A dog in the fight

 For much of my twenties and thirties, I was fueled by rage. It didn’t look like chaos on the outside. I functioned. I worked. I built. I trained. I showed up. But underneath it all was something older, something that began in childhood; pain that didn’t have language, emotions that had no safe place to land and experiences that shaped me long before I understood them. So I learned to hide. I learned how to keep moving while carrying what was too heavy to name. I learned how to be composed while something inside me was anything but. And over time, what was buried didn’t disappear, it intensified. It became pressure. It became fire. It became rage.

There is a sacred truth in that anger, even though I didn’t see it clearly back then. It wasn’t just destruction. It was protection. It was my higher self stepping in, doing what I could not yet do for myself. It created boundaries when I had none. It gave me strength when I was depleted. It kept me functioning when the alternative would have been collapse.

On the mats, jiu-jitsu, boxing, kickboxing, that energy finally had somewhere to go. I trained with intensity that didn’t need explanation. It was instinct. It was release. Every round became a clearing. Every strike carried something unspoken. I wasn’t just meeting my opponent, I was meeting everything I had ever swallowed. Every moment I stayed silent when I needed to speak. Every time I abandoned myself to survive a situation. Every piece of pain I learned to carry alone. The body remembers everything the mind tries to forget, and the body always tells the truth.

For years, that rage served me. It made me resilient. It made me relentless. It helped me build a life, raise my son, rebuild more than once, and keep going when it would have been easier to give up. But eventually, rage asks to be witnessed instead of used.

In my forties, things began to break open. The structure I had built to hold everything together started to soften. The pushing, the bracing, the constant survival mode, none of it worked the same anymore. What I thought was strength revealed itself as holding on too tightly. What I thought was control revealed itself as exhaustion. And underneath it all was what had always been there: grief, tenderness and a younger version of me who had never been fully met in her pain.

This is where I began to understand something what the issue was.  The rage was never the enemy. It was protection. It was my higher self doing its best to keep me intact until I was ready to feel what had been buried. Sacred. Fierce. Necessary. And when its work was complete, it began to soften.

Now, in my fifties, I still train. I still love intensity. I still respect the power of my body. But I am no longer driven by survival. I am no longer fighting to stay ahead of myself. What moves me now is quieter; presence, joy, awareness, a steadiness that doesn’t need force to hold itself together. The rage was a chapter, not the whole story, and what came after it is something I never could have accessed while I was still a dog in the fight.

~Shanti Freedom Das