Anger

A good friend of mine emailed me today about the issue of anger. It got me thinking: is anger a "bad" thing? Or do we just misuse it?

Not that I have the answers, but my provisional understanding of this issue is that there is a clear difference between experiencing anger, expressing anger, and reacting out of anger that is projected onto an external "other". The first two I would consider healthy so long as they arise out of a process of moving through "stuff" rather than cycling around a vicious circle with it. Anger is the mover of obstacles, they say. Most times, though, people fall into the projection trap, identifying the anger with an apparent cause (another person's action) rather that owning it as their own feeling.

I am always amazed at the ability of so many Japanese people I've met to refrain from expressing anger when the same circumstances would certainly arouse such a reaction from most English people (for example!). The trouble is, you can never tell for sure (unless you can see people's aura, which I can sometimes but not usually—it goes dark red when people get angry) whether a person's really not angry or just pretending! And denial of any emotion inevitably translates into energetic distortion and physical imbalance...

How to be honest about all our feelings without harming ourselves or others?