Beauty & Bone | The Element Sessions | Episode 5

Hi friends,

For those of you new here – you’re so welcome – I’m an Irish writer and tender to many things living at the foothills of the Wicklow mountains in south eastern Ireland. I’m interested in exploring how it feels to write, make and (m)other on this beautiful, tattered planet right now. Curious? Head to my Welcome Page. To stay up to date with upcoming events, head to my Members Hub.

Ok, let’s begin.

DeeDee Morris Photography

This episode of the Element Sessions podcast uses the WOOD Element as a jumping off point for a conversation around ANGER.

In Chinese Medicine each of the Five Elements has an emotion connected to it, and for the WOOD element (which is also connected to the season of Spring that we are stepping into right now on this side of the globe) the emotion is ANGER.

There is no emotion that does not have its place, and there are times when appropriate anger is a really important catalysing force. There is also, from a Chinese Medicine perspective, times when anger and frustration surface because we are out of balance or feeling blocked or prevented from moving forward in the way we need to.

My good friend coach, doula and writer Jessie Harrold recently wrote a newsletter all about her own feelings of anger and how she was trying to deal with them and after reading it, I really wanted to dive even deeper and unpack a lot of what she touched on more.

DeeDee Morris Photography.

Jessie is a coach and doula who has been supporting women through radical life transformations and other rites of passage for over fifteen years. She works one-on-one with women and mothers, facilitates mentorship programs, women’s circles and rituals, and hosts retreats and nature-based experiences. Jessie is the author of Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage (Shambhala 2024) and Project Body Love: my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead. She is also the host of The Becoming Podcast. Jessie lives on the east coast of Canada where she mothers her two children, writes, and stewards the land.

I wanted to chat with Jessie about why we might be feeling anger in our lives, where did she see it showing up for the clients she worked with, where might it be coming from, what might lie underneath the anger so many of us feel, how much of that anger should rightly be directed outwards at the over culture we live in, how much of that anger is masking other emotions such as grief, sadness, loss?

Why is it taboo for women to be seen to be angry? How does shame fit into it all? How can we take the anger we feel and harness it for positive change, rather than destructive attack? What role might surrender play?

We talk about all this and more in the hour we had together! I love the considered and grounded way Jessie approaches the topic and I came away from the conversation with so much food for thought.

I’m really hoping this chat with open up a continued dialogue around the anger we feel as women - where it comes from, and where it should go - so please do join in the conversation with a comment in the box below.

𖥸 Further reading ::

I mention three books on the call.

1. Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy, which is a remarkable manifesto for us as women. Here’s a short quote from Eltahawy in the chapter on anger :

Patriarchy worries when you talk about encouraging and nurturing anger in girls because it wants to deny girls a necessary response to injustice. Patriarchy knows that when we nurture anger in girls, they will hold patriarchy accountable and that those girls will grow up to be women who demand a reckoning. It does not want that reckoning, and we must demand it.

Patriarchy prefers instead that girls perform a self-reckoning, one in which girls learn to turn anger not outwards where it belongs and can target injustice, but inwards. The result is that instead of using anger to destroy patriarchy and its injustices, anger instead destroys girls {…} Girls grow up consumed with self-hatred and trauma, with little energy left to terrify anyone, let alone patriarchy. Sadness, not anger, becomes the currency of girls. Sadness does not terrify patriarchy.

pp.45-46

2. The Myth of Normal by Daniel Maté and Dr Gabor Maté
   Maté writes about how suppression of emotion very often has a somatic impact.

   
   Chronic rage, by contrast, floods the system with stress hormones long past the allotted time. Over the long term, such a hormonal surplus, whatever may have instigated it, can make us anxious or depressed; suppress immunity; promote inflammation; narrow blood vessels, promoting vascular disease throughout the body;
   

3. Jessie’s latest book MotherShift, Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage, which is a wonderful guide for new mothers navigating the cascade of identity change and transformation that is motherhood and in which Jessie explores how anger might manifest in these early years.

   

   DeeDee Morris Photography

You might also like to check out a conversation I had recently with

Chloe George

Caro Giles

and

Lindsay Johnstone

about anger in mid-life and how it is showing up in all our lives.

All Fours chat 3 - rage

And if you’d like to listen back and read back over previous Element Sessions content, head HERE for all we’ve covered so far. Ok friends, I really hope you enjoy this conversation, and as I said I’d love to hear what it sparks up in you ! Share in the comments below.

Layla xx