My muscles clenched in fight mode as I glanced over at my husband, Steve, sitting in the driver’s seat.  As we drove to Flagstaff, I could feel the burning hot anger as it tore through my insides.  I felt shocked at how our seemingly innocent conversation, with lightning speed, had flared up. How do we resolve this burning argument, I asked myself?

The question appeared alongside my desire to spew hot-lava words. I knew from past experience they would escalate the disagreement.  Steve and I would both end up feeling even more miserable. 

Hold still and feel the burn

Not knowing what else to do to resolve this burning argument, I chose to hold myself still.  In that stillness, I listened inwardly to the hot sizzle of my emotion. Every instinct in me wanted to resist feeling it.  Instead, I let the discomfort burn me.  

Not more than a minute passed before something shifted.  It was like a fuzzy picture coming into sharp focus. I saw how my anger had nothing to do with Steve.  Other people don’t cause my reactions. My own thoughts do. They showed up now in my body as these angry, defensive feelings. 

Placing my full attention on the manifestation of the feelings in my body, I torched the story that Steve had caused my anger.  An internal “aha” caused me to open my eyes and say to Steve, “What’s really going on is the ego — the one that lives with me — wants to make me right and you wrong.”  

Take action to resolve the argument

Refusing to resist painful emotions and to welcome them instead opened me to some important realizations:

When I hold myself still, I’m available to receive messages from my higher Wisdom. 

Being still and present to my emotion as physical energy is CLEAN. My process doesn’t become spattered with the mud of the ego’s desires, thoughts and manipulations.

In that still space, Wisdom shines her light on the ego’s shenanigans, and thus I become CLEAR. In that mental and emotional clarity, I see through the ego’s strategy: to cook up drama, off of which it feeds, so it can get fat!

When we refuse to feed it, it weakens. Once I see this, the fury that engulfs me completely vanishes.  In two more sentences, Steve and I can put the conversation to rest.  

When I tell on the ego (in this case, how it wanted to make me right and Steve wrong), anger and defensiveness instantly vanish. The ego can’t remain active in the light of conscious awareness. “Curses! Foiled again!” it hisses as it flees into the darkness — until its next opportunity. 

These realizations led me to devise actions for how to resolve burning arguments. I invite you, to take the following steps:

• Hold yourself still.
• Listen deeply to how and where the emotions land in your body.
• Rather than focusing on how the other person caused your reaction, feel the energy of the emotion in your body. Stay with the feeling.
• Let yourself be vulnerable. Communicate out loud what you realize about the ego’s hidden motivations (how it may have manipulated the other person to get its needs met).

Notice what happens. Watch the other person soften toward you. Feel the pain of the disagreement let go of you. You have resolved the burning argument!

When we refuse to embroil ourselves in drama and instead expose the ego’s shenanigans, we shed the pain of conversations-gone-wrong. Conflicts, instead of lasting for hours or days, resolve within minutes.

We free ourselves from the ego’s madness. What a gift!