In our most recent Again & Again podcast, one of things we discussed is anger, and how it can affect the Dark Night of the Soul. For me personally, anger has been one of the most challenging emotions to learn how to integrate. There are many books and resources out there for facing fears and understanding sadness, but the books on anger tend to focus on managing it, not healing it. I choose to look at ways in which I can integrate my anger, so that it can be used constructively, and not destructively.

Anger contains powerful information, it can help us learn more about our past life patterns, and our Soul Mission, but only if we approach anger with mindful awareness. That can be a challenge itself, because our social norms do not have a place for anger, and that is why we have so much anger exploding around us in road rage, political arguments, and workplace tensions. We as a humanity are not properly taught how to process our anger, and therefore we tend to stuff it down deep inside of us. Unfortunately, all that does is turn us into a dormant volcano, just waiting for the right phrase or word for the angry lava to spew out of us.

Step 1 in integrating anger is to accept that you, me, and everyone else holds onto anger. We all have it! There is no way around it. To deny the existence of your anger is the most dangerous thing you can do. Without accepting that you have the ability to be angry, you will never be able to recognize it in those pre-eruption moments, before it becomes a guiding force for your actions.

Step 2 is to learn what your specific pre-eruption moments look like. Do you have an increase in heartbeat? Does your neck vein throb? Do your cheeks get flush? Do you shake? Do you feel like wanting to run away from the situation in front of you? What are your signs of imminent eruption? By arming yourself with awareness, and understanding of what to look for, you can begin to spot your anger at earlier and earlier stages. Eventually, you will be able to spot your anger when it is at the stage of annoyance, like a mosquito buzzing around your ears when you are trying to fall asleep. It is at the annoyance stage, when anger is best suited for integration into your energy body system.

Step 3 is to talk with your anger. Discover what it and your Ego are trying to tell you. Perhaps, it feels disrespected, or is upset it cannot be in control of a situation. Ask your anger, “What prompted this feeling?” and dig deeper to find out what energy is the root cause of the anger. It is from past life experiences, or from early on in this lifetime? What were the details of the situations that connect to the anger? Dig as deep as you can, until the answers stop flowing. Write all this down and journal on it if you can, often this will lead to further insights along the way.

Step 4 is integration. Learning the details that created your anger is how you integrate it. For example, you have a past life where you were persecuted for your belief system. Let’s work with that example to show you how you can integrate your anger into your life now. This root cause of the anger will have you feeling reactive to situations where you are facing others who have beliefs at odds to your own. This has potential to show up in many life areas, not just politics and religion. Look to health, diet, career choices, how you raise your children, or any other important life factors connected with how you define yourself. In that self-identification you have reinforced your own belief system, and your anger wants you to defend it. Therefore, if someone says something that your Ego sees as being a judgement or dig at your belief system, that will be transferred to your Ego believing that the other person is in judgment of you. Integration comes from seeing that the past life judgment is directly connected to how you expect judgment to appear in your life now. You might say to yourself on a mental level that you are not in a state of expecting judgments, however the emotional expectation of judgment is certainly there, or you would never have felt angry in this type of situation. Starting with your root causes of anger and connecting them to your state of mind now is the integration process.

Imagine each detail of past and present lifetimes is a thread in a giant blanket. The blanket is so large it is nearly smothering you under the weight of it all. So, now you go along and start pulling out the threads you no longer need, shrinking the blanket to just the right size and right the right thickness for your life. The discarded threads of anger (or other emotions too), are now singled out, and you can examine them further and discover connections and overlaps you were unaware of before. Once you see how the past life threads have formed the fabric of the present, then you have started to integrate the anger. The more of these past life threads you identify, the more emotion you will also integrate. Plus, the blanket left behind is further focused and refined to fit your Soul Mission precisely, with no extra information to cloud your focus.

Take some time today and reflect upon your anger, go through the steps above slowly and completely. Do this exercise often to reveal more and more of those threads, pluck them out and understand why they were there in the first place. Each time you integrate more of your anger, you are removing the extra weight of emotions you no longer need, and left behind is the pure focus of how to put your past and present life experience into action as your Soul Mission.