Exploring Embodiment as a Transformative Approach to Harmful Anger at
The 2024 Inaugural International Day Against Harmful Anger

Emotionality, emotional experience, and expression are vital factors that enable us as humans, to make sense of what it means to be a human in the world. On the one hand, emotional experience is a factor that helps us to derive and contribute to constructive and shared meaning, understanding, growth, and connection. On the other hand, the destructive capacity of emotions can lead to miscommunication, social disconnect and alienation, psychological challenges, physical health ailments, harm, and violence. One emotion at the forefront of this deeper, collective call for awareness, healing, and harm reduction is that of anger. 

This year, the Alliance Against Anger will host an inaugural International Day Against Harmful Anger. The topic for this year’s workshop is Pathways for Peace: Transforming Anger Through Embodiment. In this three-hour-long workshop, three speakers from backgrounds spanning mindfulness, meditation, contemplative practices, and conflict resolution will offer talks, embodiment practices, and discussion to explore how we might transform harmful anger and cultivate peace within ourselves and in the world.

In her book Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out, author Ruth King states that “anger is initiatory, not transformative” (King, 2018). King presents the view that anger is an emotion that tells us what needs to be protected and cared for—when we or others have been violated, or something is in the way. In this perspective, anger, presents an intelligence. Evolutionarily speaking, anger is a protective mechanism for survival and can deliver important information. It can also let us know what must be resisted or persevered for the sake of justice. Without a growing internal awareness, however, anger can thwart the very change we seek to cultivate or actualize in our relationships, work, and larger collective and humanitarian efforts. This raises an inquiry: Can anger be transformed into an agent for positive change?

One approach to understanding anger in a transformative capacity is through embodiment. Historically, the body and the mind were understood as separate entities. In this view, the body was viewed as a functional, machine-like unit, and the mind implemented commands. For years, this perspective influenced the basis of studies in social and cognitive areas, in neuroscience, and clinical psychology. A shift from this perspective is one of embodiment, which can be seen as the interrelated connection between the body, emotions, brain, and environment (Marshall, 2016).

With embodied practices, we are introduced to a practice of being with emotion and lived experience by “moving towards” our experience in the body, in the present moment. In this practice, we can develop a greater capacity to open to a fuller spectrum of feelings by being with our conscious awareness. Instead of being “caught by” or “swept away” by feeling, we instead can cultivate an ability to move through present-moment experience and develop a greater perceptual awareness of an embodied understanding of experience involving an interrelationship of body, thoughts, action, and environment. Through this embodiment or embodied state, we can more constructively work towards emotional healing, self-regulation, effective communication, decision-making, relational efforts, and connection. This can feel counter-intuitive to our habitual reactions of anger and difficult emotions, where the intensity of feeling that drives action can propel us to enact harmful internalized or externalized behaviors, such as turning anger inwards in the form of inner harm or outwards in the form of harmful actions, words, and expressions. There are various practices with an embodiment focus within a growing body of research that supports its usefulness and efficacy in particular situations and populations (Carei, Fyfe-Johnson, Breuner, & Marshall, 2010; Hoge, Bui, Marques, Metcalf, Morris, Robinaugh, Worthington, Pollack, & Simon, 2013; Hoge, Bui, Palitz, Schwarz, Owens, Johnston, Pollack, & Simon, 2018). Practices such as mindfulness, somatic therapies, contemplative practices, and yoga, along with others, are a few that contain this focus.

Embodiment can deepen an understanding of what needs to be cared for, understood, or protected. It is worthy to note that in this exploration of embodiment, there might be an opening to care, kindness, and compassion towards what might be difficult, painful, or challenging within ourselves and for each other. In the embodied exploration of anger, we can often see that anger can come up, whether it is ourselves or another, because of unprocessed trauma, oppression, marginalization, injustice, and other factors. Looking at these intersectional elements can support empathic awareness, an understanding of the social determinants of health, as well as supporting the call for greater understanding of how our individual and collective unconscious biases and behaviors can influence the perpetuation of harm, sometimes unknowingly and unintentionally. Embodiment practices can be one means to open to a wider perspective of our experience so that we can grow, individually and collectively, in empathy, resilience, and directed efforts. In this sense, our actions toward others and towards our shared surroundings begin with tending to this inner space. And this inner space can, in turn, be a pathway to deepen a connection to ourselves, each other, and our shared surroundings.