Anger or Mud?

I have dog friends in our neighborhood here in Lapseki. When they see me, they want to come and pet me. But one of their habits has angered me from time to time. They put their muddy feet on me.

Until today, I have never been able to teach them not to put their muddy feet on me without hurting or scaring them. And hurting or scaring them is the last thing I would want to do, but I have done it, albeit very rarely. And I always regretted it afterwards.

I have a black dog, Zeytin. She is a female and has had two litters so far. Two of her first litters are in our neighborhood and one in my house. Whenever I go out, if they see me, they come with me, we walk together in Lapseki. They wait for me in front of the grocery store, the courthouse, the municipality, wherever I enter. When I leave, we return to the neighborhood together. This is how it usually happens, sometimes they don’t come if there are other dogs or too many people on the road.

Today it rained and the ground was covered with mud. There is sticky mud on the streets and it covers everything. When I went out, they followed me again and were licking my hand and trying to get me to pet them. They were both trying to put their feet on me and I somehow managed to keep myself away and walked quickly to the place where I was going to do my business. I withdrew money from the ATM and on my way to the shops we met an acquaintance. As I stopped and greeted him, the male of the dogs insisted on coming up to me and jumping up and putting his feet on me. No one, no two, no three… but he wouldn’t listen… gloves, on me… mud. One of the emotions I’ve been facing lately is anger.

It’s really messing me up… and I’m angry because I’m not accepting it. But because I’ve accumulated a lot of energy these days, and it’s simple things like this that I’m angry about, the anger comes out instantly and in a very high dosage. It flares up like a match flares up.

This time I really yelled at the dog, but it happened in three to five seconds, a lot of energy was released. The dog sat down on the ground, and I turned to my acquaintance… at that moment I calmed down and started talking to him calmly in a relatively centered way. I told him that it was my fault, that the animal was behaving according to its nature, while the dog stood with its muddy feet on my arm. He didn’t pay any attention to my shouting at maximum volume. I gave up and told my acquaintance that maybe I should be muddied.

It’s a very simple matter… the energy released is very high… but there’s no harm… what I have to accept is that the animal will naturally want to put that foot… and if I can’t explain it to the animal… and I don’t know how to talk to animals that way… there’s no other way to change the animal’s behavior than to scare or hurt it.

I think the animal is right anyway… who cares about mud in nature… we humans are trying to keep nature under control… that’s probably why all our stress… animals, especially dogs, are grinning and playing happily in their natural state. There’s not a trace of our tension in animals… if we don’t put them in trouble.

I think I’m going to let this mud thing go, but if I’m going to walk around as a partial mud man… or I’m going to get angry and keep on getting angry with the animals, saying don’t put it on them, don’t put it on them, don’t put it on them… Let it go, brother, relax, I’m telling myself now.

Let’s try it this way.

The energy of anger, as I’ve learned these days, behaves like a kind of friction and heat released. When personal reality is in conflict with what is present, there can be friction and sparking. The intensity of the emotion that is released here is related to the emotional energy that we have stored and how long we rub it for. So if you rub a sandpaper with great force and continuously on a surface, you can generate a lot of heat… but if you rub it slowly and intermittently, you may not even notice the heat.

According to this model of anger, a healthy and energetic person can get angry much more intensely and for much longer than a person with low energy. But anger depends not only on the amount of stored energy, it also depends on your current perception. I just shouted and there was a momentary burst of energy, but because my perception changed immediately and I was aware of the situation, I calmed down in a short time. I have been trying to understand the energy of anger for a while, it was the intense emotion that I have been experiencing lately, and my understanding of it has been growing through my practice of staying in awareness and focusing on the Spiritual Heart or sometimes on the breath.

Focusing on the Spiritual Heart here is a fundamental practice that most effectively relaxes the mind. The Divine Love energy here flows more abundantly into us when we focus on it and it relaxes our mind, quietens it, calms our emotions in our emotional body. This in turn leads to the calming of our nerves and the functioning of our physical body.

In the same way, when we focus on our chest breathing, when we are aware of the breath coming in and out of us, we experience a calming starting from the physical.

At the same time as this calming is happening, the state of awareness is emerging. For those who are new to meditation, the breath is an ideal focal point as they are more focused on the physical dimension. One of my teacher’s articles says that the breath is a connection that starts from the physical and goes through the emotional and mental bodies. As the practice of focusing on the breath brings tranquility, peace and serenity in the mind, emotions and body, one begins to experience a state of awareness after a while. This state is the natural state, it has always been there, but for people in today’s very active pace, the movement in the mind, emotions and body has obscured this state.

Once you start to find the state of mindfulness through meditation, you start to learn how to stay in this state. In that state, whatever emotion, thought or physical event you are experiencing, your understanding improves. In that moment you become much more aware of what is going on internally (the deepest energies, the more surface realm of thoughts and feelings) and externally (experiences with the 5 senses).

As you become aware, your understanding develops spontaneously.

The mind works in such a way that it develops an understanding and perception based on what you have experienced so far, what has passed through your awareness. If two people are in the same room and the same event is happening and one of them is experiencing it with awareness of what is happening and the other person’s attention is elsewhere, the one who is aware of what is happening will leave that room with a deeper understanding of that place.

Similarly, if you make the moment-to-moment effort to stay in a state of mindfulness throughout the day, focusing on the heart or the breath, your mind, emotions and body will be much calmer than if you don’t do that, so you’ll have a clearer, clearer experience of everything that’s going on, and you’ll have a better understanding of what’s going on internally and externally. And that makes you mature faster.

For me, the question is not really about anger or mud. It’s whether I can understand life while all this is happening, whether I am doing what is necessary to understand. Because understanding means maturation, and a person who matures learns to make himself and others happier. To make others happy: There is free will, you cannot make anyone happy directly, if they resist it internally, but since everyone has the desire for happiness, when you display this happiness, they will want to follow your example, and this option will be in front of them. When something beautiful is in front of you, even if you realize it a little bit, there will still be a desire for it. Of course, the decision still belongs to the person.

That’s why living in a state of awareness, learning to be centered in our heart, in other words, setting the intention to move in the direction that we realize is right, that we can feel, and working moment by moment is the most important thing we can do for our happiness and the happiness of humanity.

On a final note… why was there such a big spark when the dog put his foot on me? To be more precise, for a long time I could not accept that behavior of the dog, I had an internal resistance to the existence and reality of that behavior, which led to a slow but constant rubbing of the sandpaper and finally when the dog charged me and poked me, a good three to five seconds of pressing and rubbing led to the sparking and the release of energy in the form of shouting in the way I had previously been conditioned.

To learn creativity is to acquire the mastery of managing energy… and every moment of our lives is an act of creativity, conscious or unconscious. Taking responsibility for our lives and developing ourselves under the guidance of our heart (which we discover over time) is essential to create the life we really want from the inside. There are things that are in our control and things that are not in our control, but as our awareness grows, we become more aware of these things and can flow through life like masters who can easily surf giant waves without feeling the need to fight them. But every master has fallen into the water many times before he or she learns that skill, and when we fall, we can remember that life is a learning experience for the soul, or at least we can reckon with the possibility of it being so.