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Is Anger Ruining Your Life?

When we are caught in anger, we are always cutting ourselves off from the bigger picture and from a sense of our basic connectedness. If we could see our angry emotional reactions clearly, it would become obvious that they deplete us and narrow our life.

We would see how they are aversions to life, how they separate us and keep us closed. Yet, in spite of the fact that we hurt ourselves and others with our anger, we
hold on to this restricting emotion with a puzzling tenacity.

Even as we continue to inflict pain by leaking our energy through angry emotional reactions, even as we narrow our life to one of petty self-centeredness, we continue to indulge in angry thoughts and behaviours with a stubbornness that defies common sense.

What is anger really about? When life is not the way we want it, we react. If we have expectations, we expect them to be met. If we have requirements, we require them to be met.

If we have strong desires, we will not be satisfied unless they are fulfilled. Though life is neutral, with no bias toward fitting our pictures of how it should be, we continue to believe that life should go the way we want. And when it doesn"t, the result is often anger, in one form or another.

I"m not talking only about big explosions of anger. Even on mellow days, we leak energy through anger, from morning to night. We can be angry in the form of impatience if we have to wait in traffic at a red light.

We can be angry in the form of irritability if our television remote stops working. We can be angry in the form of self-righteousness if someone arrives late. We can
be angry in the form of frustration if our team loses. We can be angry in the form of indignation if we feel we are ignored or not appreciated.

Most of the time, we simply follow one of the two characteristic ways we have been taught to deal with anger when it arises. First, if our conditioning tells us that it"s not okay to be angry, we will suppress our feelings.

The second, more common, way of dealing with anger is to express it. We express it internally through ruminating or wallowing; we express it externally through blame.

Whether we suppress or express our anger, in neither case do we ever clarify it, nor do we really experience it. Even when we"re caught up in expressing anger, we"re rarely in touch with its energy.

We"re so lost in the juiciness of believing our thoughts and in blaming that we don"t
experience the anger. In fact, one of anger"s functions seems to be that it allows us to avoid facing what"s really happening.

What are we avoiding? We could be avoiding the more painful emotions of hurt or grief. We could be avoiding facing the core fears that almost always underlie our anger. It"s so much easier to be angry than it is to experience hurt or grief or fear.

No wonder we spend so much time indulging our anger! It"s necessary to acknowledge that we often love our anger, even when it makes our life miserable. We often mistake the feeling of power that accompanies our anger as being somehow authentic and self-validating. This is the so-called ego at its work of perpetuating the self-centred dream.

We have to understand that it"s not bad to feel anger — anger is simply our conditioned response to life when it doesn"t match our pictures. We only make matters worse by adding to the anger self-judgement and self-hatred, both of which
are rooted in more pictures of how we, or life, should be.

Instead, we can bring loving-kindness — the essence of which is non-judgement, to our practice, lightening the heaviness and self-importance of our own drama.

Notice your anger whenever it arises. Regard it as your path to awakening. Notice whether you stuff it or express it. Finally, as Aristotle says: Anyone can become angry — that is so easy. But to become angry with the right person, to  the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not so easy.