Roman and I had a fight before bed. He left the room and I fell asleep.

I went to bed angry, but when I woke up at 3 am I was no longer angry. Until I noticed that Roman wasn’t in bed with me. He was sleeping on the couch with no blankets. I could hear him rolling around uncomfortably. I shot wide awake mentally, the worst case scenario when it comes to falling back asleep. I was angry. I couldn’t believe he was choosing to make this statement. Suffering out there instead of being comfortable in bed.

But what was I really angry about? I was angry that he was not beside me, and that things were not ok. If I’d been able to see through my anger, and touch the hurt underneath, I’d realize that the closest line between the two points would have been to walk out there and coax him lovingly back to bed. But my anger did NOT feel satisfied with that course of action. Doing so felt like weakness. To the anger in felt like giving in. 

I eventually fell back asleep and had the most rage filled dreams I’ve ever had. What seemed like hours of it. The dream picked up from the current situation: him on the couch, and me angry about his absence.

In the dream I was his wife and we had a child. The entire dream floated through scenes in which he made me angry, and magnified the feeling of anger within me, until it became so potent and overwhelming that I literally felt anchored to ground (I lay down on the ground around everyone else in most of the dream). He took me for granted, paid lip service to providing for me but shorted in the end, each time. On and on. Scenes that enraged me. The anger pinned my chest down. I felt I couldn’t breathe. I felt powerless to escape it. I steeped in it. It became me. Everything I looked at, I looked at through my anger. 

My refusal to ‘give in’ to him kept me paralyzed in the same experience. It prevented movement. The anger couldn’t flow anywhere.

I wasn’t refusing to ‘give in’ to him, I was refusing to let go of my anger. I was refusing to let go of my righteousness (my feeling that I was in the right). Otherwise known as being stubborn. Doing so kept the anger alive within me.

When I woke from the dream I had a distinct impression I was being taught something about stubbornness: that it keeps me pinned beneath the very thing I was trying to escape—my anger. 

I am stubborn when I’m angry. It wasn’t until this dream that I could actually see how my stubbornness was self-sabotaging. I am grateful for the dream. I am grateful to be shown a new way of looking at what previously had me stuck. 

It is these moments that feel like a “win” —these moments that propel me forward in my sadhana.

*I am open-minded. I know that I do not know, and I am willing to be shown*