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Anger
I can't stop myself from speaking harsh words to people around me. when ever i get frustrated with some other work, i always show my anger to the people who are close to me. i really want to get rid of this bad manner. please suggest some ways......
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Comments
Why? Because the anger is not under your control. It is not yours. All that you can do is to watch it arise and watch it pass away. Do the same to your thoughts which also does not belong to you. Angry thoughts always goes away only if you let them.
Best to practise when you are not in the midst of emotional turmoil. Watch your mind when you are calm and settled. You might try to settle your mind by first watching your breath as it passes in and out.
Time to slow down. Thank you!
You should take responsibility for your actions - you really want to lose this manner? Its your choice, one step at a time.
Meditation can help by allowing you space to recognise and acquaint yourself with your mind and its processes.
Self help books on anger management may assist as may professional anger management therapy.
If you're close to your teenage years then you may just have to sit it out.
Overall, a balanced healthy life will be more likely to produce a balanced healthy individual.
The path provides many means but we have to do the work.
With two stories retold from the Buddhist texts
by
Ven. K. Piyatissa Thera
Good article.
In the past, I have tried to repress anger -- to simply stop feeling it or let go of it without doing anything to assuage the underlying suffering that gave birth to it. You will often see people citing the Buddha's words in the Pali canon, regarding the relinquishment of anger. For example, you will often see quotes from the relevant section of the Dhammapada, called Kodhavagga, in which the Buddha says: "One should give up anger, renounce pride, and overcome all fetters. Suffering never befalls him who clings not to mind and body and is detached."
However, the word translated as "anger" (kodha) does NOT mean anger in itself! Kodha is anger that is coupled with ill-will towards another being. It is anger that is coupled with a sense of righteousness, blame, and violence. It ignores the other person's humanity. It is closer to what we would call "wrath." And yet, people misinterpret the Buddha for saying that one should repress anger, so you end up with many Buddhists who end up dissociating from their anger, refusing to even feel it. Yet all this does is send the message to your brain "I do not deserve to have my needs met, or my suffering alleviated." And the behavior that is born of such repression ends up only perpetuating the situation that caused it in the first place. Does this not strike you as completely inconsistent with the spirit of compassion that the rest of the Buddha's teaching embodies? Nowhere else does the Buddha recommend repression of emotions. Would you tell someone to simply "give up anxiety" or "give up grief", even though they stem from the selfsame place as anger? Of course not. And that's not what the Buddha meant.
There IS such a thing as "clean" anger, that is bereft of ill-will. This sort of anger is a benevolent emotion -- serving to protect ourselves from being violated, harmed, or having our sense of self-respect infringed upon. In Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Path to Happiness, Sharon Salzberg notes that the Buddha saw the world in terms of suffering and the end of suffering: "This mind does not see the world in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, good and evil; it sees only “suffering and the end of suffering.” What would happen if we looked at ourselves and all of the different things that we see and did not judge any of it? We would see that some things bring pain and others bring happiness, but there would be no denunciation, no guilt, no shame, no fear. How wondrous to see ourselves, others, and the world in that way! When we see only suffering and the end of suffering, then we feel compassion. Then we can act in energetic and forceful ways but without the corrosive effects of aversion."
So, when you find yourself angry, ask yourself: "Where is the suffering here?" This will bring your attention to the REAL matter at hand. You will often find anger is born out of fear. Are you afraid of something that might happen if you allow people to make mistakes? Are you really being wronged in some way that needs to be rectified?
You don't need to get rid of anger. You simply need to "clean it" of any ill-will, sense of pride/righteousness, or wrath. Then your anger becomes an expression of self-respect and compassion, and will serve to IMPROVE your relationships with others, rather than causing harm.
For me, my biggest trigger is a lot of noise in the house. We have 3 boys, and a large dog, and when we are all in the house together my patience thread gets shorter and shorter and what might be normal noise seems amplified. This is my problem, and I'm better able to recognize that I need some quiet time, and I go take it. I still have to take a bit of an emotional inventory every day to see where I went wrong and to note patterns, but it's decreased a lot.
Keeping regular meditation practice and Buddhist study has helped as well. It keeps my practice as a very important part of my day, and makes me more accountable (to myself) for my mindfulness.
This emotion is always some form of pain. Sometimes the pain is the pain of feeling helpless, as helplessness is often mixed in with the pain. Instead of opening up to our anger and using our mindfulness practices to experience and observe it, we try to shut it down using anger.
Anger is very loud and "drowns out" our pain.
Anger usually involves doing something ... which distracts us from our pain.
And ... watch yourself do this the next time you get angry ... we feet very powerful, right into the gut/core of our being, when we become angry. Which removes any feelings of helplessness.
The solution to overcoming anger is to meditate more, and to learn to be mindful during our daily life, to be aware and observant of our internal processes.
It also helps to remember:
- The more we resist something, the more painful it is (childbirth techniques, pain management, and paramedics are all aware of this phenomenon).
- We don't HAVE to "fix" every unpleasant feeling we have. As a matter of fact, the First Noble Truth (of the Four Noble Truths) guarantees us that people suffer at times. Therefore, why should we expect to be exempt from this basic truth of life? It's okay to have unpleasant emotions ... and we don't need to try to mask them with anger.
You don't really need to intellectually figure out "why". This is akin to psychotherapy (Freudian/insight therapy) which has largely been dropped by the world of psychology because it doesn't change us, doesn't help us grow. Mostly we just get caught in the sense of "getting somewhere" when in fact, nothing is changing and we are only spinning our wheels when we engage in insight therapy.
To change your behavior, change your cognitive self-statements, the attributions you make about a situation. Buddhism is ALL about this, btw. Which is probably why it is so highly-effective. Even more effective than cognitive-behavioral psychology (which is the most effective of the psychological bag of tricks).
"Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."
- Buddha