"Rage" is a loaded word, especially when it comes to women. Even so many years after the women's movement, women aren't supposed to be angry. So "Intense Luminosity -- Embracing the Nature of Rage" is a provocative title for an upcoming workshop for women, sponsored by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington.
But Ruth King, who's giving the workshop, chose the term carefully. She talks about the six disguises of rage that women tend to wear as protection -- dominance, defiance, devotion, distraction, dependence, and depression.
"In the workshop, we open to our nature, observe the story, see its impermanance," says King (an idea that will sound familiar to vipassana practitioners). She will use sacred sounds drawn from the Tibetan Bon Buddhist healing practice, which she has studied with Tonzin Wangyal Rinpoche. "Sound is an immediate and profound way to enter into the intensity of our own luminosity," King says.
As she sees it, rage is not a "bad" emotion. Rather, it can mean vibrancy and warmth. As women, "we grow up with this sense of being zipped up," says King. "We need more permision to move closer to our rage,"
A life coach and organizational consultant, King has been studying vipassana since 1992. She had been a senior organizational consultant for corporations, but when she had open heart surgery at 27, "the forced stillness allowed me to see what I had been running from."
For more information on the daylong workshop in Adams Morgan on Nov. 14, go to IMCW.
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