Anger

I enjoy being angry. It enables me to avoid what the anger is covering up...hurt, disappointment or some underlying fear or anxiety. Anger feels so much better than facing any of those emotions.

There is a wonderful story of a Christian monk who had great difficulty with anger. He was continually and constantly angry with his fellow monks. He thought, "If only I didn't have to live with such unkind and insentitive people I wouldn't have this problem with anger." (this sounds familiar doesn't it...if only my house was bigger, if only my boss wasn't rude, if only my spouse was more understanding or worked less....then everything would be alright). The Abbott of the monastry allowed him to live as a hermit. One day a few weeks later, one of the monks went out to the cave where he was staying to pay a visit and deliver some food. As he came upon the dwelling he heard a great crash and much cursing. The monk was angry at the fire. What this story points out for me is that other people aren't the problem.

No matter how much I want to project my anger onto others, ultimately it is my own darkness that I see when I am angry.

I heard this from Joko Beck and found it in a talk on anger by one of her dharma successors, Ezra Bayda. The entire article can be found here. I've found taking these steps to be helpful in dealing with anger:

Break down the re-created emotional experience into three components: the objective situation, the emotion itself, and the behavioral strategy that followed the emotional reaction. This helps bring clarity to the process.

For example, your mate or coworker criticizes you, and before you know it, you're in an angry exchange. Later, when you re-create this experience, you first ask yourself, "What was the objective situation? What actually happened?" Often all that happened is that words were spoken, or even more objectively, sounds connected with the tympanic membrane in your ear. The words themselves had no emotional load. You grafted the emotional reaction onto the objective events. Once you see this, you can then look at the second component: the emotional reaction itself. What specific emotion or emotions did you feel? Be as precise and honest as you can in identifying your feelings; often we don't even know what they are. Then move to the third component, the behavioral strategy. What was your strategy -- to comply, to attack, to withdraw? Though the strategy is not
the same as the reaction, they are often connected in the same predictable pattern.

When we're caught in the behavioral strategy, we have little hope of clarifying our anger. This is especially true if our strategy entails blaming
and self-justifying, with that accompanying sense of power in being right. If we can refrain from blaming, we can focus on the initial reaction itself. We first ask, "What are the believed thoughts?" Sometimes the believed thoughts are right on the surface; other times they may not be accessible. Either way, the next and most crucial step is to enter the physical
experience of the emotion. Truly residing in our anger has the potential to take us down to the core fears that are often driving our surface reactions. Practicing this way repeatedly will enlarge the sense of spaciousness around our angry reactions. As we regard them less as "me", we become less likely to get caught up in them.

When we see clearly how anger arises simply because life is not fitting our little pictures, dropping the anger is not so difficult. What is difficult is that we want to be angry. We can see how our anger comes from our unfulfilled pictures and from our wanting to justify the anger. We can also see that when anger arises, we don't have to express it, nor do we have to justify it by defending the believed thoughts.