This is my second talk on anger.
The other is titled,
The Roots of Anger,
Irritation,
And Annoyance.
But before I explore self-directed anger,
I want to be clear.
I offer awareness and attention practices in a coaching framework.
So,
If you ever experienced anger or rage coupled with abuse at any point in your life,
Therapy could be better place to start looking at these experiences.
Mindfulness practices can augment therapy,
But when used alone,
Can sometimes be triggering if you need a bigger container of support.
So pay gentle attention,
And stop whenever you need to do so.
Many of us fear anger in general.
As children,
We learn to fear being the target of someone's anger.
Most of us have stories of trying to navigate,
Successfully or not,
A parent or caregiver's anger.
We often carry that fear into our adult life and work,
Fearing anger from a supervisor,
A colleague,
Or a friend.
We might also fear how that anger came to live in us.
Maybe we fear,
Quote,
Losing it with friends or colleagues or loved ones,
And we trip over ourselves to apologize when it happens.
But the anger we seem most okay with,
The one we give free reign to,
The one we justify and double down on,
Is anger against ourselves.
As children,
Some of us learn to be exquisitely attuned to the various manifestations of anger in the adults around us.
When I was growing up,
My parents discharged their anger through sarcasm,
The silent treatment,
And the occasional spanking.
I became hyper-aware.
Of their moods and tone of voice as a sensitive child.
Though I think all children are sensitive.
Over time.
I didn't have to be in the same room with them to hear the berating voice.
And at some point,
I simply told myself what adults had told me.
They didn't need to be around,
Because I had made the voice mine.
It became one of the many parts of me,
As they say in internal family systems therapy.
Though this is not a talk about or based on internal family systems.
Understanding this condition is not about blaming other people or ourselves for self-directed anger.
It's seeing that we do what we're conditioned to do.
And as we wake up to the fact of this ever-present voice,
Whether we begin that awareness through therapy or from reading a book,
Or meditating,
Or listening to a teacher,
Or some combination of the above.
We begin.
A journey of self-reflection,
And we start to wonder,
Why are we so hard on ourselves?
There's an apocryphal story of His Holiness the Dalai Lama crying when he heard how hard Westerners were on themselves.
In researching the story for this talk,
I discovered it's a composite of several stories,
Because His Holiness truly had a hard time understanding this Western concept of self-loathing.
People kept asking about it in Q&A sessions,
So he had to keep asking his translator to explain it.
Eventually,
I found a transcript of an actual talk on the website Dharmaseed.
It was given by His Holiness in 1979,
When he visited the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts.
Someone asked,
I don't feel worthwhile as a person.
How can I work on this as a beginning meditation student?
And His Holiness said,
One shouldn't be discouraged.
All humans are potentially saints.
Your thinking,
Or your feeling,
I am something without value.
That is wrong.
Absolutely wrong.
You are deceiving yourself.
So let us start from there,
From knowing the voice is wrong.
The voice is speaking a bunch of thoughts,
And we give the thoughts our attention.
And we are caught up in this struggle over and over again.
Think for a minute about your angry voice.
And the quality of the energy that propels it.
It often feels urgent,
Doesn't it?
It just seems to appear,
It just happens,
As if there's no space between its starting and our ability to notice what's happening.
So the situation is this.
There's an inner voice sharing a thought or many thoughts,
And then there's our attention.
And the attention is focused on believing or denying or arguing with whatever the voice is saying.
So that's the situation,
And here's the offer.
At any point in this tirade,
Pause,
And notice that that is what is happening.
Inner voices.
And attention caught up with the voices.
And the invitation is,
Is it possible to turn attention?
From engaging in content to noticing.
And yes,
It is possible.
And just to clarify,
We are not trying to stop the voices of self-directed anger.
We're simply pausing to notice what's happening.
Pausing and noticing offers space to let go of being the thought,
Of identifying with it,
I am,
Fill in the blank,
To noticing the thought,
Observing the thoughts,
There is anger,
Or the angry voices talking,
Can you sense that space?
Pausing disrupts the habitual pattern.
Even if you simply stopped for a nanosecond.
That would be enough.
The more you experience noticing that space between you and me.
The one observing,
And the angry thoughts.
The more aware of the beneficial nature of that observing.
And that space is always available you can feel that it's timeless,
It's beyond time,
And cannot really be explained in words.
But we have to try and communicate.
But words are relative,
And the observing,
The noticing,
The awareness are absolute and ever-present.
You chose to listen to this talk for reason.
What brought you here?
Teachers like Krishnamurti,
Sri Nisargadatta,
And of course the Buddha all say,
See for yourself.
Pause somewhere in the tirade of self-directed anger and see for yourself what happens.
Set an intention to notice without judgment.
There's a separate guided meditation that goes with this talk called Pausing with Self-Directed Anger.
Please look for it,
And we can go a little deeper into this experience together.
Thank you for listening.
And if you found this helpful,
Please rate and write a review.
It helps others find my work.
I deeply appreciate your time.
Take good care.
May you be peaceful.
