3 Lessons on Unexpressed Anger

Fractures, Alchemy, and Sex

Turns out, this gal’s anger is decades old, if not centuries.

Friends, I write to you from the final day of my partner Kevin Courtney’s brilliant magnum opus. At a time where attentions are gnat-quick, he’s gone the other way—creating an eight-year journey to explore all eight limbs of The Eightfold Path. Rooted in yogic philosophy, the Eightfold Path offers a framework for ethical living, self-discipline, and spiritual growth, encompassing practices like meditation, yoga, breathwork, and mindful action.

Each year in March, he offers a seven-day retreat dedicated to one limb- this year on DHYANA; lucky me, I get to join him, Kate Shela and Erin Rose Ward to co-teach, co-host, and participate.

This year, I led two sessions of ceremonial breathwork, thanks to my teacher, Carly Jo Carson of Infinite Crescendo, and shared this practice that means so much to me. Seventy people, using only their breath and the music of spirit, prayer, and mantra, to enter states of visioning—completely sober. It was humbling, magical, cathartic, ecstatic.

And personally, I get to be a student in Kevin, Kate, and Erin’s classes - and they cracked me wide open.

This week, my personal work was with my own unexpressed anger. The content? Take your pick. The years of difficult dynamics in leadership at my last job. The years of being the caretaker to Kevin’s stage 4 cancer diagnosis. The exhaustion of being a citizen in this political moment.

But as anyone on a healing journey knows, that’s just the conscious anger. Then, there’s the compacted, compounded anger that dates back to childhood—the stories we’ve been told about anger, whether it was safe, respectable, or even allowed.

What I’m learning is that the moment I feel anger, I question its validity. I doubt whether I’m allowed to feel it, whether it’s justified, and then shove it underground, where no one—least of all me—will have to deal with it.

Until… I do. We all do.

found on pinterest without photographer credit

1. Fractures

I first just have to share how brilliantly Kevin led this retreat. I really hate to even CALL it “retreat,” its more like a living breathing pulsating masterpiece of transformation. And Kevin weaves together practices from qi gong, vinyasa, tantric hatha, alignment based asana, and quantum physics. He and The Eightfold Path, are really just brilliant.

In it, Kevin shared the now-famed experiment by Dr. Masaru Emoto, which suggests that our emotions and words can physically influence the world around us—even at a molecular level.

Emoto’s research involved exposing water to various words, emotions, and sounds, then freezing it to examine the resulting ice crystals.

• Water spoken to with love, gratitude, or positive affirmations formed intricate, symmetrical patterns—almost like snowflakes.

• Water exposed to anger, hate, or harsh words formed distorted, chaotic, fractured formations.

The core idea feels true in my gut: If anger can visibly alter water, a substance that makes up 60% of the human body, imagine its impact on our cells, our tissues, our very being.

Kevin shared how he believes years of unexpressed anger contributed to his cancer diagnosis. And for me, what surfaced was how much I didn’t let myself feel during his treatment.

While Kevin was deep in his own emotional healing, feeling his childhood wounds of anger and shame, I was holding it all together, and holding more than I even really needed to be. I was the Co-CEO of The Class, my health insurance was keeping us afloat, and I was running on pure survival mode.

Since he was given the all-clear, I’ve only slowly, slowly, so slooooowly begun to touch the unexpressed anger in myself.

And that experiment? It rings true. If anger fractures formations in water, how could it not affect us at a cellular level?

This was my deep call: to turn toward the fractures of my own unexpressed anger—and do the work. And so…

2. Alchemy

At some point in life, everyone should take a class with Kate Shela. She teaches The 360 Emergence, a dynamic movement meditation that dives deep into the psyche through free-form dance.

This week, she offered a profound insight: unexpressed anger—especially resentment—is an essential part of the human experience. But instead of burying it, we must stir it, mix it, work with it—like a potion brewing in the ‘cauldrons’ of the self (she’s quite a witchy woman, that Kate!).

We hold many cauldrons within us—some filled with sweetness, some with sorrow. And then there’s anger: The bitter one. The dregs. The bones. The shame. The “inappropriate.”

Anger, left untouched, stagnates. It thickens, congeals, turns toxic. To alchemize it—to transform it into something vital, something healing—we must be willing to stir it, sip it, move it.

Box it out. Dance it out. Scream into a pillow. Take a baseball bat to a pillow. Shake it loose. Let it shift.

Because if we don’t move anger, we lose access to its power—its passion, its justice, its fire. And unmetabolized anger destroys from the inside out.

Her prescription: Take a sip. Let it move. Let it be witnessed. Which I think is a really interesting one. With whom would you feel comfortable being witnessed in your anger? With whom would you say, “can you be with me as a small a pillow with a baseball bat?” For me, that’s an experiment I’m going to take home with me. Asking Kevin, or any of my closest friends, to bare witness as I move through my anger.

Witnessed or not, it is only through expression that it transforms.

3. Sex