By: wisdompills.com
Everybody gets angry. Whether it’s mild
irritation or flaming rage, we experience it every day and there are few of us
for whom this is not, at some point, a serious problem. By “problem” I mean
“soul sucking, productivity leaching, blood pressure soaring, jaw clenching,
dark aftermath generating” state. This is what, in more genteel Buddhist
parlance, is called an “afflictive emotion”, or in other words, a mental state
that causes suffering.
Eliminating suffering is the raison d’etre of
Buddhism. In the Buddha’s own words: “Both formerly and now I teach only one
thing: the nature of suffering and it’s ending.” And anger does cause
suffering. You might at this point object that we need anger. Perhaps. Yet most of the things we think we need anger
for — fighting injustice, fleeing danger, protecting ourselves — are actually
better done when not angry. When we are calm, collected and ruled by love
instead of anger we are actually more insightful, more effective, more vital,
and more enduring in confronting problems whether public or personal. We need,
then, a way to free ourselves of angry mental states when they arise. Here are
five ways that the Buddha suggested we do that.
01. Consider what anger does to you.
As the Buddha pointed out, an angry person
wishes that their enemy should sleep badly, suffer losses, be ugly and have
people turn against them. Yet all of these things are what in fact happen to
the angry person! The angry person sleeps poorly. Their work suffers. They
don’t enjoy what they have. People avoid them. And there is nothing uglier to
look at than an angry person. If you don’t believe that, the next time you are
angry look at yourself in the mirror. (Kodhana Sutta, AN 7.60)
02. Find some good in the one you are angry
at.
This takes humility. So much so that the
Buddha used the metaphor of someone who is very thirsty coming across an
elephant’s footprint in the jungle. Just happened to you the other day, right?
Anyway, the footprint is filled with rainwater. So they get down on their hands
and knees and drink the water. When we are angry the other person often looks
distorted to us — ill-intentioned, stupid, willfully bad. We do not see any
good in them, and this biased perception just feeds our anger. If we can humble
ourselves in our righteous anger and kneel down, metaphorically, we can find
the good in our “enemy”, and when we do that they will inevitably appear to us
less like an enemy. Calm can be restored and healing can begin.
03. Remember something good that they did to
you.
As well as not being entirely evil (chances
are) this person has most likely, at some point, done you a good turn, even a
small one. The truth is that considering the people we get most angry with are
often those closest to us, they have probably done you more than one good turn.
Remembering this has the same effect as the previous reflection — it takes the
wind out of the engine of demonisation at work in your mind.
04. Visualization.
The Buddha was pretty intense on the
non-anger thing. He said that even if someone were to cut you to pieces with a
two-handed saw, if you got angry you wouldn’t be a true disciple of his
(Kakacupama Sutta, MN 21). After setting that bar the Buddha advised that one
meditate like the earth, like empty space, like a flowing river. One should
visualize oneself as like the earth: no matter what people put on it or how
they dig in it, it is still the earth. Likewise, one should remain oneself in
the face of anger: vast and calm like the earth.
“Empty space and a flowing river” are
alternative visualisations that work in the same way: space is not stained, and
a river does not stop flowing or change colours. Of course, in our current time
of massive pollution, “space, earth and river” may atually be overcome by what
they come into contact with. Perhaps if the negativity we are exposed to seems
likely to pollute us beyond our ability to cope, we should visualize ourselves
like someone riding away into the sunset and gently take our leave.
05. Meditation.
This is the meditation of preventive
medicine. In some streams of Buddhism it is traditional to begin and end every
meditation session with something called “metta bhavana”, or “the cultivation
of loving kindness”. In this meditation exercise you evoke feelings of
goodwill, or love. You start with yourself, thinking, “May I be well. May I be
happy. May I be at ease.” It may help to picture yourself radiantly happy and
at your best. Then extend this wish out to others, starting with those you know
and love and moving out in ever-widening circles to those you know less well,
don’t know at all, and finally, those you dislike or are angry with. Visualize
them well, happy, and at their best and think, “May they be well. May they be
happy. May they be at ease.” Remember that if people you dislike, or those who
have hurt you, were as well as you are currently wishing them, they would no
longer be unlikeable and would be less likely to hurt you, or anyone else,
again.
By practicing the cultivation of goodwill in
this way you strengthen your reserves of goodness and begin the all-important
work of altering your worldview, moving it into accordance with a deeper truth,
one that reminds you of the latent similarities at the core of all human
experience– that all beings desire joy and freedom from suffering — and this
will help to clear your vision and your mind, making it less likely that anger
will arise in the first place, and enabling your detachment from it when it
does.
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