Anger As A Path To Insight

Anger is overwhelming and painful, but it's also penetrating and powerful. This talk is about how you can harness this emotion and turn it into insight. Anger originates in the same misapprehensions as self-indulgence: that what we want is identical to what we need. The key to taking responsibility for your own anger is discernment.

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to Mindfulness Live.

This week we're talking about anger.

Anger as a path to insight.

So we're not just talking about controlling anger,

Getting over our anger,

We're actually going to start to use it.

This goes back to my earliest days in Buddhism with the Tibetans,

Where I learned about a deity called Manjushri,

Who is all about anger and its transformation into wisdom.

So without getting too transcendental or anything,

We're going to be talking about that transformation this week.

Okay,

So make yourselves comfortable.

Take a nice breath and let go.

Once you take that first breath,

Everything comes into reach,

Into focus.

You can examine your body and mind and find out how you are,

Because that first breath signals a shift in your attention,

An openness,

A willingness to experience whatever is,

Whatever happens,

Good or bad.

And this openness is the key to all insight,

Discernment,

Clarity,

Wisdom.

And that's all,

Just to be open,

Feeling your breath,

Allowing it to be free,

To come and go as it wishes,

To not be under your control,

Simply to be under your gaze.

And as you feel the breath,

You feel whether it's smooth or rough,

Long or short.

And you just notice,

This is the incoming breath,

And this is what it feels like.

And here's the outgoing breath,

And that one feels like this.

Just watch,

Know,

And pay attention.

Feeling the breath in your chest,

In your throat,

In your nose.

You feel the active breathing in your body,

In your posture,

Your movements,

In the shifting pressures inside your chest.

You might even feel the incoming energy of fresh air,

A new breath,

A new moment.

And it simply tells you that you are present,

Not thinking of the past or the future or somewhere else.

You're fully here,

Fully present,

And open.

Imagine your mind open.

Your heart open.

And even your body,

The sensations,

You're open to whatever you feel,

Pleasurable or painful or indifferent.

The breath comes and goes.

You feel it passing through you,

And you sit,

Erect,

Focused,

Clean.

And now,

Taking three more breaths,

Open your eyes.

Emotions can be very different from each other.

Let's just compare two,

Let's compare sadness and anger.

So when I feel sad,

Something's triggered it.

I found out something or I've learned something or I remember something and I feel the heaviness.

It's easy for me to explore sadness.

It's almost appealing.

Sometimes I want to go in there and feel sad.

It seems appropriate somehow.

But the thing is with sadness is that it passes.

Sooner or later,

It simply passes.

And so perhaps that's where we get the idea that when we get angry,

All we have to do is sit quietly and let it pass.

And that's what will happen.

It'll just pass.

But unfortunately,

It doesn't.

Anger has a way of building up if you don't pay attention to it.

It goes undercover.

And it grows inside you.

And it can turn into all sorts of nasty things.

Most notably,

Resentment.

So resentment is a sort of anger.

It's not the emotion of anger so much as it's the mental conversation which follows that anger and which maintains the anger.

In fact,

It's part of the process of keeping this whole emotional act in motion.

So when we talk about emotions,

It sounds as if emotions,

They're all sort of the same and then they're just different in details.

But no,

There's a vast difference between these two.

Joy and anger.

In fact,

There's a big difference between anger and most other emotions.

It is the most powerful,

The most persistent,

The most explosive,

The hardest to resist and the hardest to look into.

When I get angry,

I don't want to become peaceful.

I want to be angry.

I want to,

I may not want to express it.

But there's that that roiling thing inside of me seems right.

You know,

When you're in that moment,

It just seems right.

Because well,

Because why?

Well,

What is anger?

It's that feeling.

It's the feeling.

It's an antagonism towards something or something out there.

It's a wanting to blame.

It's a feeling that the blame belongs out there and that I've been offended.

I've been hurt.

And well,

You see,

There's all sorts of ways you could have that reaction without necessarily exploding in anger.

So what is it about anger?

It's something desperate.

Maybe you're kicking in the fight or flight response.

There's certainly some stress hormones coming out there as part of it.

It's a complex reaction.

You know,

Stress is just stress,

But anger is a sort of stress,

But a lot more as well.

A lot of rationalizations going on.

There's a lot of,

Well,

There's also that resentment,

Which is probably already in there stirring up the mix,

You know,

Because we don't generally get angry at something that's completely new.

We get angry at something that's sort of familiar.

In fact,

The more familiar it is,

The more often it happens to us,

Or the more often that person is angry or sorry,

Triggers our anger,

Then the more easily it'll come.

It's a pattern.

It's a mental,

Emotional,

Social pattern.

So there's a lot of triggers which keep it going,

Which maintain,

Which keep up that momentum.

So anger also,

Incidentally,

And I've mentioned this before,

Is probably the main reason that I turned to meditation.

I wanted to control my anger.

And I read many Buddhist scriptures about that,

Probably the most famous one being by Shantideva,

A guide to the bodhisattva way of life.

And there's a whole chapter,

It's a nine chapter book.

And in there,

There is one whole chapter devoted to patience,

Tolerance,

And the management of anger.

And in it,

It gives you all sorts of explanations why anger is silly,

And it doesn't make sense,

And it's illogical and irrational.

And I meditated on this stuff for years and years,

Never made any difference at all.

I thought it was my fault.

But afterwards,

I'm not so sure I think it really was.

I don't think that I did it wrong.

I think that the problem is that you can't rationalize your way out of anger.

Maybe not really out of any emotion,

Because rationalization happens up here and emotion happens elsewhere at the other end of the brain.

And somehow,

It's not enough.

The rationalization that while being angry,

This person doesn't justify anger,

I should be kinder,

I would be happier if I was,

These arguments have no effect on me.

So what I did do was I turned to a meditative technique instead,

Which is a little unusual.

And it involves the deity,

A Buddhist deity called Manjushri.

Manjushri is a Buddha,

A sort of Buddha.

There are many Buddhas in Buddhism,

Okay,

Not just one.

We talk about the one historical Buddha.

But the goal of all sentient beings is to become Buddha sooner or later.

So this one,

Manjushri is known as the God of Wisdom.

And he holds two things.

He's got a book in one hand,

The scriptures,

And he's got a sword in the other hand,

It's actually a flaming sword.

And this represents the discernment,

Which he uses to cut through the root of ignorance.

Now,

Remember last week,

When we were talking about ignorance being the root cause of both pleasure and pain,

Or our indulgence in pleasure and pain,

Our desire to constantly get what we want and avoid what we don't want.

This is rooted in a form of not knowing or pretend knowing,

Which is that we know what we need in our life,

And we know how to get it.

So this is at the root,

This ignorance,

This thought that we can get what we want,

That we can control our life,

That we should have what we want.

This is the root which enables us to develop all sorts of different crazy ideas,

Such as my anger is your fault,

Or that person's fault,

Or the fault of this particular piece of news,

Or that event which happened.

And that's the way we generally live,

Because to accept anger,

As you know,

It's very hard to say,

Yeah,

I'm angry,

And I'm sorry.

Or maybe you're not sorry.

This is another aspect of anger,

The social aspect of it,

Which is that anger is bad,

You mustn't be angry.

When you live with that,

Then anger is never ever justified.

So it's always going to upset you.

So it's going to be very,

Very hard for you to accept.

And if you don't accept the fact,

First of all,

I am angry,

You never get a chance to use that sword,

And even reach the root of your anger and find out what's really troubling you.

So the first thing is to be able to accept.

And we know how difficult that can be.

But by meditating on this deity,

Manjushri,

Who is a very benevolent looking,

Very beautiful looking figure,

Very elegant posture and everything,

And also the iconography,

And visualizing myself as that person.

It's quite interesting.

This is what Tantra actually is,

The path of Vajrayana,

They call it,

The path of the thunderbolt.

It's yes,

It's,

I wouldn't call it transcendental,

It is imagistic,

And it's full of symbolism.

And it's not the direct sort of mindful meditation,

Which we normally do.

But we're not dealing simply with facts at this point.

I mean,

Eventually,

We get down to the facts of,

Okay,

I am angry,

Why am I angry?

What's going on?

But first,

We have to get there.

And what makes it hard to get there is the natural denial,

I'm not angry,

Or I am angry,

But I'm entitled to it.

So all this resistance that we have to anger,

And especially this,

This big anger is bad.

For so many people,

Especially if you're trying to follow a spiritual path,

You know,

If you're trying to become a better person,

Then you've probably heard tons of messages telling you that anger is bad.

And that's unequivocal,

This is just bad,

You've got to stay away from it.

And if it comes up in your mind,

Well,

You're really screwing up.

And that's enough to put you into denial right there.

So what we have to do,

First of all,

Is find ways of just opening ourselves to the anger and accepting it.

So I did that by visualizing myself as Panjushri,

Imagining him with this flaming sword in this book.

He has knowledge,

I have knowledge,

I know stuff.

And I have this flaming sword of discernment,

Which is I can see through,

I can see where my anger is coming from,

I can see how I'm overreacting.

Not all the time,

I have to be chill,

I have to be relatively meditative to see that.

At least to be in my own home,

You know,

To be in a relatively familiar situation,

When I get angry,

That then it becomes a little easier to see into it.

But I need to be able to visualize myself in such a way that I can allow myself to be angry.

I can do it not in an uncontrolled,

Unconditional way.

Anger,

Yeah,

Anger is hurting me,

It's upsetting me.

But still,

I'm the one doing the anger.

Now why?

Is it appropriate?

Is it not?

What's the root of it?

Well,

Where's it coming from?

Is this other person or event actually hurting me?

Should I express my anger?

What should I do with it?

Should I just bury it?

Should I pretend I'm not angry?

Should I explode?

Should I speak wisely,

Quietly?

As Caroline always says,

You can express anything if you're respectful.

And in fact,

That is the way to do it.

So when you get angry at somebody,

And the person is standing in front of you,

It's theoretically possible for you to say,

You know,

I'm rather angry.

And this is why,

Because you did this.

And I understand where you're coming from.

So you can qualify,

You can justify them,

You can try,

If you're skilled,

To not alienate them,

To open them so that they can admit that maybe they've said something which was hurtful.

But you've got to be there first yourself,

And often we're not.

When we get angry,

We just want to lash out.

And the first thing to know is whether you're able to actually enter into the anger with any sort of discernment with that flaming sword,

Or you're just being pushed into it by the momentum of that emotion.

So just to cover it all,

I know it sounds like a lot of different things,

But I'm talking only about one thing today,

Which is seeing your anger and accepting it.

Allowing yourself to be angry.

How are you going to respond?

We'll talk about that later in the week.

But that first step is not easy.

Allowing yourself to be angry without being caught up in the anger.

You know?

Yes,

I'm upset.

That shouldn't have happened.

I don't like that that happened,

And I feel like lashing out and calling this person names.

But what will that do?

It'll probably make both of us more angry.

But in the heat of the moment,

I've already launched the counter-offensive,

You know,

Way before that thought actually occurred to me,

And now we're in a fight.

So first step,

Know and accept your anger.

It doesn't come naturally,

Because anger is bad,

Right?

Everyone says that.

Everyone will say,

You shouldn't be angry.

Should be patient.

Should be kind.

Should be respectful.

And yeah,

It's all true.

You should,

You should,

You should.

But the fact is,

You're human.

So coming to terms with anger,

First of all,

Means embracing it.

Really accepting I'm angry.

I'm mad.

I'm furious.

I'm boiling inside.

And instead of rushing to blame,

Just trying to sit with that feeling.

And just know it and see where it comes from.

And this is where the discernment grows from.

From this ability to accept,

Sit,

See.

That's all I want to say for today,

But we will talk more about this.

So make yourselves comfortable.

Take a nice breath.

And let go.

And as you breathe,

You go to a place.

Well,

I suppose that's a metaphor.

It's a state of mind.

There's something familiar about closing your eyes,

Taking a breath,

Coming into yourself.

And so I call it a place.

And as you breathe in this place,

Visualize yourself sitting with a chair opposite you.

And in that chair,

Somebody who just makes you angry.

Maybe somebody you know personally,

Maybe a relative,

Maybe a historical figure,

Political figure.

It doesn't matter who.

Somebody who makes you angry.

And allow that anger.

And try to look at it,

Not the person in front of you,

But looking at the anger inside of you.

And then look back at the person who's opposite.

And then feel the anger.

And see them as two separate things.

Yes this person makes you angry,

But that person is not your anger.

They're separate.

So feel that emotion inside you.

And when you feel it,

Look at that person opposite you and see how something,

Some fire has gone out of the equation.

By recognizing that your anger is yours,

The other person becomes less threatening,

Less awful,

Less hateful.

And it's just somebody who behaved badly.

Just as we all sometimes behave badly.

And you just sit with this person,

Coming used to this idea that the anger is yours,

Not theirs.

Feeling the discomfort,

But also beginning to feel the connections inside of you.

To know what anger makes you want to do.

Maybe to hit back,

To verbally abuse,

Or maybe even to harm yourself.

That happens.

But again you can feel the difference between the anger and the desire to hit back.

So this is the sword of discernment,

Breaking it down.

The person who says or does something,

That's one thing.

The anger that you feel inside,

That's another thing.

And then your reaction,

The way you respond to that anger,

Whether you speak in anger or in toleration.

Three separate events,

The protagonist,

The emotion,

The response.

And this is our method.

We learn to break it down.

We learn to see.

Not to take the insult personally,

But to take the anger as something of our own.

Something we can understand.

Something we can work with.

Something that is within the scope of your mindful attention.

And now taking three more breaths,

Open your eyes.

Reviews

Very useful talk on anger. Just allow it and don't get caught up in it. Lesson I could have used many times.

This was really helpful thank you

Very helpful! Thank you

Thank you.
What about anger that is delayed?
Only later you put the pieces together and see something wrong, layers of wrong- in my case it was a therapist who I saw weekly for 4 years.

This is a gem!