Integrating how you feel at any moment into your self-image means not having a self-image, per se.
It's a bit disorientating.
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I stopped thinking of myself as timid/confident, arrogant/humble or anything of the sort.
Angry Sindre is terrifying.
Timid Sindre is a bit pathetic.
Arrogant Sindre is a pain in the ass.
Humble Sindre is nice to be around.
But they're all real, in their own time. And not "me".
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Learning to integrate my anger into my personality to get it on a leash has meant realizing that it's big, and has a lot of fangs.
For now, anyway.
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After I stopped making such a point of suppressing anger, it felt like I had become this really angry person. It really did.
But you identify with anything you feel strongly, if you don't watch out. Feelings tend to contain a quality of selfhood. It's easy to identify with them.
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So as I've become better at integrating the feeling of anger into my conscious awareness, I started noticing that it's bounded - it has limits, contours, shape.
Then it stopped feeling like *I* was angry and like anger was just happening to me. It became an event to react to.
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That's when the anger stopped coming as readily. And next to that, stopped being impossible to react to.
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Awakening is not permanent and all-pervasive (at least not at first, and not for everyone). It doesn't mean some kind of mystical new awareness.
It's just paying very close attention to what is there.
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I couldn't have a relationship with anger that wasn't very immature, because for the longest time I couldn't even tell it was there.
I needed to know it to learn to live with it.
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When people say they have their feelings "under control", generally that just seems to mean they have no relationship with them whatsoever.
So they just do their thing, dissociated from everything else. They don't *go away*.