Generating Karma: The Anger Virus
Clearing Toxicity
While clearing the unconscious emotional toxicity from your past may be too complex a task to take on by yourself, clearing your current anger and negativity is a task that you can work through on your own. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve had a stressful day filled with conflict and hostility. You leave work feeling tense, angry, and worried. Your first thought when you walk through your front door and greet your family is to get a drink or two to soothe your nerves. You want to forget what happened as quickly as you can, and ignore those troublesome feelings of anger that have tied your stomach up in knots. Your anger, however, is not eager to cooperate with your intentions and will not readily accede to your wishes. Anger is an agitated, aggressive, restless, and unhappy energy in need of an outlet and in search of a target. It cannot be stilled or pacified for long. Unless you transform your anger it will manifest in unexpected ways that are destructive to both yourself and other people.
Lashing Out: The Danger of Impulse
You’ve finished one drink now and are finally beginning to unwind. Your stomach is loosening up. You are finally able to breathe again. Then your spouse or one of your children barges into your study and asks you an innocent question. Before you can catch yourself you are taking the weight of your anger out on them. “Leave me alone, goddamitt! ” you scream. “Can’t you see that I need to be by myself for a few minutes? Is that too damn much to ask? Go away!” It’s not the way you intended to react, but you couldn’t help yourself. The words just slipped out of your mouth before you could stop yourself from saying them. Once they are out there you can’t take them back. The anger that hurt you in the workplace is now hurting those you love at home. A single, momentary slip of the tongue is all it took to cause emotional damage. Dinner is not pleasant, the air is toxic, charged with unexpressed emotion. No one says much. Instead, everyone retreats into his or her own world, upset, knotted up with anger, and silent.
An Emotional Infection
While that is painful enough, the events of the evening do not end at the dinner table. Every family member carries that toxicity with them into the next day. The toxicity in their systems will, in turn, infect many of the people they interact with perpetuating the anger and expanding its reach.
As the above example illustrates, the failure to process anger and other negative emotions can have serious consequences beyond your own experience. Instead of trying to assuage your anger and hope it goes away on its own, a far better approach to dealing with toxic emotion involves confronting and clearing your negativity as it arises. When you confront your anger and negativity as it occurs, you regain your balance and increase your power, clarity, and confidence. When you clear your anger and negativity you will be less prone to creating more negative karma.
In Harm’s Way
The opposite, however, is also true. When you ignore your anger, hoping that it will go away of its own accord, you lose your power and balance. By ignoring your anger, you put yourself in harm’s way, for you never know when or how that anger might surface and cause you to explode. When your anger does surface, the one thing you can count on is that the way you express it will not be in your best interests. Angry people are never at peace. They are karma generating machines.