I had a strange dream recently.
I’m walking behind a very successful man. He doesn’t know I’m there. Someone steps out of a doorway in front of him and he completely loses it. Screaming, yelling. And something in me ignites. I lose it right back. I get in his face and tell him he cannot treat people that way. That he needs to go to boxing class. That he needs a sustainable way to move his aggression through his body so it doesn’t erupt at the smallest irritation.
I kept yelling the same thing over and over: you have to go to boxing class.
When I woke up, my throat was sore.
I lay there thinking about that dream for a long time. Because what it pointed at wasn’t really about him. It was about all of us.
We have built an entire culture around softening. Around going inward. There are yoga studios on every corner. Meditation apps on every phone. Journals designed to help you practice gratitude, find the positive, locate the calm inside the chaos. And those things matter. I believe in them.
I also believe in balance. The full expression of a human. I’ve written before about how gratitude is a beautiful practice until it becomes a muzzle.
We have built almost nothing for the other side.
They are karate and boxing studios, but they’re fringe. No equivalent infrastructure for anger. No culturally sanctioned, regularly practiced, socially acceptable way to move frustration through the body and out. We have therapy, which is important, but talking about anger and moving anger are two different things entirely. One happens in the mind. The other happens in the body. And some emotions are too physical for words alone.
Anger is not a flaw. It is not a failure of your spiritual practice. It is information. It shows you where your boundaries are. It shows you what matters to you. Some things in this world are meant to make you angry.
But when it has nowhere to go, it doesn’t disappear. It compresses. It waits. And then it comes flying out at whoever steps into the wrong doorway at the wrong moment. Or it turns inward, quietly, and eats at you from the inside instead.
The Shaolin monks understood something about this. They are famous in the West for their stillness, their meditation, their extraordinary calm. But what we rarely talk about is that martial arts was woven into their practice from the very beginning. They called it moving meditation. Body, breath, and mind aligned through exertion rather than stillness. The physical and the contemplative as two sides of one whole practice. Not in spite of their spiritual path. Because of it.
Around a hundred warrior monks still train that way at the Shaolin Temple today.
We just never imported that part.
We took the softness and left the fire. And then built a wellness culture that wonders why people are so tightly wound.
The body needs both.
It needs places to receive and places to release. It needs the yoga mat and the boxing bag. The breath work and the run that ends with you breathless on the floor. The inward turn and the full-body exhale that only comes from having truly spent yourself.
You don’t have to be an angry person to need an anger practice.
You just have to be human.
P.S. If this resonates and you want support building a practice that works with all of your emotions, not just the peaceful ones, I’d love to talk. Book a coaching session here.
