Anger is not the problem. What matters is what happens next. In this Tiny Treasure, Cari explores anger as a natural, healthy emotion and looks at what may be underneath it: unmet needs, wounded pride, crossed boundaries, and the longing to feel seen and valued. She shares five simple, body-based ways to slow the energy of anger down, create space around it, and respond with greater clarity instead of slipping into aggression.

Because the goal is not to stop feeling anger. It is to stay connected to ourselves, and when possible, to one another, while we feel it.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Hi everyone, it's Cari. Man, I wanted to jump on today and just talk about an emotion that's been super alive for me this week. Maybe it'll be a little unexpected, and that is anger. Oh my goodness, folks! I don't know what has been happening, but from friendships to work relationships, to my marriage, it has just been tinged with feelings of anger. Since I've been working with it and dealing with it, I thought, what a great time to jump on and share a little bit about what I know about anger. And the first thing I want to share is anger is not a bad thing. The feeling

of anger is normal. It's healthy to feel anger, and we need to give permission to ourselves to actually feel anger. Otherwise, we're just spiritually bypassing it. So, what is this idea of spiritual bypassing? It's a concept created by John Wellwood. So, what is the definition? It is the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. So that's a very formal definition. But the way that I'm using it here is to say that when we compartmentalize anger, or push it down, or

pretend it's not existing, or try to turn it into something else, that is a way that we are not allowing our experience to be just as it is, and allowing ourselves to feel our true feelings just as they are. And when we do that, we can also avoid facing what's really here. So we can drop into ideas around this not being good, anger not being good, and certainly anger that is unhealthy or striking or hurtful. We're going to talk about a little bit about what that is. Is different than when we're actually managing and working through the emotion of anger in a way that's healthy. So I

wanted to start with a root analysis on anger. So, what is a root analysis? What does that mean for people who maybe have not heard that word before? And it essentially means that if we were to peel away and peel away and peel away, what is the root that is causing something? And sometimes that can be just hard to get to, but we often feel angry because we feel wronged, we feel diminished, our boundaries have been crossed. We can also feel righteous anger, like on behalf of injustices that we see in the world, or what we feel is the right way to be in the world. Certainly, we're seeing a

lot of this everywhere, but in Buddhism, the Buddha said there were two primary reasons that we feel anger, and the first is that our needs are not being met or unfulfilled desire. So we have this craving for something to be a certain way, and that need is not being met. That can feel like a lack of somebody valuing us, a lack of somebody hearing us, of not feeling seen. An example could be like I do a lot of chores and activities around the house that my husband may or may not see, and I become resentful. And guess what? He does too. So the first one would be this feeling our needs are

not being met, or unfulfilled desires for certain needs to be met, and for us to be seen and felt, and valued and heard. That's the first reason the Buddha said we feel angry, and the second reason is wounded pride. Wounded pride. So, pride is only a pride in the context when it is the basis for demeaning others. Meaning, I need to feel slightly above them, or better than, or you know, as if I'm just slightly upheld at a higher level, that is the pride that we're talking about here. So Buddhism encourages confidence and honesty with oneself about is there a place in which we are allowing

pride to get in the way of humility, of true humility. So attract. here could be: I don't feel as good as I want to about myself, so I buffer to defend. Right. So the shadow side of feeling better than is often that we're contrasting feelings of unworth to buffer ourselves. Against it, so we put ourselves a little bit above as a means of trying to hold on to some power that we feel like we need to have.

And when that power, that pride, gets wounded or you know taken out, that can create anger. There's a beautiful quote by one of my favorite teachers, Adyashanti, that says anger's other face is often a kind of extraordinary clarity. People don't usually associate anger with clarity. They associate that when they get angry, they get sort of distorted, or even disoriented, or disassociated, and not very clear at all, but this is the opportunity that there is something behind the anger that is really important for us to see. So it's understanding what's behind the anger, and skillful anger

doesn't shame, it doesn't blame, it doesn't dehumanize, it doesn't yell. It doesn't scream. It's not out of control. That's aggression. Anger actually protects boundaries, and aggression disregards and disrespects boundaries, and violence trashes them altogether. That's a quote from Robert Augustus Masters, the late Robert Augustus Masters. If you haven't looked him up, look him up. He's amazing, and he's written some fantastic books. So, anger is not aggression. That's different. Anger can move into aggression, or anger can stay as anger is. And what is anger? Like, what is any

emotion really? It's just energy. It's energy, and what happens when we get angry? And I know this. I tend to be a little bit of an aversive, angry character by nature, right? So this was a lot of why I came to my meditation path, why I came to my healing path, is that I really wanted to be able to manage some of the disruption in my system. And anger is just an energy, and it spins things up. It becomes very, very fast, and it can be hard to slow things down. So energetically, when we can slow things down and feel into the energy of anger, we can make a slightly more sober choice. That does

doesn't mean we're going to just like stop the spin, especially if we're angry with somebody we really, really care about, or we really, really love, or we really have a connection with, but we can make a sober choice, and we can come to observe the anger and our relationship to it in a more natural way, and we can ask ourselves: Is this coming from an unmet need that I have? I don't feel seen. I don't feel valued. And can I then just ask for that without aggression? And that's the trick. It's so easy for us to slip into aggression in those moments. Or am I having wounded pride? Did I feel

like I was really good? Did I feel like I was better than how I'm being seen? When we can stop and observe and slow down, we can actually make a choice, and then we don't become the emotion. We don't let it take over us. We can make a mindful choice, and this is sort of the difference between, and for any emotion, anger being one of them. But where we have a choice to either become depression, to become anxiety, to become unhappiness. Sometimes, you know, we're suffering from a mental disorder that's different than what I'm talking about, I'll tell you a little story about this. When my father

died, which was incredibly traumatic for me, he died very young. He was 64 years old, and it was a botched surgery. And I felt incredible grief, like I was. It was hard for my legs to stand up straight. I, you know, the grief was just overwhelming, but there was still a way that I could see the grief. I could feel it fully in my body, but not entirely become it. And that's the difference. I still held this space where the thing I call me, and where all the emotions take place on this sort of giant stage was still vast and wide and aware of what was taking place inside of me. And when we

can do this with anger, we give it space, and we give ourselves space for it to not overcome us and for us to not become us, so the wisdom and the power come from slowing down the energy, slowing down the adrenaline, and getting to the metta m e t t a, which is loving kindness. That's a Sanskrit word. So what I'm really saying here is slowing it down so that we can slow it down so much.

That we can find loving kindness for ourselves and others, even in these very angry moments. Anger is heart wrenching, and when I say heart wrenching, I mean truly a wrench to the heart. A response to anger is inherently positive. I'm feeling angry, and my heart wants to stay open to you. I want to stay connected to you, and I'm not. A reaction is inherently negative and divisive. Anger, in and of itself, isn't a problem. Aggression with the intention to create negativity or divisiveness that would be an issue. A great thing about coming into our own wholeness is that it's not as though we just

sit on the couch and see that everything is perfect. This is a quote from Madhushanti. We do see that everything is perfect, but from that sense of perfection arises great love, great compassion, and a great response to the life around us. So this is really describing, you know, when we can slow down, when we can downregulate our system. We can find the part in our heart. We can wrench out of our heart this part that still feels love, even when we're angry, it's not easy to do. It has to be conscious, and sometimes we need to take space. Sometimes I need to walk away. Sometimes my husband

needs to walk away from me. I'll tell you that. Some people think, "Oh, I'm a meditation teacher, and I'm an executive coach, and I'm teaching people about healing, and I am, but I'm still a human being, and I'm still a person, and I get angry, and I get hurt, and I act in ways I regret, and then I come back and try to repair. I'm as guilty of it as anyone. One of the ways that I work with how do I create this slowdown is in working with the body, so this is what can also be called as the somatic experience of anger. Like, how do I even know I'm in it before it kind of gets me? How do I

know I'm in it before I get reactive? So there's a few steps I put down. I put down five steps. Maybe I'll call this little episode five steps of dealing with anger, but the first body based is if you notice that you're trying to push something down, and this takes some skill, so aversion to the anger that you don't even want to feel it, you want to push it away, you want to compartmentalize it, that is a signal. It's your body signal to saying I'm holding something. Are we getting a reaction in our own system? Are we getting triggered? Am I experiencing the anger in the body? This is number

three. So, do I feel my heart's getting rapid? Am I feeling warm? Am I feeling tightness? Does my throat contract? And number four is: Am I armoring up? Am I creating an armor around myself? And number five is: Can I get some distance in the direct experience of my body and in the larger experience of myself? So, five ideas, five different practices you can do. Number one: notice if you're pushing it down and compartmentalizing it. Notice if you're triggered. Notice what's happening in your body. Notice if you're armoring up, and see if you can create some space, some distance, some

slowing down around it. Anger is a natural emotion. It's going to happen. The big question is, what do we do after the moment we've noticed anger is here?