FromChapter 12: Transforming Anger

Many practitioners get discouraged when they realize how difficult it is to maintain an awake state. Quite often, even after a good period of meditation or yoga first thing in the morning, where we feel somewhat aware and awake, we may “come to” later in the day with the realization that we’ve since spent hours in a state of waking sleep. The question is, why is it so hard to awaken? In part, it’s because the life force, or energy, necessary to awaken is constantly leaking away, from morning till night.

Perhaps the most significant leak occurs through the manifestation of negative emotions, where energy is squandered in small and sometimes huge doses throughout the day. The word negative, as used here, doesn’t necessarily mean “bad,” but simply something that negates or denies. It says no to life. Anger, for example, says, “I don’t want this!” This does not apply only to loud outbursts of anger. We manifest negative emotions, in smaller doses, all day long: as irritability, judgments of self and others, impatience, passive aggression, and so on.

Working with Anger

One important emphasis in practice is learning what closes these leaks. This is why we must pay attention to how to work with our negative emotions, particularly the many forms of anger. An analogy might be helpful in understanding this process: we all know that food provides energy for the body. But there’s another kind of “food” that feeds our being, namely our impressions or experience. Every experience, much like the food we consume, can either nourish or deplete us, depending on how much awareness is present and what our intention is. When we react to an experience negatively, it’s like eating bad food. It doesn’t digest. In fact, it can even poison us. When that happens, we often spew the poison back out into the world, usually at another person.

The alternative to manifesting negative emotions is to bring physical awareness to the actual energy of the reaction. Normally, we fuel our reactions by believing and justifying the thoughts that accompany them. But when we disengage from this pattern, attention can instead be focused on the visceral experience of the emotion itself. This attention allows a different type of digestion to take place. For example, when we can stop the expression of anger and instead experience its actual energy, that raw energy may actually transform into nourishment for Being Awareness.

I’m not suggesting that emotions should not arise, nor that we should repress them. The practice instruction is simply to refrain from expressing them, either outwardly through words and actions or inwardly through spinning and obsessive thoughts. It is only through the process of not expressing negative emotions and instead actually experiencing their energy that we learn to live in accord with our true nature, our natural Being Kindness.

If we could see our angry emotional reactions clearly, it would become obvious how they deplete our energy and consequently narrow our life. We would also see how, when we’re caught in anger, we’re cut off from the heart, from a sense of our basic connectedness. For example, when someone swerves in front of us on the freeway, anger arises instantly, and we may get caught in the strong impulse to yell and gesture. We will certainly feel justified in being irate. But what happens if, instead of expressing the anger, we simply stay with the visceral experience?

Practicing in this way over time teaches us to connect more deeply with our experience, and finally we are able to recognize the situation as it is: that another driver simply cut us off, and that is all. Perhaps we can also label the reactions we have as just believed thoughts, such as, “Having a believed thought: ‘he’s a moron,’” “Having a believed thought: ‘she shouldn’t be allowed to drive,’” or “Having a believed thought: ‘this always happens to me.’”

As we learn to see our reactions more clearly, and to label the thoughts associated with them, we become more and more capable of experiencing our anger as just what is—heat in our face or tension in our muscles and gut. We might even see that what really happened is that we simply got scared. Above all, we no longer hold on to our emotions and thoughts as the objective truth about what actually happened.

At a certain point, in addition to experiencing our emotions and labeling our thoughts, we may even feel compassion—in this example, for the driver who cut us off—or at least we might laugh at ourselves for getting so worked up over an objectively small or insignificant occurrence. The point is, when we don’t express anger, not only is the energy leakage closed, but the very energy that would have leaked away also becomes available for nourishing a genuine reconnection with life.

One common point of confusion relating to this process is misunderstanding the difference between nonexpression and suppression. When anger is suppressed, it means that we are not feeling it. This can be particularly problematic for meditators who have been brought up suppressing their anger, because they can easily mistake their suppression for spiritual maturity. But suppressed anger tends to fester; the poisonous energy of anger can even pollute the body, often impacting our physical health. When we instead withhold the expression of anger, it is very different from suppression. Nonexpression actually allows us to feel—to fully feel—the emotion of anger directly, letting it simply be there without needing to do anything about it.

So why is it so difficult to stop the expression of anger? We seem to hold on to this habit with a stubbornness that defies all sense. The simple answer is we want to be angry. We want to be right. This may not always be obvious, but the feelings of juiciness and power that can accompany the expression of anger are often intoxicating. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, where raw instinctual reactions served a real purpose—they allowed us to ward off physical threats in order to survive. However, even though we no longer face the same kinds of danger, and thus no longer need the same kind of response, our bodies and minds have not yet caught on. So that juicy, “good” feeling of anger remains, though it no longer serves us, particularly if we are on the path of trying to live a more harmonious life.