Working with Anger

Thich Nhat Hanh's "Wisdom for Cooling the Flames"

As someone who is interested in our collective evolution I pay close attention to the waves of energy passing through our human family. Traveling through four different airports across the country these past few days I felt wave upon wave of pernicious anger. I could almost see it as a vapor as it spread from person to person.

If our own tendency for experiencing anger is strong, if we haven’t taken care of our own anger and all its variants like irritability, frustration, mean-spiritedness, cynicism and so on, when anger passes as a wave through our collective, we are more likely to “catch it.”

To put it another way, if our emotional immune system is not strong because un-tended-to anger has weakened us over time, if we don’t have enough anger antibodies like compassion, when an emotional virus passes through the collective, our own emotional body will be more likely to host the virus. (Sound like anything else you know?)

Don’t get me wrong – anger on its own is not problematic. Anger is a form of vital energy. It is un-tended anger, anger that is allowed to simmer and boil and is fed all the wrong things which can rage out of control, like a virus.

In his book Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, Thich Nhat Hanh instructs:

The Buddha never advised us to suppress our anger. He taught us to go back to ourselves and take good care of it. … our anger is a part of us. When we are angry, we have to go back to ourselves and take good care of our anger. We cannot say, “Go away anger, you have to go away. I don’t want you.” When you have a stomachache, you don’t say, “I don’t want you stomach, go away.” No, you take care of it. In the same way, we have to embrace and take good care of our anger. We recognize it as it is, embrace it, and smile. The energy that helps us do these things is mindfulness …

Emotional immunity works in a similar way as physical immunity, especially where anger is concerned: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We have to take care of ourselves, eat right, live right, be in right relationship with all our relations, to avoid imbalances in our own systems, and to avoid contracting emotional viruses.

Thich Nhat Hanh explains how a natural kind of compassion for others (but also for ourselves) arises from the understanding that we are not separate:

… Our method of practice should be non-violent. Non-violence can be born only from the insight of non-duality, of interbeing. This is the insight that everything is interconnected and nothing can exist by itself alone. Doing violence to others is doing violence to yourself. If you do not have the insight of non-duality, you will still be violent. You will still want to punish, to suppress, and to destroy. But once you have penetrated the reality of non-duality, you will smile at both the flower and garbage in you, you will embrace both. This insight is the ground for your non-violent action.

… This insight teaches us how to treat our body with tenderness. We must treat our anger and our despair with tenderness.

The teachings in the book, Anger, are profound. They are incredibly simple, not necessarily easy, but they are cooling wisdom for our heated times.