How To Listen Better To Anger
Every emotion, every single one, has something to teach us or show us. This includes anger, the most taboo of emotions, particularly in spiritual circles. Despite its taboo status, anger is natural, we all feel it, and there’s a valuable place for it in our lives.
When I personally look at the injustices in the world, at the destruction we allow to be inflicted upon not only each other but the entire breathtaking being that is the Earth, I think we’re not angry enough. I believe our inability to hold anger in healthy ways leads to destructive unhealthy anger, and that our conditioning against anger in general prevents its transformative quality from coming in where it’s needed, while time and lives are ticking away.
Those of us aspiring to lead more spiritual lives must understand that a spiritual path is not a sleepy path. It’s awake with the flames of love, sometimes expressed as the protective anger that stands firmly against that which is not love.
Because there’s so much fear and shame around anger, most of us politely conceal it. We fear that anger will overwhelm us and make us lose control. We feel ashamed that a potentially destructive emotion could be part of our makeup at all. This fear and shame around anger distort its value and create suffering. Politely concealed anger always finds its way out somehow. It comes out aggressively after building up, or passive aggressively, or it leaks out onto an unrelated target. This isn’t a good use of the energy of anger.
If we could cease to feel ashamed of anger, or fearful of it, we would discover the love and enlightenment within it. Anger can be a fierce form of love and an accelerator of transformation. It can illuminate something hidden that needs to be exposed or addressed, such as abuse, destruction, or oppression. From the personal to the societal, anger can be what pushes us towards awakening when something big is in the way.
The trick is to have enough presence and self-control to be able to be with it.
In Buddhism, a distinction is made between anger and aggression. Aggression is one of the three poisons that create suffering. It’s driven by greed and self-centeredness and is typically an offensive state.
Anger, on the other hand, is typically a defensive state. Its purpose is to protect. Anger is the power to say no when we see someone suffering. It’s a loving, firm no to injustice. It’s a fierce love that seeks to destroy the causes of suffering and wake us up to the ways we’re deceiving ourselves.
What healthy anger does not do is harm, shame, or in any way seek to create more separation. Rather, it protects. It halts the causes of suffering. It brings things to consciousness. In its healthy manifestation, anger has a sharp and penetrating insight. It knows what is just and unjust.
By the same token, what healthy love does not do is coddle or enable any behavior that causes harm or suffering. Healthy love knows that to allow an act of harm is an act of harm itself. Healthy love believes in the capacity of all beings to be free from the cycles of suffering and the causes of suffering.
In other words, love takes on many forms, depending on what’s needed. Love can be a sweet, soothing, healing balm. Or it can be a fierce call to wake up.
Anger is taboo, or shadow, because most of us have only experienced its unhealthy version, or experienced its unhealthy version enough to not want it to be any part of ourselves. So since few of us are taught how to relate to anger in a healthy way, I’d like to offer you three steps you can take when you feel anger arising so you can stay in a healthy place with it:
1. Remind yourself that for anger to be healthy, it must be expressed without shaming or causing harm. This requires your ability to stay present with it. To not let it run away from you. Do not judge the anger. See it as a valuable messenger. But do take some time to breath and get yourself under self-control.
2. Do some thinking or some journaling to understand what it is you love that feels threatened. What is your anger wanting to protect? What is the more tender thing beneath it? The thing that feels under threat could be someone’s well-being, including your own, or it could be a value or a principle, like justice or goodness or innocence. You will always find something more tender beneath your anger if you take the time to look, and you need to know the answer to that question before you act. What is it you love that feels under threat?
3. Asking yourself that question allows you to unvelcro yourself from the object of your anger and move closer to the thing you love instead. This allows you to act from the dimension of fierce, protective love instead of losing yourself in hatred for the perceived threat. Creating this more conscious allyship with the thing you love will keep your anger anchored to love.
It takes courage and strength to abide skillfully in the intensity of anger without hurling it around recklessly. Our meditation practices can give us that inner strength by teaching us to abide with whatever arises in a sitting. But let these practices create inner strength and steadiness, not pacify you into a sleepy indifference. Because again, a spiritual path is not sleepy. It’s awake with the flames of love, sometimes expressed as the protective anger that stands firmly against that which is not love.
(This post is an excerpt from my 6-Week Compassion Immersion. To learn more about the immersion, and possibly enroll in the next run, please go here.)
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This article was originally published in Julia’s blog here.
