A few understandings that help with anger
This is a short auxilliary post (a “lemma”, indeed) to the Friday in Heaven, Friday in Hell post on radical non-dual acceptance. It offers a few understandings that help you step out of anger. And to avoid doubt, meditation always needs such understandings. The body-oriented meditation approach makes them much easier to use, it doesn’t replace them.
These refer to the Black Friday example, but you can easily apply them elsewhere.
When you are angry, don’t assume that anger is the main or final emotion. It may be. But until you let your body move freely, with an alert consciousness as to what it happening each moment, it is hard to know what the emotion is. Underneath anger can be pain, fear, all sorts of things. You can’t necessarily take your surface thoughts at face value. As your body moves in anger, all sorts of other things may come up.
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♥ With any of the people in the Two Fridays scenario, you could reflect that “If I say ‘he made me angry, she made me angry’, then even though my rage is terrible, I remain a victim, because the other has power to control my thoughts, not me.” ♥ “Everybody has a point of view, different from mine. If I am in the right, then it should do me no harm, and may do me some good, to see things from the other person’s point of view.”
♥ The cat had no intention to hurt you, so your anger is undeserved. ♥ Being angry with the cat achieves nothing for you or the cat. ♥ If you kick the cat you’ll bitterly regret it for a long time. ♥ The poor cat is ill, yet you are angry; this is crazy.
♥ The journalist is correctly paid to dig up truths, which when revealed cause trouble; maybe your project deserves to fail, and you need to face reality. ♥ Or maybe the journalist is a slime job from the Daily Snail who has told lies; then, such a one is a hurt person, from a hurt family and in their own life will never know deep peace and deep love; no anger will touch them or help you, again it is useless. ♥ Shit happens and if you want to run cool, you need heavy, heavy fuel. Get over it.
♥ If you really love your partner, you will be happy if he or she finds joy with someone else. If you are angry, perhaps your “love” is possessiveness, not true givingness. ♥ This too will pass. ♥ Your anger hurts you even more than it hurts the other person.
♥ With all aspects of Black Friday, behind your anger is a mass of other emotions: fear of failure, shame, inadequacy, fear for your income and for your future, many others. The anger is a mask or a bodyguard for these. It will serve you best to look at yourself and your fear and hurt. The anger is a sideshow. ♥ Anger is painful to have and does you harm to hold on to, better get rid of it and let it go. ♥ Often, anger is a warrior on behalf of denial. Are you in denial? Is your anger keeping some illusion alive? – if so, drop it, and face reality.
All good stuff. You do need such understandings to deal with anger. But if you read this list on the Black Friday of my example, in real life you may want to additionally kill the person who wrote the list. Hey!, that’s me! Go easy, friend. In that post, you will find some possibilities about welcoming the emotion in your body, which potentially makes these kinds of understanding much easier to apply.
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