I have been given many opportunities lately to consider how I relate to those closest to me and respond..not react..to pain and conflict.
This has led me to actively working with all the pain their pain brings up in me. My desire is to grow and respond consciously…not react.  Of course, I will have a reaction. It is natural. But what do I do with that energy? Some would suggest it is perfectly okay to just go off…just scream and yell and do whatever you feel like doing. I would say, sure, if that’s what you choose to do in that moment.
As for me, I hold that words carry energy and either healing or poison. I definitely need to vent my emotions, but I am  going to do it in a way that doesn’t spread the poison. I will only vent when I know the person I’m with can handle it and know what to do with it. This is a highly controlled response. I understand that.  But I’ve been reading and studying and doing my work around awareness of our emotional body. The way we humans have learned to relate usually creates our own personal hell.

Don Miguel Ruiz says this in The Mastery of Love...
“Emotional poison is created by our reaction to what we consider injustice. Once we are full of emotional poison, we have the need to release it, and we practice releasing the poison by sending it to someone else. How do we do this? By hooking that person’s attention.

The attention is something very powerful in the human mind. Everyone around the world is hunting the attention of others all the time.  When we capture the attention, we create channels of communication.  The Dream is transferred, power is transferred, but emotional poison is transferred also.
Usually we release the poison with the person we think is responsible for the injustice, but if that person is so powerful that we cannot send it to him, we don’t care who we send it to. We send it to the little ones who have no defense against us, and that is how abusive relationships are formed.  The people of power abuse the people who have less power because they need to release their emotional poison.  We have the need to release the poison, and sometimes we don’t want justice; we just want to release, we want peace.  That is why humans are hunting power all the time, because the more powerful we are, the easier it is to release the poison to the ones who cannot defend themselves.”

Having been hooked and received a great deal of emotional poison lately, I have sat with it and worked with my own wounds and poison, wondering how to break the cycle of returning that poison to anyone else. It is excruciatingly difficult. It is breaking all the cycles I’ve ever known. But it is also following those hunches inside that detect the poison coming at me and knowing that I have to stop the cycle. I have always had an antennae that detects such poison but I’ve never been able to describe it. I feel it coming as a wave of excrement. I used to call it someone throwing shit like a monkey. I’ve thrown plenty myself.
But I’ve also known somehow that it didn’t have to be that way and if I were strong enough and knew how, I could keep from throwing it back at them.
Now the perfect opportunity has been given to me to figure out how. There is quite a lot of poison all over my wall. I’ve cleaned up a lot of it…but now what? How do I respond in my heart and purge the poison? How do I remain true to myself and yet not attack?  These are big questions. It’s taken me two days since the encounter to get to this point. I’m not sure what’s next, but I’m working slowly through it, being patient with myself and my emotions. We shall see what tomorrow holds.