Anger
Writings | Training, Life
Writings | Training, Life


This first appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of Tricycle
“Anger is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion.” This is how Charles Duhigg sums up a conversation he had with James Averill, professor emeritus of psychology at UMass, Amherst. Averill also noted that a bit of anger can quickly clear up unspoken resentments, unacknowledged boundary violations, and unaddressed imbalances. On the other hand, in Buddhism anger is often regarded as taboo, an emotional reaction to be avoided as much as possible. The 8th-century monk-scholar Shantideva, in The Way of the Bodhisattva, writes that a single moment of anger destroys the good karma built up over a thousand eons. These are two very different views, but both agree that anger is very powerful.
Is there a way to direct the energy, clarity, and power of anger to spiritual or mystical ends? Is it possible to find the peace and clarity of awareness in the experience of anger? Is it possible to use anger to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and so undermine the tendency to treat ourselves as special? Is it possible to step out of the world of conflict and opposition that anger projects? And is it possible to discover the groundlessness of experience in an emotional reaction as intense and potentially destructive as anger? Although I cannot speak for other Buddhist traditions, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the answer to all these questions is an unambiguous “yes.”
For instance, Jan Willis, professor emeritus at Wesleyan, described an occasion when she was furiously angry while at Lama Yeshe’s center in Nepal. She remembers standing outside the temple fuming at something or other. Lama Yeshe crept up beside her and whispered in her ear, “Buddha mind very angry today.” Her mind stopped. The mind that is angry is the same as the mind of buddha? She had never considered that possibility. It changed everything. Anger was no longer a force or demon that took you over. It became, instead, a movement in mind, a mind as clear and empty as the sky.
In the tradition in which I trained, all experience is seen as movement in the mind. Experiences arise and fade on their own, like clouds in the sky. Anger is one such cloud, though it often arises as an overwhelming black storm cloud whose earthshaking thunderclaps deafen us to all other voices and whose flashes of lightning can set our whole world on fire. In this article, I describe four practices, each of which opens a door to a different way of experiencing anger.
Don’t force this practice. Don’t hurry it, either. There is plenty of anger out there. Just take it in, breath by breath. Connect with your own joy and peace. There is plenty of that, too. Give it all away, breath by breath.
Keep it simple with the black smoke coming in and the silver light going out, reminding yourself every few breaths what you are taking in and sending out. Don’t exert a lot of effort trying to track exactly what you are taking in or sending out. Let the symbolism of black smoke and silver light work their magic. Just do it, without expectation or anxiety. You are not transforming the anger into peace and joy, and then sending that back out to others. Some people have been told to do taking and sending this way. There may be other practices in which you imagine such a transformation, but they are not taking and sending. In the beginning, people often say that they don’t feel much of anything when they do this practice. That is not unusual. As you become accustomed to this exchange, however, you will feel more and more the negativity and suffering coming into you and more and more how you can give peace, joy and well-being and everything that you value in life to others. Your effort is to let taking and sending work on you by letting the exchange strip away everything that you have ever hoped or longed for, and then strip away the hope and the longing, too. Taking and sending is a very effective way of breaking the spell of anger and other strong emotional reactions. If, however, you do this practice to help yourself feel better in difficult situations, you are, unfortunately, corrupting the practice. Inadvertently, perhaps, you are reinforcing your sense of self. The aim of taking and sending is twofold: to break the spell of emotional reactions and to move beyond self-interest. Thus you just take in the anger and give away your joy. Over time this practice brings about a fundamental rewiring of your whole being.
Mindfulness of Anger
The first practice comes from the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. I learned it years ago from Yvonne Rand, a Zen teacher associated at that time with San Francisco Zen Center. The practice is based on the Anapanasati Sutta, the “Sutra of Full Awareness of Breathing.” In this practice the breath is used as a rope: you use it to lower yourself into the experience of anger. What you find there may come as a bit of a surprise. Start with just being in the experience of being angry. Say to yourself, “Breathing in, I feel this anger. Breathing out, I feel this anger.” No analysis, no trying to understand it, no attempt to reason your way out of it or justify it. At first, the anger may feel too hot to touch (or too cold, in the case of hatred). No matter. Touch however much you are able to, using the breath as a rope. You will probably notice physical sensations associated with anger—tightness in your stomach, for example, or constriction in your throat, or pressure in your head. You may also notice various emotional sensations, too, not just anger, but fear, perhaps, or jealousy, or sadness, or hurt. Stories will run, stories about the anger or about who or what made you angry. Again, using the breath as a rope to hold onto, just let all those reactions to the anger swirl around and in you like autumn leaves in the wind. While you are doing this, you might say to yourself, “Breathing in, I feel reactions to this anger. Breathing out, I feel reactions to this anger.” Something strange often happens at this point. You may find that you can feel the anger and how your whole system reacts to it and not be carried away in the storm. You discover that you can feel the anger and be calm at the same time. Now you say to yourself, “Breathing in, I feel calm in this anger. Breathing out, I feel calm in this anger.” Then you discover that it is possible to relax in the anger, to be at ease in it. To bring out that possibility, you might say, “Breathing in, I am at ease in this anger. Breathing out, I am at ease in this anger.” At this point, you have to be a little careful. When you start to relax in the anger, you will feel everything that you have felt before more clearly and more intensely. You may wonder if something is wrong. Isn’t the anger meant to go away? In fact, nothing is wrong. You are just experiencing what is going on in you more completely. You may need to cycle back to one or another of the earlier stages, but there is no problem with this. A common misconception is that practice proceeds in a linear progression, but it doesn’t. There are many ups and downs. Meanwhile, you are discovering a new possibility—namely, that you can experience anger without tensing against it—and you are beginning to explore that possibility. Somewhere in this process, you may suddenly become aware that your relationship with the anger has shifted. You know what it is, and it doesn’t intimidate or disturb you. For the moment at least, you are free from the tyranny of reaction. Now you might say, “Breathing in, I know this anger. Breathing out, I know this anger.” And that’s it. Using the breath as a rope, you have lowered yourself into the experience of anger and discovered the possibility of peace and clarity there, not by controlling the anger or trying to get rid of it, but by opening to the anger and experiencing it completely. One final point. This is not a one-shot exercise. This is a practice. You do it again and again, until it becomes part of you. Then you keep doing it, and the practice starts to work on you. That is when real understanding begins to ripen. Furthermore, as you gain facility, you may find that when anger arises during the day, at work or at home, you can open to it and touch that peace and clarity in the moment.Taking and Sending
A second method for working with anger or other difficult emotions is taking and sending, one of the key practices in the Mahayana mind-training tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. If you are consumed by anger, consider everyone in the world who is experiencing anger right now. It doesn’t matter what you are angry about, or what they are angry about. It is enough that you are angry and they are angry. As you breathe in, imagine their anger coming into you through your nostrils and down into your heart in the form of thick black smoke. Imagine, too, that everyone in the world except you is now free of anger. Experience everyone’s anger for them! As you breathe out, imagine that all the joy and peace you’ve experienced in your life goes out to everyone. The joy and peace arise in your heart, and go out your nostrils like silvery moonlight, going to every being in the world and filling each one with joy, peace, and well-being. Give all your joy and well-being away!Don’t force this practice. Don’t hurry it, either. There is plenty of anger out there. Just take it in, breath by breath. Connect with your own joy and peace. There is plenty of that, too. Give it all away, breath by breath.
Keep it simple with the black smoke coming in and the silver light going out, reminding yourself every few breaths what you are taking in and sending out. Don’t exert a lot of effort trying to track exactly what you are taking in or sending out. Let the symbolism of black smoke and silver light work their magic. Just do it, without expectation or anxiety. You are not transforming the anger into peace and joy, and then sending that back out to others. Some people have been told to do taking and sending this way. There may be other practices in which you imagine such a transformation, but they are not taking and sending. In the beginning, people often say that they don’t feel much of anything when they do this practice. That is not unusual. As you become accustomed to this exchange, however, you will feel more and more the negativity and suffering coming into you and more and more how you can give peace, joy and well-being and everything that you value in life to others. Your effort is to let taking and sending work on you by letting the exchange strip away everything that you have ever hoped or longed for, and then strip away the hope and the longing, too. Taking and sending is a very effective way of breaking the spell of anger and other strong emotional reactions. If, however, you do this practice to help yourself feel better in difficult situations, you are, unfortunately, corrupting the practice. Inadvertently, perhaps, you are reinforcing your sense of self. The aim of taking and sending is twofold: to break the spell of emotional reactions and to move beyond self-interest. Thus you just take in the anger and give away your joy. Over time this practice brings about a fundamental rewiring of your whole being.