Anger is adrenaline. Like sugar, it lasts as long as it receives external strokes, validation to keep it going. But in the end, it needs fuel. It demands to be constantly fed and when you cant feed it, it consumes you. The burden of anger always belongs to the one carrying it.
Most anger is projection. I am angry therefore I resonate with the things that feed my anger. You think the cure is in ending the provocation, but it’s not. It’s in ending the ability of the provocation to elicit a response in you. The origin and end is always in us
A philosophy based on anger, need, fear of elimination, grasping is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Why is forgiveness so powerful? We imagine it as letting people get away without consequences. Forgiveness is removing the power the provocateur has over you. They become powerless because anger is your dance to their tune. As long you keep dancing, you are not free of them
We release ourselves and in doing so we release those who hurt us. Eventually they see they don’t affect us and stop. If they don’t stop we see them caught in their cyclic misery and offer compassion. In doing so we become greater than those who hurt us. This is the high road
On the high road, we find another path, other things to focus on. Acts that provoked us no longer matter, so distant they become specks in our past, memories we can learn from to propel our better actions. We feel sorry for those still where we left them. This is moving on.
The better life does not come from staying stuck in an irretrievable past, an undoable injustice, but in using it to better ways of doing and being. The hurt others send us lives in us, bodily, in the mind, and in the memory. What we transform it into is the channel we become.
This is empowerment.
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