The Key to Managing Anger? Compassion

If you’re like me, there are any number of moments throughout the day that can deeply trigger anger. Maybe someone flakes out on an arrangement you made. Or you get passed over for an honor or promotion that you really wanted. Perhaps you got your hopes up about a new romantic partner, and they really, really let you down. When those things happen, you might feel deep anger…and you might even lash out at people in your life. That never feels good. What if you could stay with that powerful emotion without acting out in harmful ways?

There is a beautiful Buddhist text dating back to the 14th century known as the 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva. Bodhi can be translated from Sanskrit as “open” or “awake,” while sattva can be translated as “being,” so, in brief, a bodhisattva is an open-hearted being. A meditation master known as Ngulchu Thogme composed these verses to teach us how to live full lives with open hearts, in order to be helpful to those around us and to show up more for our day-to-day lives. One particular verse offers advice on how to look at our anger, as well as those people who have caused it:

If you have not tamed the enemy of your own anger,

Combating outer opponents will only make them multiply.

Therefore, with an army of loving kindness and compassion,

To tame your own mind is the practice of a Bodhisattva.

Here Ngulchu Thogme is saying that there are a few ways to relate to our anger. One way is to lash out at these “outer opponents”- people who may or may not have wronged us, whom we have dubbed “enemies” in the stories we tell ourselves. Perhaps you’ve done this before: someone at work implies you dropped the ball when you very well did not, and instead of just sitting with your anger you immediately email them something nasty and regret it minutes later. Now you have the pain of your anger, plus someone else is angry right back at you, and your problems have only multiplied.

Sitting with our Anger

Our friend Ngulchu Thogme advises that instead of acting out on our anger we can learn to tame it by sitting in the midst of that difficult storm. One way we can do this is by dropping the storyline we are playing on repeat and instead letting ourselves feel whatever we feel. As with most meditation advice, this is easier said than done, right?

Here’s a short exercise to sit with your emotions:

• Begin by sitting in a relaxed but uplifted posture.
• Focus your attention on the breath. This is less about thinking about the breath, more about feeling it. Notice the natural cycle — however you normally breathe is fine.
• After a few moments of this you may notice that the particular storyline around what angers you rears its ugly head. Gently acknowledge that story, then give yourself permission to simply feel what you’re feeling, without judgment.
• Most important part here — stay with the energy of the emotion itself.
• The same storyline may come back up but similar to coming back to the breath in other forms of meditation, here we return to the emotion once more, giving ourselves space simply to feel it.

The more we are able to sit with our emotions, without generating a lot of stories around them, the more we realize we don’t have to get overwhelmed by them. Here we are seeing our feelings and emotions not as defilements we need to be rid of, but as valid communication arising out of us remaining embodied. We are not making our emotions our enemies but recognizing their impermanent and fleeting nature, looking at and acknowledging them while they are there and letting them go when they are not.

Loving-Kindness

Ngulchu Thogme advises that we go one step further. Yes, it’s good to see our anger as it is. But we can also practice loving-kindness and compassion in response to this strong feeling.

In traditional loving-kindness practice we often begin by offering a sense of friendliness to ourselves. This is surprisingly hard for some people — we may not have trained in the art of giving ourselves a break. When you are meditating on the breath, that means not beating yourself up for having thoughts. We have thoughts all day long, but somehow think that the moment we try to meditate they will magically evaporate. That’s simply not the case. To ask the mind to stop thinking is akin to asking the heart to stop beating; it’s just not going to happen. So our task in meditation is to become very kind to ourselves each and every time we notice that we have drifted off in thought.

I offer a formal guided loving-kindness meditation here, beginning with visualizing yourself and offering yourself unconditional friendliness, but the long and short of the practice is that we look directly at how we divide the various people in the world up into “I like you,” “I don’t like you” and “I’m going to go ahead and ignore you.” In the practice we bring to mind various people in our life who fall into those camps and offer them a sense of love and friendliness equally.

This is particularly hard when we bring to mind those who have angered us. One traditional phrase that is often used in this practice is “May you enjoy happiness and be free from suffering.” Even the difficult people in your life didn’t wake up thinking, “Maybe I should create a lot of suffering by being a jerk today.” They may have woken up with a heavy heart though, physical ailments, or perhaps emotional pain. Then they acted out on those burdens in inappropriate ways, leading you to be angry with them. If we can open our hearts to them just a little bit, in order to see their suffering, then we may be able to move beyond our anger.

The Birth of Compassion

When we see the suffering of the people we’re upset with, then we arrive at the birth of compassion and empathy. Empathy is not you sitting up in your high tower thinking you’re more spiritually evolved, feeling pity for the jerks in your life. It’s seeing that they suffer and, because you intimately know the various ways that you suffer, developing a felt connection to them. You have your pain and they have theirs’ — in recognizing that simple fact you acknowledge their humanity…and compassion is born. You realize we’re all in this together.

Perhaps you know how paralyzing something like anger can be — the way your body continues to tense up and your mind has less and less space up until you can think of little else other than what is making you angry. You know how painful that can be. While at work you see that person you find brutally annoying but…their body is tensing in that familiar way. In that moment, you can drop your preconceived notions of what a jerk they are and realize that they are suffering in a way that you know all too well. In that moment you might have cut through your fixed opinion about them to realize their core humanity. Boom — compassion.

The more we are able to tame our minds in meditation and through specific techniques in loving-kindness and compassion, the more we loosen the bonds anger has on us. We can feel anger fully, acknowledge it, but not let it control us. As a result, we live a life marked by more levity and joy. Things will still come up that spark anger, but we are quicker to see our way through that strong emotion and more open to the possibility that we’re all human, foibles and all, and thus worthy of love and compassion.

A version of this article was published at https://www.sonima.com on November 14, 2016.