A Painful Lump, An Answering Dream, Love of Angry Me

The last week or so, I’ve had a lump in my lower left-side back near the waistline that’s been painful again. The pain comes and goes, and I have probably had the lump all my life—just lately in the last decade I’ve pinpointed it to a more specific area. Normal activities like snow shoveling or vacuuming, sometimes even walking, don’t feel so good when it hits—so I lay low for a bit and listen to what the pain has to tell me.

Pain, for me, is a way of my body supporting me in helping me to realize:
1. That I’m running away from myself.
2.That I need to stop and listen so I can become aware of my feelings and thoughts at that time.
3. I need to lovingly care for myself.

As I readied for sleep last night, I rubbed the painful spot and chose to ask my dreams to show me the underlying core energy struggle/wound that was resulting in the pain I felt.

The answering dream was a night terror:

In the dream, I was in a recently vacated room with two other guys who felt like friends of mine. I reached down to pick up a pile of blown-up photos left on a table. The photos were of murder victims and of people’s hands that had fingers severed off through torture. The murderer’s appearance in the room felt imminent, so I grabbed the pictures knowing he was coming for them, and I left with one of the guys. As I crawled across the driver’s seat of my friend’s vehicle to get into the passenger seat, I noticed that my side of the vehicle seemed frozen over with a thick layer of ice in the interior (like in a frosted deep freezer). Occasionally water from the ice would drip on me.

The dream shifted and I found myself in a café with mobster-like men. One of them grabbed me and slammed my head repeatedly on the table with a metal napkin dispenser. I seemed to be in and out of my body—one moment it was me being beat-up, the next I was watching him do it to my sister. I was trying so hard to scream but something kept interfering with my ability to make a sound. I was terrified for the two of us.

Somehow I slipped free of the two men at the table. One of them was grappling to hold onto my sister with the intent to kill her, and in a blaze of pure rage I plunged a spoon into his neck to stop him.

Thankfully, I woke up then--though, I awoke terrified, drenched in sweat and with a sore throat. And even after getting up to use the bathroom and taking some breaths to center myself, I was still shaken up enough from it to make it difficult to return to sleep right away.

In yesterday’s posting to my blog, I’d written about recently becoming aware of how I emotionally protected people from experiencing the consequence of my anger with them when they judged or tried to control me, or someone I love.

My temper scares the crap out of me—and I’m really quite harmless. But my feelings of anger frighten me so much so, that I look back often at what I write, whether on this site or in personal emails, to see how harsh I’ve been in response to my feeling of being attacked in some manner.

I have to say, my writing shows how I mentally try to handle the anger I actually feel because I’m terrified of losing control like in that nightmare and actually murdering someone. The anger I actually feel is more like a raging blast of energy that’s pretty much yelling, “Back off NOW!!!”

Back in 1998, a dog mauled our one-year-old Molly cat right outside the door in front of me. I watched him drop his mouth over her entire front end and pick her up and shake her. My mother instinct kicked in and I slammed open that door screaming and beating on that dog until he dropped Molly and ran off. He was a big dog, too, either a mastiff or a boxer. Rationally, I know not to interfere in dog and cat fights—but, my well-being wasn’t even a thought for me in that moment. All I knew was, “Make him stop!”

If I’d had anything handier than my two bare hands, I’m afraid I would have killed that dog. And I love dogs, too.

In a nutshell—as I’ve written many times over here—anger is one of those HUMAN emotions that has been a real challenge for me. I’ve tried to keep such tight control of my expression of it that it’s actually physically painful for me. My body has just been alerting me to what I’ve been doing with it—reminding me that I’m better off expressing it the moment anger hits, rather than stuffing it until it’s got nowhere to go except to explode in order to release the energy. I choose to HONOR MYSELF and whoever is playing my button-pusher by releasing it before it gets to that point.

There are certain things in this world that are taking place that do anger me. I don't like gossip and back-biting—and I’ve quietly suppressed myself while in the presence of someone engaging in that. I hurt from being in the presence of such malevolence. I get angry at people forcing their beliefs on someone else—whether it’s forcing them on me, on their own child, or on some distant person in a third world country. I dislike wars and finger-pointing. These are to name a few.

Guess I’m really just tired of all the unnecessary fighting, period. I see us—humanity--as capable of having so much more enjoyable lives together. I envision a world where we’re celebrating our diversity and uniqueness along with all those things we have in common with every living thing on this beloved Earth. I guess I’d rather we looked for ways to connect with each other rather than setting our sights on getting the others to conform to our expectations.

Maybe making that vision a reality first involves allowing myself to get upset and angry with the old ways…

And I don’t believe I have to kill anyone off either…just be aware of how I feel and honor that in my expression of all that I am…