“Anger repression not only predisposes to disease, but the experience of anger has been shown to promote healing or at least prolong survival.”
– Matt Gabor, When the Body Says No; The cost of hidden stress
In theory, I love to play in the garden. But I must confess that I had mixed feelings about lazing around when I was gardening in the last house I owned.
Unfortunately, during the seven years I lived there, there was more often than not a lot in the way of neighborhood noise to deal with as I tried to achieve serenity in my little garden: children screaming, parents yelling at said children, high-pitched screaming. band saws that are used for hours and hours, pressure washers, as well as the boom-boom-boom of the bass of music and video games.
And then… there was the traffic.
I lived on some kind of public road that was getting busier in our growing city, so maintenance and construction vehicles rumbled loudly on weekdays. Gravel and cement trucks (as well as buses and Harley Davidson motorcycles) are LOUD vehicles, especially when speeding up, which, oddly enough, often happened in front of my house. Years before I gave up trying to garden in my front yard without wearing hearing protection.
Some days, I could play in my backyard without earplugs or headphones, but not very often. But on a long weekend in what would be my last summer at home, I found myself working, without ear protection, in my back garden. He was delightfully (and strangely) calm. I could hear the birds singing. It was lovely.
Part of the reason for this was the fact that my neighbor with the screaming children had finally moved out six months earlier and was preparing his house for sale. He was more than grateful for the relative peace and quiet.
One of the tasks I was undertaking in my garden that long weekend was wisteria and vine pruning. Both vines had grown out of control and were strangling neighboring trees, so I cut and cut and cut.
Most of the time, though, I had to be on a ladder, which meant I could see into the backyard of my neighbor, the one who had (albeit inadvertently) angered me so much over the years. And the more I mowed, the angrier I got at my neighbor for a) being so loud and messy over the years and; b) just bother to clean his house and his yard now that it was time to SELL IT and make a lot of money.
“Blaming others takes an enormous amount of mental energy…it makes you feel powerless over your own life because your happiness depends on the actions and behaviors of others, which you cannot control.”
-Richard Carlson Don’t worry about the little things
At first, directing all this pent-up anger at my noisy neighbor (or rather, his empty backyard) felt quite therapeutic. But the more I smoked, the more I started to turn that anger on myself because I finally realized that me he was the one who had chosen to stay in my house for SEVEN years. No one had forced me to stay and put up with noisy neighbors. I was alive in my own self!
By the end of the weekend, I had completely exhausted myself. But let me tell you, has my garden ever looked great? That poor wisteria didn’t know what hit her.
And then wouldn’t you know? I had a reflexology treatment on my feet two days later, and the next morning, I woke up sick as a dog. I had this weird headache on top of my head, like my body was a pressure cooker trying to release steam from the top, but it couldn’t. I was nauseous and had no appetite or energy. And I kept falling asleep. I drank enough water to sink a warship as my body tried to get rid of all the old toxic anger that had risen to the surface but seemed to be trapped.
The water detox worked. The next day, I woke up and felt pretty much back to my usual self. And my anger had dissipated.
“I am very empowered without harming anyone if I allow myself to experience the anger and contemplate what may have triggered it. Depending on the circumstances, I can choose to manifest the anger in some way or let it go. The key is that I have not suppressed the experience of it “.
– Matt Gabor, When the body says no
In hindsight, even though I thought I’d been expressing my anger over the years (you’d think so, judging by the number of livid phone calls made to family and friends about the noisy neighbor and noisy traffic situation ), now I’m not so sure. I suspect he had just suppressed it, and it took wisteria pruning out of control to bring it to the surface…and reflexology and water detox to finally release it.
Interestingly, two weeks later I sold my house…and still hadn’t put it on the market. Go outside; full steam.