger release work should be done in layers, one emotional workout at a time, so you can sustainably burn through your backlog without tearing yourself or anything else that’s living down.

The best techniques I’ve found for anger release work are chopping with an ax on a dead log, or the use of a punching bag.  Both allow you to vent off your negative emotional fire in ways that matches the emotion’s needs.  You can also use different types of exercise to burn off your anger.  For example, you can do interval work when you run or ride a bicycle, and put your anger into the hard efforts so you can feel the burn while you tear yourself down in a constructive way that will give you a good workout.  The Phase I Client Manual has a 30 page chapter dedicated to anger release work, so you can refer to it for more techniques if you wish.  In the end, anything that allows you to vent off your negative fire in a healthy way will help, but the goal is to find a primary technique that works the best for you.

With anger release, success will initially open you to more anger.  This occurs because so much of this core emotion will be shut down and hidden away, and the boosts song will give will start to wake up this emotional debt.  So, as you begin to create success with your release work, it will first feel like you’re experiencing more anger before you then work your way through enough of it to where you can start to notice a tangible reduction in how angry you’re feeling.  In time, this trend will shift into not only feeling less of the negative to starting to experience wellbeing at a core level.  With anger, I call this type of emotional fire care—a combination of emotional warmth, loving, and determined emotion you can turn towards yourself and the world you want to be a part of.

I’ve found some want to simply focus on changing their perspectives to life so they don’t need to or shouldn’t feel anger.  The point I want to stress about anger release work and getting the chance to reclaim the right to organically feel care is that it’s not grounded in control or somehow forcing yourself to experience yourself and life in a different way.  It’s grounded in sound emotional mechanics.  For core healing to work, you need to allow your emotional system to lead the way because it’s the only force that can successfully heal the damage that has created your anger and rage.  Only by healing first can you then find peace with life, or change your perspective, in a way that’s honest and genuine at a core level.  The more you create success with your work, the more you’ll find yourself naturally reclaiming the ability to not be so volatile and angry, and to organically feel more care.  That, ultimately, is the goal of anger release work.

Some of my clients are afraid of their anger and rage, and others are ashamed of how it has come out in the past.  These emotional barriers to releasing anger are valid and need to be honored and worked with, not ignored and pushed past.  I often use song to help my clients digest these more complex emotional barriers so they can find flow with their work and get the chance to realize that your anger wants to come out in a sustainable, layered manner, and that the real danger comes from ignoring and suppressing it.

Anger isn’t at the center of many of my client’s emotionally based struggles, but it always plays an important part within the makeup of a debilitated core.  If you want a chance to heal at a core level, all it’s parts need to heal, including your emotional fire.  In the end, your emotional system will show you how much anger and even rage is there, and how much of it needs to be digested so you can heal in the ways you want to.  My client’s job is to explore this type of release work so they can figure out whether it’s safe and has value, and whether it fits within the needs of their healing process.