I am not a zen master

“How come you get angry though you are into meditation and all that stuff?” many of my friends asked me when they saw I had not sprouted a halo.

I would then sigh and wonder what I was doing wrong. I too wanted to walk around like one of the Zen masters you see and hear about, looking peaceful and without a care in the world. How did they do it? I wondered. Was it because of their constant attention on their breath? Was it because they made their whole life a meditation?
I did a lot of work on myself, trying to regulate the breath, trying out various meditations. But the more I meditated the more circumstances appeared in my life which triggered my dark self- the shadow self. All the meditation I was doing was bringing up stored up memories which had been hiding in my subconsious. The more I turned my focus from the ego to my soul the more negativities came up. I found that from being a fairly quiet calm person I was running about like a cat on hot bricks.
I met a few friends who were into meditation and they reported the same thing. Friends  and family were criticizing them for not reducing their anger or other negativities.
It was then my friends and I realized that our spiritual path this moment was not about being Zen masters .It was about being ourselves. It was about feeling the emotions we were having instead of trying to be masters before our time. There is a time for everything and now was the time for our souls to give us a good spring cleaning. Yes, Life was doing a spring cleaning on us. It was taking us to the basement where we had swept down all our dirt. It was bringing up all the dust into the forefront so that we could be aware that it was there and clean it away. How on earth would we know what was hidden in our subconsciousness unless a trigger came along to bring those emotions we had suppressed, to the surface. Only once we were aware of it could we claim responsibility for it. You cannot release what you don’t hold. Once we accepted and identified the emotion, we could make a choice. Hold on or let it go.
People expect you to sprout a halo the minute they hear that you are into meditation but things aren’t that easy. We have built up all the negativities down the ages and unraveling it also takes time. Things would be hunky dory if we could always release negativities with a smile and show the other cheek but that is not how things work. In life you win some you lose some. Sometimes we choose to hold on to the anger to the resentment. The thing to do then is not kick ourselves but accept it as part of our humanness and make a decision to make a higher choice the next time.
One way to make the path easier is to see the bigger picture. To pause in the moment of temper or stress or anxiety  and realize that the person or situation that is pushing your buttons is actually an angel sent by life to give you an opportunity to say goodbye to one toxic emotion. The minute you think of the villain as a godsend, the equation changes. A shift occurs and your anger subsides, your low spirits rise. You can release yet another emotion that has been thrown up from the subconscious.
That is what life is all about. Releasing all the negativities till all that is left is the true self, pure being.
That is what is called enlightenment.