I’ve been thinking about anger this morning. Recently, I got into a snit about something which led to my saying something rather intemperate to someone I care about. And to venting to others about it. And all the while, I had this split screen experience - seeing the irritation and righteous indignation on the one hand, and on the other saying, what’s the big deal? People are being inconvenienced, not harmed. And further, looking at how my mindfulness was not strong enough to slow down the runaway horses of irritation.
And I wondered if others might be finding surprising upsurges of anger or irritation in their lives. While I don’t think anger as such is anything new, I’m wondering if the toxic atmosphere of our political world might be seeping into our psyches on different, more everyday levels.
So I want to share a few thoughts about anger from the point of view of our own internal health and our practice.
The Dalai Lama recounts a conversation with one of his monks who had been caught in Tibet when the Chinese invaded. This monk spent some time in captivity enduring privation and torture at the hands of his captors. When he finally gained his freedom, he made his way to the Dalai Lama. In that conversation, the Dalai Lama asked how he was. The monk replied, “I was in very grave danger.” The Dalai Lama nodding thinking he understood. But the monk went on to say, “At times I was in danger of hating my captors." The Dalai Lama bowed to the monk’s practice saying it was even deeper than his own.
Anger as we understand it often arises as a reaction to being hurt, as a protection, or a shield for future feared hurt. As empathic human beings, when we see others being hurt, we might feel that pain ourselves and anger rises up.
The problem is that anger destroys wisdom. It is a reactive emotion of a being hurt in battle. And sometimes the wound from an earlier time is triggered by a current provocation that leads to reactive anger.
In the Buddha’s teachings, anger is a defilement that must be overcome on the path to liberation from suffering. This is not to say that people should be passive in the face of wrong doing, injustice, harm. As I’ve said before, these teachings on anger are not to render us passive.
Instead we need to investigate anger, look more deeply at its roots, and consider its consequences for harm to ourselves and to others. One of the first major actions we can take is to offer compassion to ourselves and others and spend time coming into the presence of our own interior wounding that offered up such a trigger for the anger to arise. Spending time nurturing and healing our internal pain and hurt is one of the most valuable missions we can undertake. This healing and familiarization can help guard us against the reactivity of anger which seeks solutions outside of ourselves.
Rodney Smith, meditation teacher in Seattle, said on a retreat I was on, “We are hermetically sealed in our reactions.” I initially rejected this notion. But what he meant was we need to look inside to find the “cause” of our reactions to outside provocation. Our reactions are always our responsibility. The outside trigger touched an internal trigger/wound that wasn’t healed. So the outside provocation is not the cause of our upset. Our own reactivity is where we need to look when we are aroused to anger.
Thich Nhat Hanh puts it another way, “If you know what the real roots of your anger are, you can also transform your anger. At first you think that your anger has been caused by the one outside… that something he said or did caused your anger. You don’t know that the main cause of your anger is the seed of anger in you. […] ...The first thing we can do is accept that the main cause of our anger is the seed of it inside us. Then we must realise that if we don’t deal with our anger, it will spill over and hurt others.” I recommend the full article on anger on the PlumVillage website. https://plumvillage.app/thich-nhat-hanh-on-the-roots-of-anger/
While we need to be able to act upon our world to reject injustice and defend the innocent, this is better motivated by in the bedrock of fierce compassion, fierce resolve rather than the white-hot lashing out of reactivity, of anger.
Ajahn Chah, well known and beloved Buddhist master in the Thai forest tradition (now deceased), said there are two kinds of suffering. The suffering that leads to confusion and the suffering that leads to freedom. The suffering that leads to freedom is suffering that encounters the dharma. In that meeting of suffering and the teachings, faith arises - a sense that there is a way out. To start with, this is a tentative believing kind of faith that becomes stronger with exposure to practice and the teachings. As we see the benefits of practice for ourselves, faith can become the pillar of our practice guarding our minds against ignorance and the defilements of craving, anger/hatred, and ignorance.
And faith is a necessary condition for joy to arise. This joy can strengthen and lead us on the path to untangling and freedom.
But another element that strengthens this connection to joy is the presence of virtue. This very humble virtue is based on our endeavors to be a good person, to do good deeds, to refrain from harming ourselves and others. This refraining also includes working with the negative consequences of anger when it arises. Anger causes us suffering because it separates us from the uplifting states of joy and peace and equanimity.
And because anger destroys wisdom, it weakens or breaks our defenses against it. The Buddha called anger the poison arrow with the honeyed tip. The honeyed tip is how good righteous indignation feels in the moment, that "I’m right, you’re wrong" moment. But the poison of ill will invades us at the same time.
Thich Nhat Hanh recommends caring for our anger like a mother would a child.
“Everyone knows that anger is not good for us and for other people. Everyone knows that. But the fact is that they cannot help it. They are overwhelmed by the energy of violence, of anger; that is why everyone should learn the art of embracing anger and transforming it.
“The first step is to learn how to breathe mindfully, to smile to your own anger, and to embrace your anger tenderly like a mother embracing her baby. […]
“We know that when anger manifests in us, we should not do anything, we should not say anything. Because doing or saying something out of anger will bring about negative things that will make us regret later.”
So the best thing to do when anger arises is to take care of it by:
– Practicing mindful breathing and mindful walking
– Not yet talking to or approaching the person we think is the cause of our anger.” *
So the teachings are to be on guard about anger and irritation, to look deeply into the consequences of anger to understand at a foundational level the harmful consequences to self and others and to care for ourselves and our anger whenever it arises. At the same time, we also need to dedicate much of our practice to strengthen loving kindness and compassion towards ourselves and others so that these become more readily available responses to provocation than irrational anger.
I wonder how you experience this dynamic in your own lives.