Merciful Anger

The spring time odyssey invites us to slip into the cracks of our gender identity narratives. On the first half of the journey, we dive into womanhood and motherhood following various voices, named and unnamed, receiving tender words capturing the essence of our inner experience, listening to music with powerful lyrics as we fall upwards into Joy Unspeakable.

Joy Unspeakable is where the weary and self-emptied traveller lands when sorrow is handed over to a conversion of the heart. The transformation of sorrow into joy requires that we feel – truly feel – the losses, the sorrows, and all the unlivedness that dwell in us. What’s more, it beckons us to acknowledge the depth of the grief that inhabits us, individually and collectively. The love revolution sparked by Joy Unspeakable begins when we surrender to weeping and lamenting, even bemoaning and complaining, the mountains of sorrow that are chiselled in the human experience.

The June workshop invites us to the second half of the journey, this time exploring manhood and fatherhood, a journey guiding us towards Merciful Anger. Similar to grief, anger is also much suppressed and denied in our cultures and societies, yet anger is the deepest form of care and love.

How often have I bellowed, helplessly, “Where does my anger go when it cannot be conveyed and received in the fullness of its expression?”  So, yes, what happens when the ferocious lifeforces, we hastily name anger, are curtailed? They go underground bidding their eruption. So many – too many – voices strangled, words swallowed in makeshift attempts to conform to sanitised versions of anger and the premises of anger management approaches.

Nobody likes an angry woman; they are even feared, shunned and spurned as undesirable. Anger is a masculine energy, we are told, and in the name of this attribute of virility, anger is probably the only emotion that has been forcefully hammered into men so that they may claim their manhood and, like Prometheus, steal the power of fire from those who inhabit anger gracefully and unashamedly, as their birth right and rightful legacy.

Regardless of this cultural and societal context, whatever our gender or orientation, when we can allow ourselves to feel – truly feel – our bitter frustrations, our abrasive irritations, our rancorous disappointments, and the wealth of our sentiments of injustice, then we fall upwards into Merciful Anger and dwell there in compassionate equanimity.