Monica explores how to deal with anger through conscious awareness
This article was originally published in Lion’s Roar on June 28, 2022.
Although I don’t consider myself an angry person, I have always had an open curiosity about anger. As a child, I remember being deeply afraid of the chaotic moments of my mother’s anger. I felt helpless and worried, but I suppressed these feelings because of my fear of adding momentum to my mother’s outburst, and the inevitable consequences it would bring. As I grew older, I saw more clearly the subtle ways in which we all harbor and express anger. The following is what I found in my research.
The power of anger can feel empowering. When we feel unusually vulnerable or depleted, the energy of anger sharpens our senses and restores our energy, acting as a wake-up call that jolts us out of our stupor. At first, this onslaught of angry energy feels good. The adrenaline rush is enticing, we want to cling to it and maximize its potential.
This feeling of anger can be beneficial at times, but unless we deal with it consciously, it can cause us to lose our perspective and can destroy relationships if we hold on to it for too long.
Anger allows us to stand in our righteousness, in our sense of justice. We may even feel inspired because we also have a sense of self. Our ego, our feeling me, it’s so full, wondering what we’re going to do to right this wrong.
However, unconscious, irrational anger becomes personal, leading invariably to inappropriate and irrational behavior. It can be alienating, ostracizing, and hostile at times, and it can alienate others because it can be condescending and arrogant. At its root, this type of anger says I’m right, you’re wrong.
In this state of mind, our ability to listen carefully to what the other person is saying suddenly ceases. This is righteous anger it blinds us and ceases to serve us as an empowering force. This is when anger can become our greatest enemy and an obstacle to a peaceful outcome.
It didn’t take me long to realize that we all need relief from heartache, and that’s where we can find the root of anger. These roots can come from feelings of fear, insecurity, shame, sadness, disappointment, grief, and more.
If you understand that anger is a natural, but uncomfortable and protective emotion, that motivates you to protect yourself from a perceived threat, then it makes sense that our immediate and normal tendency towards this unpleasant emotion is resistance.
Rather than dealing with the feeling, we tend to focus on a person or situation that is a false refuge, something to blame for what we are unhappy about. Molding the false refuge outside robs us of the opportunity to reflect on our fears, our loneliness, and our wounds, and eliminates the path to healing the cause of our suffering.
Experiencing anger without realizing it puts us at great risk. As the Buddhist teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi wisely says “It may sit inside as suspicion and quiet resentment, or it may explode into violent rage and destruction..”
Deep in Anger
Anger may come with two opposite narratives depending on the nature of the situation.
There may be reasons like I need to be angry, because if not, I will get hurt, which creates stories in our minds of what we really believe and disconnects us from what we have kept in our hearts. Unaware of the trap we have fallen into, the only way out, the only way to save face, is anger.
It’s strange that Anger can also come from self-judgment: I should not be angry; a person with my values cannot be angry. Therefore, I am a bad person when I show anger. We repress anger with self-denial, and it never goes away. Without working on avoiding self-judgment, anger is not made by the body, and it can come back to haunt us over time in unexpected ways.
That being said, anger is not a bad feeling. Anger is a valid, and rational, emotion. It’s part of being human. Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, explains what we should do when we are visited by uncomfortable feelings in his beautiful poem, “The Guest House..”
Welcome and happy everyone!
Even though they are a crowd of sorrows,
they sweep your house violently
its furniture is empty,
however, treat each guest with respect.
He may be taking you out
to find new happiness.
Every emotion brings wisdom that we need to come to terms with. Anger tells us that something needs to change. We need to face a boundary that has been violated or recognize that something we care about has been blocked or activated.
When we are faced with a situation that causes an outburst of anger in the first place, we must first understand how not to share with it. Suppressing our anger or acting on it are two ineffective ways of dealing with this primal force. Both rob us of leadership.
Skillful ways to begin working with anger include cultivating an openness to understanding, curiosity, and self-awareness. We must examine anger with the desire to learn from it, not by analyzing it indifferently at all, but in a warm and deep way that comes from caring about the human condition. We must feel the anger at the somatic level and explore what is underneath. We need to hear it to heal.
We also need to be the observer of our anger. As we feel the restlessness of desire in our bodies, we must turn our eyes within and see how we are moved. We may notice sensations in our bodies: tension, a lump in the throat, a pounding heart, a lump in the stomach, heat running through the chest and face.
As you notice these feelings, allow yourself to feel them. As Rumi said, “Stay with it. A wound is a place where light enters you.”
Feel anger without judgment, but with self-pity instead. To hold your suffering tenderly, you allow any thoughts connected to your feelings to arise, and then you let them go. This way, your emotions will be able to flow through you rather than being trapped in your body and turning into illness or disease.
If I wonder What happened to me? I turned my eyes inward and looked at my triggers. This eliminates the influence of external factors that I cannot control. When I do this, I often see who it’s not about he did something to me or whatever it was done to me.
Rather, it is about what is happening inside me. The anger is in me, and as soon as I shift my focus to the right place, the anger begins to melt away.
The habit of sitting like a log
In The path of the Bodhisattva one of the most influential texts in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, the eighth-century Indian Buddhist monk Shantideva says:
When lust arises in the mind
violent feelings of desire or hatred,
don’t do it! Shut up, don’t talk!
And as a log you should stay.
When the mind is full of ridicule
and full of pride and arrogance;
and when you want to show the hidden faults of others,
to bring about old discord or to act treacherously…
That is where you should stay like a log.
This practice tells us to pause before reacting, which gives us space to breathe in and out and begin to de-escalate. Through this practice, our thoughts can calm down, and we can see things clearly.
This takes practice, and therefore we must engage in it consistently. We can start with small things, like losing our keys, misplacing our bags, having laptop problems, or being late for a meeting. In this way, we train our brains to respond carefully and intelligently when provoked by serious threats.
Taking responsibility for what we are experiencing rather than avoiding or suppressing anger is empowering. Feeling the feeling is where healing begins. Only then will we be able to clear our minds to take a wise step forward.
