We live in an increasingly angry world. And I’m mad about it! I’m angry when I try to go to sleep. I’m angry when I wake up. And when I go looking for a reason not to be angry, I’m angry all over again. Everyone gets angry. That’s okay. The question is, what do we do with it?
It seems like we should do something with our anger, doesn’t it? Some of us believe we should never be angry. Or that anger should be hidden. Some people want to express their anger, while others feel the need to explore and interpret what their anger is all about.
Despite what we try to do with it, anger keeps showing up—in our every disappointment, every instant of fear, every petty argument, and every minor annoyance. It shows up in our resentment and resistance, as a rant, or as a tantrum. Anger is your ego using its outside voice, shouting “Things are not the way I want them!”
Anger is addictive. It’s an intoxicant. We can’t seem to turn away from it, and it can really stick around—not just for a day, but for years. In Buddhism, we call anger a poison. But we’re not powerless against it. It’s only a poison if we swallow it.
We can, and should, use our anger to deepen our practice. We should face it and take responsibility for it, because we all know that the world gets angrier every day and we’d better not add to it. Everything we think, feel, say, and do has infinite consequences in this world that we share. If we want to live differently, that starts with us. We can use our practice—our active, conscious awareness—to recognize the signs of anger as they arise in our minds and bodies before anger consumes us. I’m going to tell you how.
These tips are based on a very simple teaching that was articulated first by my late teacher Maezumi Roshi. He called them “the three admonitions.” They apply to everything in our lives that we consider to be a problem, issue, barrier, or dilemma. Life is full of such things. These instructions apply no matter what the circumstance is.
Don’t deceive yourself
You might think, “I don’t know where my anger comes from,” or, “I’m not sure I’m ever really angry.” Don’t deceive yourself.
Our practice is to notice what we do and to take responsibility. Be honest about what you do, what you think, and how you feel. Ask yourself: Am I an angry person?
Sometimes I tell people I was not an angry person until I started my meditation practice. What I mean is that I didn’t yet have the self-awareness to recognize that I was angry. I was still deceiving myself and avoiding responsibility for anything that seemed unpleasant or negative in my life.
But even then I was getting plenty angry, and I’d always take it to the nth degree. I threw things. I broke and slammed and kicked things. For this, I blamed my Irish grandfather; I could argue that my behavior was all DNA-coded. (You see how I wasn’t taking responsibility?)
One evening near dusk, I was having an argument with my husband—who’s still my husband—and I threw my wedding ring across the front yard. Why did I do that? Because I didn’t know how to handle my feelings. I didn’t know what to do with my anger.
I crawled on my hands and knees across the grass to find that ring, and I did find it. But I wish this wasn’t a lesson I still remembered. I wish it had never happened. This was me when I was “not an angry person.” There was no excuse for it.
Don’t make excuses for yourself
Don’t rationalize. Don’t justify. Your anger originates in you and belongs to you. So, don’t try to foist it off on anyone else.
We each have reasons why we are the way we are. We’ve had experiences that have shaped us. We may not be able to do anything about what’s happened to us before, but we can take responsibility for this moment of our lives.
Take responsibility for yourself
Your life is huge. It’s vast. It has a lot of power and reaches a lot of people. We’re all living in this moment with billions of other human beings. Whatever happens in your head doesn’t just stay in your head. You don’t simply hoard whatever wonderful (or terrifying) feelings you have inside your body. So, you have responsibility for the kind of world we all live in.
I used to believe that it was other people and other things—a word, a look, an incident—that “made” me angry. That’s the ultimate cop-out. But isn’t that how we so often see it? Something makes you angry. What someone said or how they treated you made you angry.
Believing that it was all other people—known and unknown—and all these circumstances—preventable and unpreventable—inciting my anger only multiplied my anger. We project our negative feelings outward, and then we react to our projection. That’s delusion, and it’s also how we avoid taking responsibility.
Where anger comes from
In our practice of zazen, being quiet and still, keeping our eyes open and not ruminating or judging, we can see how anger originates in our minds and bodies. As you expand your awareness through practice, you will feel anger’s energy rising like a wave in your body. You get an early warning signal when anger is present.
Informed by that feeling, you respond. You stop and take a breath. You can take two breaths, a dozen, two dozen breaths. If you pause and breathe, not acting or reacting, calming your body and cooling your head, a remarkable thing happens. Anger goes away by itself when you don’t add fuel.
This is worth examining, and scientists have taken a close look. When you are angry, hormones flood the body and unleash their power. But the experts say these chemicals are completely flushed out in ninety seconds! A minute and a half. You can wait that out, right?
You can. You have a practice. And if you don’t, I suggest you get one.
Four ways to respond to your anger
After I had been practicing for about fifteen years—that’s half my practice life—someone asked my husband if he’d noticed a change in me. He said, “She’s easier to get along with.”
That was a profound gift of encouragement. It’s one thing to manage anger when you’re alone, but it’s another thing to deal with it around other people, at work, or at home with family, because that’s where you can really hurt others and rupture relationships.
From my own hard-won experience, these are the four practices that have helped me meet anger differently.
Tell people that you are angry
Don’t scream. Tell. This is before any of the throwing begins, before your reactions arise. I realized that I was angry or frustrated so often in my home life that it would benefit everybody if I could just say it. Announce it. Neutrally, nonjudgmentally, as a statement of fact, like a weather report. It’s a kindness that you are sharing with the people around you, letting them know that the sky’s about to fall.
What does this sound like? “I’m getting angry, so I don’t want to talk about this right now,” or “I’m going to go take a break before my head explodes,” or “I need to cool off.” It’s honest. It doesn’t blame anyone. It’s not an excuse. And you’re taking responsibility.
Remove yourself from the situation
In our practice, we call this “taking a backward step.” Don’t throw yourself forward into the fray, take one step back. This is not what they call “the silent treatment,” which is another kind of attack. It’s simply another courtesy: “I need to step out of the room before I say something that I’ll regret.”
Atone for your anger
To atone is to apologize and forgive. Anger has arisen. You’ve had conflict. People are suffering, and it needs to end. Offer no excuses, no rationale, and no justification. Just say you’re sorry.
At some point, I realized I had better be the first one to say I’m sorry, because I can. My practice tells me that, and I prove it to myself over and over. As for forgiveness, you don’t even have to say that you forgive, but you do. Why? Because you can. You don’t lose anything. (And just so there’s no mistaking here, forgiving doesn’t mean approving.) Forgive, so you don’t carry around the weight of anything undone for the rest of your life.
Begin, maintain, or resume your meditation practice
To practice Buddhism is to take responsibility for the kind of world you live in. And it works. Sometimes the big epiphanies in a spiritual practice are just seeing what you do and then doing it differently.
The late Zen teacher Kobun Chino Roshi gave us a beautiful explanation for why we practice. “The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how you use it and how you manifest it is all your responsibility. We face such a big task living this life. So naturally we sit down for a while.”
The peace you seek is already here. Going beyond anger will always lead you right back to where you are: not to the storm inside your head, but to the stillness and the silence within you.
Learn how to find this still and silent place for when you need it next time.
Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash