She hated being late so she left her\u00a0house an hour early. Plenty of time to get there and then some. She wasn\u2019t\u00a0exactly sure how to get where she was going, so she turned on her GPS an filed\u00a0into the bumper to bumper traffic that was lined up on Laurel Canyon. She\u00a0reminded herself that she had time to spare and she breathed and stayed calm.
Surely the traffic would let up when she got to Sunset Blvd.<\/p>\n
It did and she exhaled. She was\u00a0heading for a meeting near the airport so she decided to take Crescent Heights\u00a0all the way down. It was usually a good way to avoid traffic. Big mistake. After\u00a0a short time, it became stop and go so she turned right and headed across to La
Cienega. A worse mistake. Road work everywhere. Loud machines clanking and\u00a0sputtering. Orange cones cutting off two lanes. She inched forward, stuck\u00a0behind a large white van with no back window so she couldn’t see anything in\u00a0front of her. She hit every red light as her muscles tightened. Her breathing\u00a0was becoming shallow and she began to hyperventilate. She wanted to slow her\u00a0breath but she was too far gone as she white- knuckled the steering wheel. No\u00a0more Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde had taken over, telling her she was going the wrong
way and she\u2019d never get there anyway. That was when the full transformation\u00a0hit. She started screaming in her car, spewing swear words. When she finally\u00a0got to her meeting exactly on time, she was exhausted, ashamed and she felt\u00a0like she\u2019d been beaten up \u2013 by herself. \u00a0<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve probably guessed by now that\u00a0\u201cshe\u201d was me. It\u2019s embarrassing to admit that every bit of that story is true.\u00a0Sweet, spiritual, patient Andrea who forgives and encourages, who teaches and\u00a0cares for the dying had turned into a cussing, raging, blaming shrew. I was having\u00a0an authentic bout of road rage and for a moment, I understood why people got\u00a0out of their cars when someone changed lanes in front of them and picked a\u00a0potentially deadly fight with a person they didn’t know, for something they had\u00a0also done at a different time.<\/p>\n
When I got home, I was wiped out\u00a0and stunned at my behavior. I remembered the name of a book by the late artist,\u00a0Beatrice Woods, called, \u201cI shock myself.\u201d I had shocked myself. My rage had\u00a0been so extreme. How did it happen? How had I gotten so angry that I had lost
it? It seemed like I had dropped into a kind of hypnosis and in some twisted\u00a0way, it had felt good to swear and yell and feel like a victim.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s like gossiping. I know it\u2019s\u00a0bad and unkind but if I\u2019m honest, it can feel good to go numb and blame someone\u00a0else, to become united with someone against another person. It’s like being a\u00a0member of a private club that uses up a lot of energy and adrenaline and if you\u00a0don’t get it in hand, you can end up hurting yourself.<\/p>\n
I felt shame about my anger and\u00a0frustration. Many of my baby boomer generation of \u201cnew agers,\u201d believed that\u00a0\u201cbeing spiritual\u201d didn’t include having anger and impatience. Hate and blame. But\u00a0I\u2019ve learned that it\u2019s a misnomer to think that spirituality is all love and\u00a0light. Rainbows and butterflies. I no longer think that being spiritual is\u00a0pretending to be something that you’re not, something better than who you are. It\u2019s
about finding the courage to admit that you’re furious. Hurt. Inadequate. Afraid.\u00a0If you\u2019re lying to yourself, suppressing your feelings so you can look better\u00a0to other people, the problem is that however you look has nothing to do with\u00a0how you feel. Remember the old adage: The only way out is in.<\/p>\n
I often turn to the wisdom of\u00a0Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, to clarify my thoughts. She says, \u201cWhen you\u2019re\u00a0angry, it\u2019s like sitting on a keg of dynamite and it\u2019s vibrating.\u201d She explains\u00a0that we all become enraged. I had a friend who went on a retreat to an ashram,\u00a0led by a guru who only allowed joy. They called him \u201cthe joyful teacher.\u201d One\u00a0night, my friend stopped at the doorway to the kitchen and observed the guru
making himself a sandwich. When he turned his back and opened the refrigerator\u00a0to get something to drink, a dog showed up and ate the guru\u2019s sandwich. When he\u00a0saw the empty plate, he looked to his right, looked to his left, and when he\u00a0was sure that no one could see him, he kicked the dog.<\/p>\n
No matter how much anger we feel,\u00a0being real is the only way to guide ourselves away from negativity and onto the\u00a0path to peace and compassion. I recall a teaching from the late Vietnamese\u00a0monk, Thich Nat Hanh. He said that when he got to a red light, he saw it as an
opportunity to to stop and breathe. To meditate. Just think about all the
breathing and meditating I could have done during my wild ride. But I wasn\u2019t up\u00a0to the task. I had something more important to do: to investigate my rage,\u00a0understand where it had come from, accept it because it was real, and watch it\u00a0dissolve. In my experience, missing any of these steps puts us right back where\u00a0we started. It\u2019s never effective to turn in on ourselves and pile more anger on\u00a0top of what’s already there. When we ignore anger, we end up kicking the dog.
When we acknowledge it, we can stop, take a breath and make another sandwich.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
She hated being late so she left her\u00a0house an hour early. Plenty of time to get there and then some. She wasn\u2019t\u00a0exactly sure how to get where she was going, so she turned on her GPS an filed\u00a0into the bumper to bumper traffic that was lined up on Laurel Canyon. She\u00a0reminded herself that she had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2318,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317\/revisions\/2318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}