Anger Management and the Gentle Art of Blessings
Tell me the story now
Now that it’s over
Wrap it in glory
For one Irish Rover
Tell me you’re wiser now
Tell me you’re older
Wrap it in glory
For one Irish Rover
One Irish Rover – Van Morrison
As a storyteller I love stories. I especially love stories were the human condition is highlighted and the true self wins out, which is beyond the opposites of winning and losing. Here is a short story that I love. It is from The Gentle Art of Blessings
A young American ventures to Japan to study martial arts. he is riding the subway, and at one station an immense, completely drunk, unsavoury looking hulk of a man enters the subway car. He aggressively jostles various passengers and violently pushes a woman down the aisle. At this point the young American feels impelled to act. For the first time, he finds himself in a situation where he can apply in real life the skills he has mastered in the martial arts classroom through years of training.
When the drunken hulk hurls insults at him, he steps forward poised to defend the widow and the orphan, and teach the drunkard a lesson he will not forget. At that pivotal moment, a tiny, elderly gentleman sitting on a seat with his tiny wife, lets out a piercing shout. The drunkard, completely taken aback turns around. Then the old gentleman beckons him, inviting him to sit down beside him. He starts talking to the huge fellow- who must have been twice his size – of his love for sake (rice wine). He has found a common link with the drunken man. After a few moments, they are talking to each other like old friends. The giant starts to cry. All aggressiveness has melted. He becomes like a child.
At this point, the young American realises that the old man has just given him an extraordinary lesson in martial arts, that the ultimate of his art is never to use it – physically. That the only real victory is the victory over self, be it fear, anger or self justification. He exits the subway car, taking with him the image of a huge man with his head in his knees of a neat kindly old gentleman who is caressing his dirty, matted hair.
The old mans was “blessing his neighbour without pronouncing anything but the most ordinary words. He had gone far beyond talking about spiritual truths. He was simply being Love.
That is the supreme Blessing.
This story was told by the great American Ram Dass. I love this story. It touches my heart. In it I see all of myself. I see especially the huge drunken, aggressive man who would melt like a child given that someone was kind enough to share their Love. I see myself too as the old gentleman who sees beyond the aggression to the deeper sadness of the separateness from Love. I, too am the young American. Except I am not trained in martial arts but I am, like so many, a reactionary. I react to situations rather than respond. I get myself into situations before I realise that the energetic I am creating is not terribly skilful and I have lost my centre.
I have the privilege of knowing a young man who has a heavy burden to carry. He carries the burden of the sins of the father and the sins of the father before the father. He carries within him all the energies of opposition that are unresolved in his family and within his family history. He is not unlike other young men I know. He is not unlike myself who was the archetypal angry young man, but is now to some degree the one who can share his love and make people I have never met melt into their knowing of who they are. I have become the Magician archetype who has been loved into existence by the archetype of the Orphan.
At a poetry reading I gave in Leeds in England one time I told a short story. It was a short story about my relationship to my emotionally distant father. During the break a rather large and slightly inebriated Scotsman look me by the arm and said,
I don’t know how you do that but you nearly made me cry.”
Who would you rather be? I know who I intend to be. I intend to be them all because they are all part of me. This doesn’t mean I learn martial arts or learn to be a huge drunken lout – I have already played that role in large measure. I intend to live being Love. I intend to write and invite being Love. This is a supreme blessing.
Violence in any form never works. it tends to create more violence. The real courage is to develop enough discipline to create the gap. The gap is that instant between reactivity and responsibility. Reactivity is a kind of Pavlov’s dog kind of way of moving in the world. It is also helpful to remember that you are an attractor. You attract the energy you put out. This is the Law of Attraction in operation at an unconscious level. You need to learn an anger management technique. The best technique I know is meditation. It is the way of creating a physiological gap. Here is one of the greatest management anger tips and technique. With the practice of mediation you create the gap between reactivity and responsibility. You create a space within yourself where you are able to see what is coming and you have the time – be it only a little time – to make a conscious choice in how you will respond.
However, there is a strange phenomena that happens around meditation. When I worked at the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Bethnal Green in London it was found that young men who began to meditate would get into fights. It was a common enough thing to see black eyes. Here were young men intent on peace and they were attracting violence. This is the work of the shadow (2nd chakra). This is not a popular idea amidst lightworkers. Those who are seekers after the light.
This is what happens. What is in the subconscious begins to open out and move more consciously into your energy field. Everyone of us has reason, even good reason, to feel angry. You don’t become and instrument of peace by denying your anger. You become an instrument of peace by alchemising anger in fire (3rd chakra work) and transforming it into air (the heart chakra) – the energy of the heart. This is alchemy healing. It is turning the lead of anger into the gold of compassion. This is the true work of the Alchemist. It is a real energy healing technique.
This takes discipline. This is really the discipline of martial arts. It is the discipline of the boxing ring and the discipline of a warm meditation practice. It is also the discipline of Hatha Yoga which through the practice of asanas impact the bio-energtic armour we place around the emotional body. This discipline is not something you do against your will. It is what you do because you commit to a value that you wish to be integral to your life and the life you plan to make wild and precious.
If you don’t have such a discipline with a deep spiritual value inherent in it then you might find yourself in the underground. You might find yourself in a subway of a life lived without love. If you are lucky you will meet with the wise old man (and it could easily be the wise old woman) and he or she will talk to you, not about love, but will connect to you by being love. He or she will remind you in the words of a Mary Oliver poem,
You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is a life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. it is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it. – Mary Oliver – West Wind II
To be such an old gentleman toward the middle and close of your life is an extraordinary blessing. To be able to shout from within the darkness of the subway and to get the attention of a brother or sister lost in the darkness of their paradigm of separateness is a real martial art. it is the art of the heart. it is the art of compassionate awareness. It is a 4th chakras level awareness and above.
You don’t get there by denying your feelings as many who are seekers after truth do. You get their by the merging of the opposites within you (2nd chakra) aligned with the will (3rd chakra) that is focused through discipline and a daily spiritual practice that you are committed to. Then, when the giant hulk appears in your life, you can practice The Gentle Art of Blessings
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What is Yoga – The Key to Living a Wild and Precious Life
It opens with a powerful piano accompaniment and then the voice comes in and sings the opening lines
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
No, no regrets
No, we will have no regrets
As you leave, I can say
Love was King
but only for a day
Edith Piaf, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
This is a song (hear it here by clicking the graphic) »»»»
that when I hear it sends shivers down my spine. It is, of course, the song made famous by Edith Piaf – the little sparrow. The only other time I ever had the experience of feeling that spine tingling experience was one sunny afternoon in London.
I was walking through Covent Garden market close to the Royal Opera House. The music from the opera was being piped into the square through a bank of speakers. I was stopped in my tracks by the song being sung. I don’t know what the name of the song was but the singer was Pavarotti. He was singing what seemed to me to be a song that said Love was King.
On each of these occasions I felt the wonder of what it is to be a human being. I felt the wonder of listening to the longings of the heart as it called out expressing our relation to that dynamic all hearts long to touch and to be at one with. It is our triumph but for too many it is also their tragedy. The tragedy of being the expression of Love in form without the ability to express this in creative and empowering ways.
Rick Jarrow in his Sounds True recording “The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide – The Inner Path to Finding Your Work in the World,” tells about a survey conducted among elderly Americans. These elders were asked the question, “Do you have any regrets in the life you have lived?” Overwhelmingly, the answer that was returned was that most regretted not what they had done, but what they felt they had failed to do. They regretted the opportunity to take a path that had been offered along the way.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by
And that made all the difference
Robert Frost
from “The Road Not Taken.”
Notice that when the elders were asked the question “Do you have any regrets in the life you have lived?” they focused on loss of an opportunity. As a writer and storyteller, this answer fascinates me. It reminds me of the importance of the invitation from the soul that is forever inviting us into that expansiveness that is the movement of Love in form.
The True Meaning of Yoga
The first stage on the Hero’s Journey is what is termed “The Call.” It is the refusal of the call that is central in many movies and the beginning of many more. This is where the anti-hero becomes filled with struggle and usually lives a conflicted life until there is a sense of redemption only when they take action that they are trying so hard to avoid. At the beginning of the story of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker refuses to answer the call to go to the assistance of those who call for his help. He refuses to step into his destiny signified by his name – a Walker between the world of earth and sky.
In my own life I refused the call to become a Yoga teacher because I paid attention to the view of the collective that was the dynamic at the time when I lived in Northern Ireland. This was the collective voice that said the teachings of Yoga were the teachings of the devil. This was at a time when Yoga and the philosophy and practice of Hatha Yoga was not the household word it is today. It took me more than thirty years before I would heed the call.
I am not a Yoga teacher in the normal understanding of that term. Most people understand Yoga as a series of exercises rather than a map of the journey into living the wild and precious life. I am a teacher of this kind of Yoga. I invite through my writing, storytelling and singing an experience called union. This is the experience of a state of being where you recognise your oneness with creation. This is the experience of union. This is the true meaning and purpose of yoga. Yoga means “to yoke.” It means to join that which appears separate to that which is non-separate. This is a living paradox because in the most real of senses you are working to join that which has never been separate and never needs joining
Do I have any regrets about this? The answer is no. I might have had regrets had I refused the call the second time around when I made the choice to give up the work I was doing. We sold our house in Leeds in England. We gave up the business we had built up over twenty years and return to Ireland. Neither one of us had a job to go to or the prospect of getting one in the outback of rural West of Ireland.
Many of our friends thought we were crazy. To be honest, I felt scared but I knew that if I did not follow this invitation into a kind of metaphorical and physical homecoming that I would always regret it. I knew that part of who I was to become would die inside me if I did not go.
None of what Bee and I did made sense in logical terms. I could have stayed on doing what I was trained to do. I had started a new business promoting computer and accounting software. The opportunities where widening for me. Then my sister Mary died at the age of fifty- four years. I was fifty years old at the time. Her dying at such an early age made me ask the question the opened me up to questing and answering the call I had refused to answer when at seventeen my mother handed me a book. She was an avid reader. She had never suggested that I read any book before. She gave me a book on Yoga. I read it and knew that a door had opened in me that invited a crossing of a threshold into what my heart loved but was too afraid to follow.
Crossing Borders 
The question I asked myself was this. “Tony, if you had only four more years to live would you be doing what you are doing now?” It took no time to answer “No.” So I and my beloved Bee, one cat goddess and an angel of a dog made the decision that we would, in the words of Joseph Campbell “follow our bliss.” I’m not sure that the cat was initially keen on the move. But she was a star on Moving Day ,delighting everyone she met when travelling the long journey from Leeds in England, through Scotland, across the water to Belfast harbour and on to Dowra on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Now I have a favourite saying that I use when we sit together looking out over the beauty of the landscape we are graced to live in. I turn to Bee and I say, “Another fine mess you have got us into.” This is a line frequently used by the comedians Laurel and Hardy. It really is a wild and precious kind of mess that we live in since we took the road less travelled.
The central theme of the song sung by Edith Piaf is the theme of Love. For me it is intimately connected to the theme of forgiveness. We all have regrets. The greatest regret for many will be living with the knowledge that you refused to live the life you where called to live. You will regret not singing the song that only you are here to sing. This needn’t be a song – an action that will change the world but let me say this. Your heart knows what it longs to give to the world because it is from this centre that the meaning of your being here is found and it is found in the movement of energy from this heart centre that naturally gives from its direct know of Love.
When the poet Mary Oliver, who wrote the line that inspires the work I am graced to do was asked by Maria Shriver Schwartzneger “What have you done with your one wild and precious life,” she replied that she had learned to love and be loved – but that it had not been easy. This is as succinct an answer to the meaning of existence as one is ever likely to hear.
I am blessed that I have only one regret and I do not dwell on it. A long time ago and over a long period of time I told someone that I loved them. I didn’t really know what love was. I lived a fairly loveless life. It is why I so identify with the lines from the Hafiz poem,
Everyone you meet you say to them
“Love me!”
Of course, you do no say this out loud
otherwise someone might call the cops.
I spent most of my twenties saying to everyone I met, “Love me!” I didn’t say it out loud but I was radiating it into the atmosphere. I felt loveless and unloved and there were many times I almost threw my life away in behaviours that where a result of a sense of desperation. I don’t regret that time but I can honestly say I would not want to live in that kind of state again.
5th Chakra Practice
Let there be no regrets because it blocks the energy of the new which is the energy of Love moving into higher form. If you do have regrets then make amends in the best way that you can. if you have regrets they are a form of attachment to an idea of what you should be. However, you are the living process of Loves forever becoming. While you might have regrets Love that is the cosmic energy that creates you in each and every moment does not ever experience regret.
Practice forgiveness and give up feeling guilty. When the energy of any thought of regret arises do not give it your emotional attachment. Practice the art of silent witnessing and release such regret, which is a form of non-forgiving, into the ether (5th chakra) with the request that it be given back to you to be used for the highest good of all. Do this as often as you need and pay attention to how the Universe replies. Be open to any possibility.
You are here to live a wild and precious life. You do not earn that right by anything you do or do not do. It is already a given. It is your birthright. It is what I refer to as your true name – the name that Love agave to you before you were born – to speak into this world of form. Your only true regret will be if you do not do this. This is the call of the soul and in the words of the master soul friend (anamcara),
What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul.
The means that you gain nothing if you lose your knowing connection to the infinite creative expression within you that is your source of joy, purpose and passion for life. This is the direct knowing that you are a unique sound of Love in form. Knowing this (which is not simply intellectual knowledge) you have no time for regret because your core being knows that it partakes in the timelessness of Love moving into form through you.
This knowing and the forgiveness that arises from such knowing is a major key to living a life without regret.
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