Rage is a part of me, I have always known it, I feel rage sometimes when I just mention the word. As a child, I believe I had good reason to feel rage, as an adult I have tried to live with rage and understand it all of my life. I realize one can never completely shed rage, but you can live with it. It can be a great teacher.  I think I am beginning to learn how to do that.

I had several encounters with rage yesterday, mine and the rage of other people. Rage attracts rage, like anger attracts anger. Unchecked and misunderstood, it can be an awful disease. Understood and considered, it can be healing and cleansing.

Rage is a universal human emotion,  all of us have it to varying degrees, even if we don’t wish to acknowledge it. In her remarkable book “Women Who Run With Wolves,”  Clarissa Estes writes about the rage women and men feel:  “even raw and messy emotions are a form of light, crackling, bursting with energy. We can use the light of rage in a positive way, in order, in order to see places we cannot usually see. A negative use of rage (cable news, left-right politics,  nasty messages online) is to destructively concentrate it in one tiny spot until, like acid creating an ulcer, it destructively burns a black hole right through all of the delicate layers of the psyche.”

I carry a few such holes in my psyche, I have worked  hard to understand and contain them, not just feel them. In  my relationship with Maria, or the dogs, rage has never appeared. In my work as an editor and producer and journalist, it appeared frequently. I quit about a dozen jobs, always in a rage, and only in recent years have I been open to lasting friendships and the ability to be still.

But rage also has to do with learning, rage is a great teacher. Something not just to run and hide from but a mountain to climb, something to learn from. When I feel rage, I always ask: is this who I want to be? Is this how I want to be?

What can I learn from rage, what is it showing me about myself? Rage is a cycle, and like any other cycle, it rises, falls, dies, eases, disappears, it is a powerful form of energy, an open window into the deepest parts of ourselves. It can rip us apart, it can also heal us in the most surprising of ways.

By allowing myself to see rage as a teacher, by permitting myself to be taught by it, I am able to transform it. Learning from it dissipates it, disperses it, controls it. I can take that powerful energy and apply it to my love for Maria, for the animals, for my writing, for my photos, for my body, now in need of more care and attention than it once needed.

Rage is not good for creativity, a person who creates out of rage tends to create the same thing over and over again, they tell the same story – just look at the political blogs – there is nothing new coming through, there is no acceptance, change, growth, no listening or respect for other points of view. Rage untransformed and unfiltered is the path to self-pity and victimization. “Untransformed rage,” writes Estes, “can become a constant mantra about how oppressed, hurt, and tortured we were.” Do not speak poorly of your life, or your work,  it may be listening.

Rage corrodes trust, it washes away hope, it forbids listening or hearing, learning or growing.

What kind of person do I wish to be? What did I learn from this? Is this really how I want to handle the traumas of my life? Is this who I want to be? And what will it take, to be who I want to be?

In all trauma treatment, the doctors know that the chances are good that the sooner the injury is dealt with, the less it’s effects spread or worsen. Rage is an injury, the sooner it is seen and understood, the sooner it can be treated and understood.

When I feel rage, it is often because I feel abused, endangered. It comes with shame and guilt for me, and sometimes, terror. I learned rage when I had no other tools, not other way to feel. The outrage we commonly feel about life and politics and culture are often echoes of the disrespect, terror, abuse or neglect we felt in childhood. They return to us in new forms, the rage is old and deep. I always recognize it, it is one of the most familiar feelings in my soul. When people treat me in that old way, they will often see my rage, it often shocks and surprises them. Or triggers rage inside of them.

Rage is a magnet, it always – always – brings out the worst in other people, as well as me. I always feel like I just end up looking in an awful mirror, reflecting parts of my life I don’t wish to see.

So I sit with rage, I meditate with it, I invite it in for tea and chat, I ask what it is doing here, what can I learn from it, what do I need to change, how can I see the light more clearly? Estes calls this the mystery of the bear.  You give it food. It is, after all, quite a journey, this business of rage.

For me, Rage is best understood as a teacher, it is about the business of stripping down illusions, taking responsibility, remaining open to awakening. Perhaps most of all, it is about learning how to lay the dead past to rest.