I got up off the bed and stormed out the bedroom, down the hall, into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water, which I gulped down angrily.

Feeling like a caged animal, I looked around somewhat frantically, feeling overwhelmed by the amount of seething rage, anger, and disappointment I felt flowing through my body.

I saw the back door and opened and slammed it shut, over and over again, feeling the jarring jolt of energy through the handle, into my hand and wrist and up the length of my arm, as the door banged against the door frame.

I opened it one more time, stepped out into the cold midday air, and allowed myself to cry. Tears poured forth from my eyes, from my soul, as I felt the sadness, anger, and anguish of being chastised as I was trying to do something really nice. How many times had I been yelled at when I was just trying to do something nice for someone else, in my lifetime? A lot. And I was feeling each. And. Every. One. Of. Those. Times.

I turned and opened the door again, walked inside back toward the bedroom, feeling more fiery rage rising up through my entire body as I moved back toward Taylor, my husband who had triggered these energies at this time.

I stormed past the bedroom door, locked myself in the bathroom at the end of the hallway, and started the shower full blast, extra hot. I needed to feel the sting of that steaming water pounding into my skin, I needed to feel embraced by the clouds of steam and the layer of water streaming over my skin, in order to come back into my body.

I heard Taylor unlocking the bathroom door with the key, and felt even more anger and indignation at the fact that I can never have a moment of SPACE to just BE in the state that I need to BE in.

As he cautiously opened the door of the bathroom with a gentle open hearted smile on his lips, I slammed it back closed again in his face, shouting, “GIVE ME *SPAAACE*!!

I stepped into the shower and HOWLED and SCREAMED, feeling the emotions of 36 years of suppression erupting, rising up from the depths of my being and pouring through my throat. I sounded like a wild animal, like Kali yodeling her war cry.

I banged my fists into the hard tile wall of the shower over and over again, screaming, crying, yelling, raging, sounding sounds that I had never heard my self sound before.

Sadness, anger, rage, anguish, betrayal, injustice, victimhood, feeling like I couldn’t contain the hugeness of these emotions for one second longer.

As I slowly started to de-escalate the intensity of my expression, I broke down into sobbing instead of screaming, and sunk into a child’s pose on the floor of the shower, crying all the tears I had told myself not to shed as a child and young adult, in an effort to seem put-together and like a beacon of calm in whatever storm was passing through.

I felt that scalding hot water beating down on my curved back, running through my hair and pouring off my nose onto the floor of the shower, and I let myself experience the feeling of being misunderstood, of being alone even while in partnership, of no one really being able to understand just how it feels to be me.

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As a person in a female body in this lifetime, there have been so many instances in my life of suppression. Emotional suppression.

Many times in my childhood, it was not safe for me to express my emotions, so I developed this habit of experiencing emotions from a mental perspective, examining them as an observer, examining the circumstances that led to me experiencing that emotion, and then organizing them in a neat little thought box within my psyche and pushing the emotion to the side.

I judged my emotions as either unsafe, or unworthy expressions of my energy. Little did I know the huge energetic toll it takes to suppress emotions into little thought boxes in a dark corner of psyche for an entire lifetime, and how much energy I would free up and unleash by going back into those shadows now as an adult, to open all of those Pandora’s boxes and express the original emotion in completion.

Folks have commented my whole life about how calm and peaceful I am, how grounded, how un-phased I am by the ups and downs of life, how calm in the face of different circumstances. And while I do have a lot of those qualities within my unique expression, I also know now in hindsight that a lot of that was developed from a place of trauma or suppression of my emotions. A sense that it wasn’t safe or valuable to express what I was actually feeling, and quite the opposite actually, of needing to NOT take up space in order to be able to coast through life and my childhood in a more controlled way that was safer.

So, even well into my adulthood, I kind of rolled my eyes at emotional expression in myself, viewing it as such a 3D experience that was beneath me and not as evolved as I should be. I also became obsessed in my study of human emotional states and etiologies. I studied psychology and philosophy in college, and spent many of my adult years reading books on the human condition, on the physiology of emotions, down to the hormonal and chemical changes our bodies and brains experience as emotions course through our physical and emotional bodies.

I am somewhat ashamed to say that I also did this heady analytical distancing from emotions in others… mostly my partner or the masculine in general… Sadness, rage, anger, any sort of emotion beside a baseline of what I considered “normal” behavior, I viewed as unacceptable and something that needed to be immediately analyzed and processed away. This was my programming. I didn’t feel safe to express, so I made it unsafe for my partner to express as well, or when he did, I tried to fix it away so I didn’t have to feel that energy and exist within it.

Recently, after a botched breathwork experience at our home (this is a long story, but I will briefly explain it by just saying Taylor and I were listening to a guided breathwork recording that cut off in the middle of the recording, which then catapulted us into a state of chaos and confusion with each other), I really allowed myself to express a ton of rage that bubbled up from the depths of my being, as described in the beginning of this email.

For the first time in my entire life, I feel safe enough to truly express anger, rage, disappointment… in a BIG way. I contribute this feeling of safety to many different healing processes I have completed and integrated over the last 4 years specifically, as well as my recent dive into the study of Tantra and Taoism in general.

The baseline — for me — that I’ve personally taken from my studies is that all of me deserves to be loved, as does all of everyone else. And not loved in a heady logical way of thinking “This emotion is coming up and I should think my way into loving it,” but loved in a way of trust-falling into the deep well of unconditional love that resides within myself, each moment of the day, especially during peak emotional experiences.

And it took one seemingly unrelated (ha!) trigger to tip me off into that place of massive rage expression, for me to really have the opportunity to put this in to practice with myself in a big way.

Eventually, of course, I emerged from the bathroom and was able to articulate my experience and emotions to Taylor in a way that was more easy to understand than that pure fuming RAGE. And it was a really pivotal moment for us, for our relationship, and for the container we are continuously crafting for ourselves.

This is a container of unconditional loving acceptance of exactly the expression we witness within each other in each moment.

We are not perfect at this, by any means. But we are trying. Real hard. To move in that direction. Always.

How many times have you expressed an emotion, thought, or action and been told, either by someone else or that voice in your head, that that was not acceptable?

Do you think that there ARE any circumstances in which expression of your pure emotion, action, or thoughts can possibly BE unacceptable?

Barring intentionally harming another being (which, let’s be honest, we’ve all actually done in our lifetimes to one degree or another — and we could argue that it is all perfect and needed to one degree or another as well), I am trying hard to be able to witness ANYTHING, ANY expression within another being and myself, from this place of unconditional love.

This remembering that I am currently doing, of this ancient way of Being, which includes radical self-acceptance and radical unconditional love of all parts of my Self, would answer the above question with a hard No.

Any emotion, any energy that needs to be expressed, should ALWAYS be expressed, and should ALWAYS be met with unconditional loving acceptance.

The more we can do this for ourselves, the more we can do this for our partners and our children.

I LOVE to be able to share that since my initial rage expression, I’ve had one more “rage ceremony” in front of the kids, and we have all worked together after the fact to process what happened and integrate and to really bookmark the experience under the heading “Beautiful and Sacred” and nothing more or less than that….

… which paved the way for my daughter — who is 6 years old — to have her very own expression of sacred rage just the other day.

It was a beautifully intense thing to behold and hold space for, and made me so sad in some respects to realize that she has this pool of rage within herself too (still de-programming myself in this arena … all emotions are beautiful and worthy of unconditional love, right? Not sad to behold, but beautiful and normal and inherently human), and also was very healing for myself and my own inner children to be able to hold space for her to fully let go and go there. What I would have given to have been held in that way as a child!

And imagine how amazing the world will be, in the future, when our kids do not have to do this sort of unraveling chaotic-feeling expression and integration and weird analytical way of THINKING about emotions.. and will just honor the rightness of their unique expression at all times.

Imagine our children never having to convince themselves that their emotions are ok. That there is beauty in expressing themselves whenever they need to, without judging what is happening, and with their siblings and peers holding space and honoring the rightness of that expression as well!

THAT is the future I am walking toward. THAT is what I hope for my children and for ALL future generations. Freedom of expression, and the deletion of this false concept of SUPPRESSION.

I don’t care if there is a funeral or if my kids are around or if I am in the library or on an airplane or … anywhere… I want to be able to express and I want that for my kids and for the whole world, too.. and I want all of us to be able to meet that expression with unconditional loving acceptance because that is a BEAUTIFUL part of being a human being in this reality.

Honestly, I’ve worked SO hard to be able to hold that space for my children, so they are able to express in all ways no matter what is happening or where we are (hello giant meltdown in the middle of the grocery store met with love and acceptance instead of my initial programmed inclination to distract with sweets or embarrassingly hush them or threaten them into “acceptable public behavior”) that it seems strange to NOT hold that same vibration for myself or my partner or any other adult.

And I hope that by holding this space for myself and my inner children (and literally everyone else in the world) to express alllll that has been suppressed or pent up throughout this lifetime and probably past lifetimes as well, to take up space and to shine my true expression without all of these layers and layers of false programming over the top, I will honor my expression and all the energies that want to come through my body, heart, and soul, and shift the pattern for my children and all future generations to come.

So no one feels unsafe in their expression, so everyone feels completely normal no matter WHAT they are feeling, and that we can all see the beauty and achingly complex divinity in each moment of our existences.

May it be so. :)

In Gratitude & Service,

Ashley