Awakening My Heart-centered Anger

Before I dive in, I want to share that I intend to post more of these real-time reflections. It’s helpful for my healing to hear what others are moving through and the insights they are receiving through their healing journey.

So I want to offer up my life experiences and my reflections as someone who is also walking side by side with you through my own healing journey, in the hope that these reflections may resonate with you and support you in your walk.

I just finished Xavier Dagba’s “Awakening Heart-centered Anger” workshop that brought me to cleansing tears many times through the three hours. First of all, just being in the receiver seat was healing on its own. After my trip to visit family in Houston, I have made a decision to focus this summer on my own nourishment and healing.

The last few years have been so expansive in creating my Trip with Ellen, LLC. business. I have exponentially grown my client base and been blessed with so many incredible opportunities – recording my first breathwork album “Reclaiming Life with Breathwork” with Hay House, guiding breathwork at the Hay House Psychedelic Summit, becoming a resident facilitator for DoubleBlind Magazine and holding my first in-person post-pandemic breathwork circle at their music and psychedelic festival Psychedelia, launching both my Death/Rebirth Mentorship Program and my Spirit Medicine Programs, launching my podcast MUM on death and grief, and co-created my first medicine retreat in Costa Rica “Land is Body is Land.”

All of that growth has also led me to burnout – something I am intimately familiar with, especially in my previous career as an executive creative director. At the time, I had blamed the advertising industry and the toxicity in the workplace for my burnout. But as I believe we all come to discover – you can change your external environment all you want, but if you don’t change your internal environment, shit’s eventually gonna come back around to bite you again.

This colonial program of appraising my value through my work (and of course, always coming up short) is an ancestral and generational wound that I’m consciously working on. Layers of it have already been shed in my healing journey. But it’s a poison that I had been feeding on since before birth. So understandably, this will take lifetimes to clear from the collective.

Part of my resolve to feed and nurture myself – LOVE MYSELF FULLY + UNAPOLOGETICALLY – involved receiving and being held in this heart-centered anger workshop. I also want to name that this new consciousness began showing up during my 5-MeO-DMT retreat experience at Enfold Institute in April (soon to be shared in another reflection video). I thank the medicine, my host and companions Steve and Austin, and all my fellow participants, for that profound life-changing experience.

Heart-centered anger is anger that is directed to run through the heart and show up fully and fiercely, not repressed or aggressed. Depending on how we were modeled anger by our caregivers and parents, most of us have not learned how to honor it fully for the powerful, necessary expression of life force that it is.

Those of us who repress, dishonor our selves and bodies. Those of us who aggress – fight, attack in hostility and aggression, dishonor others. My personal response to anger is to freeze or fawn – to repress. The video above shares more intimate details of my relationship with anger.

Below are some highlights from my notes that I want to share. I believe it is imperative that we all learn and integrate our relationships with anger and our expressions of it right now in this moment as we are witnessing such polarity, divide, and hateful vitriol in the collective.