The movie “The Upside of Anger” features dramatic, familiar manifestations of acted-out rage: doors kicked down, sharp, blaming words exchanged, cars driven too fast, bodies striking other bodies. We were also shown cold, expressionless, commanding rage delivered in others’ faces, revenge fantasies featuring horrible things happening to another and all manner of attempt to hold back the rage charge from escaping. In the climactic moment, I fervently hoped that finally Hollywood was going to allow a full expression of primal sound to escape the main character’s lips.

Alas, I was disappointed at the cinematic reflection of our society’s refusal to “let the air out of the balloon through the original opening,” instead trotting out all the old cliches of what anger is and does. Emotions were allowed to subside and go back to sleep, with the occasional leaked tear. Sigh. At least no one pretended they weren’t angry! I imagined anger filling the balloons of our emotional bodies to the bursting point, with an ever-ready pin to bring havoc and destruction instead of safe release and epiphany.

We’re all connected, not just in spirit, but in emotional essence too. When you or I hold back rage, the pressure added to the Big Balloon intensifies somewhere else, through some “far distant” and weaker point in the “balloon skin”, and then – POW! Of course the balloon forms again – weaker this time, more easily poppable. When “popping” occurs, someone gets hurt; sometimes us, sometimes “the other guy”. We watch the outer reflection of our inner collective anger in places like Iraq and Palestine, and all over any news service. Not knowing what else to do with it, we shove our anger into others with blame, the rage never evolving through appropriate expression, just getting passed around.

Imagine our rage is in a balloon, and we’re holding the balloon, two fingers clutching the cinched opening. Why wait for the bang’n’shreds when we could just let go? Letting go doesn’t mean just sending it into the Earth or somewhere else through a technique. We have to take more responsibility than that; our emotions are a part of us. Expressing anger in wordless sound “vibrates” the emotion, literally speeding it up, evolving and entraining it with spiritual understandings which are already vibrating at a very high rate. The part of us encased or entwined with old anger has been too shunted away in the dark to know what our minds and spirits know already. The vibration achieved through expression brings our angry parts up to speed. Ever notice that, having gone through an emotional time, you understand things much more deeply than before? That’s emotional essence having caught up with the rest of the self.

Letting go means allowing the raw power of the rage that wants to just scream or shout. Use a pillow if necessary to block your sound; however, anger can “prefer” unfettered sound expression in a safe space. Sometimes anger wants to stomp or smash things; allow this as much as possible while smashing things that don’t mind being smashed, such as an old tree bough on the ground. Throw soft things around the room, pound your bed, buy some 50c crockery at a yard sale and clear an area of your garage wall to throw them against - whatever works.

When you dare to release your anger this way, you’re helping undo the mass of denied and inappropriately-expressed rage across the planet, directly affecting volatile situations in war-torn areas of the world. If need be, release the judgment that this couldn’t be true. Every time we allow angry feelings to release safely in pure sound, it “goes out the hole” and eases the pressure on the Whole.