I’ve been doing a practice called 3-3-3 anger. It’s simple: I get really angry for three minutes, three times a week, for three months.
“Why would anyone do that?” I hear you say? Well, read on…
You’re probably aware of the importance of exercising your physical body regularly. But what about exercising your emotional body? I didn’t even consider that I had an emotional body until about a year ago. And why would I?
Growing up in modern culture, we focus on force-feeding as much information as possible into our intellectual body (mind) for the ten or more years of schooling we go through.
To mix it up, we kick around a ball once or twice a week. But what if we had more bodies than just a physical and an intellectual one—such as an emotional, an energetic, and an archetypal body?
Furthermore, what if these bodies need nourishment and exercise, just like the physical body? If you don’t regularly exercise the physical body, it becomes weak and sluggish. What if you have bodies that are completely underdeveloped because you haven’t been exercising them? And what if that grossly limits your potential as a human being?
Despite having studied various spiritual lineages and participating in a lot of alternative healing and personal growth thingies for the past five years, I’ve never, ever heard of a practice to exercise the emotional body.
Meditation, visualization, and much more are readily available for the energetic body, but the emotional? At most, feelings and emotions are regarded as something to be released, which goes to show just how invisible and misunderstood the emotional body is—even on the edges of modern culture.
Thus, our emotional body tends to be all weak and shrivelled up, longing for some exercise.
One way to exercise it is through the 3-3-3 practice. It can be done with all of the basic feelings (Anger, Fear, Sadness, Joy), but it’s probably best to start with anger, since it’s easiest through anger to unclog the pathways in our nervous system that have been shut down for decades.
Here is how the practice went for me:
Ever since I’ve been doing conscious feelings work, I have noticed how fear, sadness and joy have more and more become part of my everyday life, bringing a profound and grounded usefulness and sense of aliveness with them.
But anger—there just wasn’t much. I would feel sad, afraid, and joyful during the day, but rarely would I say “I feel angry…”
Thus I wondered how the anger practice would go. I lay down on the bed, set the timer, and then… not much. I just wasn’t all that angry. When I really looked, there was some, but it was barely worth mentioning.
Okay, fake it till you make it, right? I started beating the mattress and making some sounds. Voices in my head mocked me: ‘This is childish and stupid.’ My gremlin laughed, trying to sabotage the process, desperately wanting the status quo of my box to remain the same.
I persisted, doing it again and again.
Eventually, a force came behind my punches that wasn’t acted, and words started to bubble up from some deeper part within.
Soon, I started to look forward to the practice. I screamed at the top of my lungs, hearing my voice in a completely new way. Words poured through me: “Stop!” “Don’t fucking touch me!” “Get out!” “Don’t tell me what to do!”
My mind didn’t understand these words. My mind thought I was going crazy, that this was all just a big joke. I kept on going.
The more I did it, the more I came to a point where it didn’t take effort anymore. I didn’t have to “do” it. It felt like I was being plugged into an electricity outlet, anger coursing through my body, energizing me to no end, like I was about to take off and fly to the moon.
After the three minutes were over, I would jump up, dancing like crazy because there was so much life in me, or just lie there with a joyful grin on my face, the bliss of being alive coursing through me.
It’s as if this practice opened a portal to a part of myself that I haven’t had access to for a long, long time. And while not everything that comes up is pretty, I’m glad it is coming up. For I’m noticing how much energy I’ve been using to keep it down—energy that is now at my disposal to create what I truly want.
Besides, keeping it all bottled up somewhere deep down didn’t really work, because it simply erupted every now and again onto the people close to me.
Now, I have a safe space for whatever needs to arise, and I’m noticing that by consciously getting really angry for three minutes three times a week, I’m much less prone to unconsciously use anger in a destructive way throughout the week.
In addition, low intensity conscious anger is becoming part of my everyday life. It comes with information about what I want and what I don’t want in each moment, alongside the energy to act upon that information. It grounds me in the here and now, making me more clear and authentic.
And my emotional body is loving the workouts, becoming more alive with every day. It’s like I’m discovering a layer of reality, a dimension of existence that I haven’t experienced before—the world of low intensity conscious feelings.
Thank you, Anger.
Don’t take my word for it.
Will you try it for yourself and share your discoveries? Simply lie down on the bed, set a timer for three minutes, have a towel, a bucket, and some tissues ready. Then get really angry.
With Love,
Valentin Raphael
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