Chapter 02: Desire and Anger as Life Force

Feeling Moved

The maiden season is one where we begin to express ourselves fully. It is an invitation to become fully alive in ourselves and that requires an ability to feel.  An ability to feel sensations in our external environments so that we can enjoy the pleasures and sensations of life, but also our internal environment. To know what things can can nourish us and know what things will harm us. To feel what lightens us or makes us feel heavy. To move and adapt to the dance of life and all of our relationships with an intuitive sense of what it brings up in the pit of our belly. One of the greatest expressions of the feminine is our ability to discern truth by feeling things. It is therefore one of the greatest crimes against the feminine that we have been taught to repress our feelings. It is probably the single most important thing that I have done for myself, to reclaim my ability to feel - and to trust those feelings when they speak to me.  After years performing in academia and corporate advertising, surviving in cities that savaged my senses and with people who dismissed my intuition, it took a lot to begin listening to the hidden wisdom of my emotions. 

Many psychological studies have been done, predominantly by men, on the key basic emotions that we experience as humans and how they affect our behavior. Fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust and surprise are commonly referenced. But nowhere did I find desire referenced as one of the key emotions. American psychologist Dr. Robert Plutchik proposed that there are eight primary emotions which he expanded into a full wheel of different emotional states and spectrums. Desire does not appear on that spectrum and I think this speaks bone chilling volumes about the repressed state of existence we have been living as humans and as women especially. 

Desire

Buddha said that desire is the root of all suffering but it was his desire to end suffering that made it possible to transcend it. 

Desire is an animating force that trajects us forwards. It moves us (emotionally and physically) encouraging us to grow as we reach out towards life. The early developmental stages of a baby show how we grasp outwards into life. The head lifts towards the smell of milk and we learn to grasp things towards us before we learn to push them away. 

The peak of spring marked by the holiday of Oestre shares the origins of its  name with the collection of hormones oestrogen - from the Greek oistros, literally meaning “inspiration” (but figuratively sexual passion or desire), and with the suffix gen meaning “producer of”. 

The relationship between oestrogen and the spirit of spring can also be seen in our female ovulation cycles. Our cycle is often described in 4 phases that relate to nature's seasons. Luteal phase (premenstruation) is our Autumn. This is the phase where the egg is released from the ovaries and falls through the fallopian tube into our uterus, as a fruit drops its seeds to earth. If that seed is fertilised it grows into a life, otherwise we enter menstruation, our winter. A season where we are called to go inwards and sit with the silence. Where there seems to be no apparent life outwardly but there is still so much life stirring beneath the soil awaiting activation. 

The second week after bleeding in the pre-ovulation or follicular phase is spring. During this week our bodies begin to produce oestrogen in abundance to prepare the body for optimum fertility and create a hospitable environment for a baby to grow. The follicles that contain our eggs begin to blossom. This the period in our body that is most alive with the desire for life. It is our monthly spring. Once ovulation is complete then we turn to the third phase of the cycle which, if an egg is successfully fertilised, would begin the journey of growth. This is our summer of ripening fruits and moving from the self to the other. Our own ego and identity takes a back seat as we shift to taking responsibility for nourishing a new life. This marks the shift from the maiden to the mother stage in not only woman’s moon cycle but also our life cycle. Nature never bypasses the season of spring and the self before moving to the summer of other.

During our pre-ovulation spring season we tend to be at our most aroused.  Our senses are heightened to smell, touch and taste. It is not just the bodies desire to create live but the desire to feel alive. Even our demeanour becomes more open, flirtatious and sassy as our attention is drawn outwards into the world seeking a high quality mate. The outward seeker, hungry for love, life and sensation - no wonder I felt so happy and at home during this stage in the month. 

So spring is also a season of sensuality. As plant life begins to sense the rising temperature and lengthening day light, even the gravitational forces that hold their roots in place and give it direction of growth. Of all the seasons and archetypical lifestages, our maiden years are held up as the poster child for sensuality and external stimulation. 

Shakespeare coined the phrase “green with envy, meaning filled up with desires and green of course is the colour most associated with spring. When our eyes process growing amounts of green in our landscape our whole body is reminded it is time to awaken our desire for life again. 

Green is a colour of balance.   Green occurs because the particles of green items absorb the extreme wavelengths of red and blue light which are at either side of the visible spectrum. It delights me that Spring equinox is a moment in time when the day and night are in complete balance and when the colour of the landscape is at its most balanced

I certainly feel that green creates a sense of equanimity in my body and it has a raft of proven physiological effects. As the mid-way point of perception it is literally the colour that the body finds the easiest on the eye. The color is used with gall bladder disorders, and for easing allergies, asthma, and breathing problems. It improves concentration, strengthens memory, and supports thought processes. Green lowers blood pressure and widens blood vessels preparing for extra blood flow, spring awakening and a desire for life.

Rod Stryker, one of my earlier teachers in yoga nidra, talks about desire as an animating force that can point us towards our purpose. Our passions and desires might not be the end goal but when attended to with curiosity they can inspire life in us after a period of low energy and point us in the direction of our souls yearning. Of course we cannot live every day and moment in a state of high passion. It is an emotion that comes to us in cycles, as all seasons do, to awaken creation. The spirit of spring is in us all moving us towards life after periods of stillness and rest. 

Desire is longing and it seems to me to be the very essence of what life feels like. Representing longing is the very thing that makes me feel less alive.  

John O’Donohugh said that there is longing at the heart of music because it moves us from a space of logic to heightened feeling. Music has consistently been the one of the few things that can bring me to tears. When I moved to Portugal I discovered the word ‘Saudade’ which means a kind of longing. It is sort of like a melancholic grief but not necessarily for something you’ve lost. It is a longing for something your soul knows it is connected to but has been separated from. It is the foundation to fado music and sings to the hardships of daily life and the emotions of a diaspora community, longing for a feeling of home. I felt so naturally at home in Portugal and the fact that they had a word for that feeling seemed to point towards why. Our traditional folk music in Scotland and Ireland also traveled with its immigrants to anchor them in a sense of home as they sought new life in the Americas.  I certainly felt more moved by these tunes while I found a home overseas. But for me ‘Saudade’  also touches on something deeper than the feeling of displacement and detachment from our home, it is a deep heart and soul longing that the soul has for connection to the divine and a feeling of union. 

Wagner also believed that the greatest expression of life was longing. The story of Tristan and Isolder explores the feeling of disconnection and the longing for love and union. The entire Opera holds this unresolved discord, avoiding any respite from harmony throughout their yearning, right up until the conclusion where they are unified through death. 

I love Ester Perel's observation that Eroticism is an antidote for death. She observed the people who have survived deep trauma and returned to life and noted that they had the capacity to return to eroticism as a demonstration that life can continue. That eroticism is the key ingredient to life. “It is about how people connect to this quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of vitality, of renewal,”. The very fact that you are alive is a miraculous cause for celebration and the finest way to celebrate is to create, because that gives you a sense of agency over life. Erroticism is more than sex because it is not just a bodily impulse but a cognitive capacity to believe there is more that life has to offer. To be turned on is to be switched on to life.  It requires a curiosity to search for something that you long for but have not yet experienced. That is desire. That is spring. 

Yet, we have created a society that intertwines sensuality, desire and the erotic with guilt. Something frivolous and distracting at best but at worse something shameful.  What an excruciating gas lighting scenario to be in as a woman, or indeed any human. To be told that you will be most favoured and successful if you embody desire and sensuality, but that you are unintelligent or shameful human for doing so, is a deep crime against the feminine. 

We have often cast away desire as something compulsive and shameful because it is a hunger that can never be satisfied. I can strongly relate to the appetite for passion and being carried away by sensation. But throughout my thirties I have also learned to slow down and pay attention to what awakens desire and pleasure in me. In contrast to the times that I have binged on fast food to fulfill a craving that leaves me feeling sluggish and depleted, I have noticed how much I slow down and indulge in all of the senses that are awakened I am left satisfied for longer. Instead of getting lost through the night with TV series on autoplay, an afternoon pouring into art leaves me inspired and moved. As I learned to slow sex down to an exploration of touch, sensation, breath and emotion and not race to orgasm, it stopped becoming an act that would send me to sleep and one which awakened me. I’ve begun to notice that to  be attentive to our desires allows them to feel more fully alive for longer. The more I stay present with what is awakened in me through my desires, the more stillness and satisfaction I find. But if we are taught to shy away from our desires and repress them we are being deprived of this deep sense of connection and fulfilment. Perhaps the route of all addiction is not desire but the shame of our longing.  

Ester Perel also talks about the feeling of desire being deeply connected to a sense of self worth because you have to believe you are worthy of wanting something. To tell someone that their desire is something to be shameful of is to tell someone they are not worthy of one of the most formative, life giving, natural feelings of being human. 

So what happens when all of that desire rising inside of you is repressed? When you override your senses with mental logic and clever argument to the point that you sever your connection to intuition. Not just for the week before ovulation or for the 3 monthly spring season, but as a whole lifestyle and ongoing habit. Can you imagine the damage caused by a relationship, a family structure or an entire culture that dismissed these feelings and desires as greedy, dirty, selfish, frivolous or “too much”?

This is the repressed maiden and the story of my twenties which lead to a season of great anger and frustration. . What kind of community are you looking to build here

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Anger and the repressed Maiden

At the age of 19 I began a 12 year relationship that restricted my spirit, I just did not know it at the time. My maiden spirit craved independence and freedom but because I looked for it outside of myself, I ended up creating a cage for myself. 

We had met surfing and he introduced me to rock climbing. He appeared to me to be the gateway to adventure and freedom I craved. The spring spirit was awakened and I felt like with this man I could explore the world like never before. 

But my appetite for living vastly was soon met with limitation. The more I sought to explore the world the more the subtle control and repression developed. I was too young and naive to spot the signs or know any better, I’m sure he was too. We would have great arguments about my desire to travel, to live abroad, to spend our weekends pursuing the outdoor sports that had once brought us together. I would be chastised each time I took on a creative project for making the house such a mess. He wouldn’t dance with me but he called me a slut for dancing with others. I should have taken agency over my life and lived with more independence and eroticism but the frustration of feeling caged actually left me feeling guilty for not being more content with the life I had. I felt shame every time I felt like I wanted more. I felt selfish for entertaining my desires. I bounced between frustration and guilt which led me to overcompensating and compromising even more of my spirit and desires, thus deepening the unconscious feelings of resentment. I was frustrated at everyone else for limiting my life because I felt like I needed others to enable my life and I began to lash out at anyone who questioned or curtailed my desires. 

The first time I had therapy it was at his request to address my anger that kept seeping into our relationship. I was unaware that the anger I was feeling should have pointed me towards the ways in which my spirit was being squished . But instead I was told that I was insatiable,  overly emotional and an unlovable character who was difficult to be around. I dutifully went and after a few months I had learned some good tactics to avoid my outbursts of anger. But I didn’t go deep enough. It was simply a sticking plaster that kept the discomfort and pain buried and numbed my ability to feel. By the time I was finally untangled from this pattern and the relationship there was not much left of me to show. The spirit that had once kept me so animated was utterly depleted and I could no longer remember who I really was. 

Consider a wild plant that is destined in its DNA to grow vast but is kept in a small pot that limits the spread of their roots and therefore branches. Imagine the growing pressure building up as that  growth is stunted. This is then spring wood element in Chinese medicine when it is not in harmony. The emotions associated with spring wood are frustration and anger. The internal organs associated with spring are the gall bladder and the liver and paints a vivid picture of the emotions that overcome someone who we describe as feeling liverish or who has a lot of gall.  Anger and frustration is the counter to desire. Both animating forces, one driven by a push away and the other a pull towards. Both come from an appetite for life. Frustration or anger is simply  a reaction to forces that restrict life.  

But we have repressed anger in the west as a dangerous and uncomfortable emotion, associated with evil, ugliness and abuse. The ugliness of anger has been a weapon against equality that has kept the patriarchy intact. 

It has been dismissed as emotional and uncontrolled and therefore illogical. Angry individuals that kill are criminals to be sent to jail. Strategic politicians that kill are celebrated as war heroes that should rule our countries.

In the casting of feminine as soft, gentle, appeasing and passive; anger has been positioned as something ugly and unfeminine. To be angry is to be less of a woman. It is a classification that keeps the call for injustice repressed and the repressed disempowered. To name outspoken men assertive and outspoken women as bossy is an abuse to silence the oppressed. 

I have felt the sting of being rejected as an angry woman. I had a lot of anger as a child and as a young adult and was always told to go away and return when I was feeling more pleasant. I have lost count of the number of times my expression of dissatisfaction has been dismissed by men who found my assertiveness uncomfortable. Partners, employers, builders, mechanics, landlords, teachers and even friends.  My dissatisfaction was dismissed as inappropriate where it would have been celebrated as assertive if it had been expressed as a man. The difference is whether or not the person vocalising dissatisfaction could benefit from challenging the status quo of power. 

The stereotype of the angry black woman is a even greater crime against humanity because it represses vocalising race inequalities as well as gender inequalities. The dismissal and disgust of anger is targeted towards almost all minority groups to keep uncomfortable truths from being spoken and the continued repression of the disempowered. 

We have forgotten the animating power of anger. It can be the canary that alerts us to ritchous injustice. It caused Jesus to turn the tables of the merchants in the temple; it brought Ghandi to march his people to the salt planes in protest; it brought suffragettes and countless other activists in history to the front line of social and political transformation. It is an energising emotion that gives us the impetus and strength to make change where change is needed. It points us towards the areas in our life that we feel trapped and frustrated.

And yet, the paradox of frustration through repression is healthy boundaries. The necessary container that is required for creation….

To be continued….