Classroom Talk
Winter 2002 Archive
About finding a healthy place in life for anger. Posted by John on February 28, 2002 at 16:59:12:
This is about making a healthy place in one's life for anger. There is a place for anger in the whole of our human reality. Anger has a healthy part to
play.
And it is not the *experience of anger* that creates the problems the world has with angry acting-out. It is not *being angry* that is the culprit. lt is
the avoidance of the experience of anger—it is ignoring this emotional feeling when it comes up—which leaves us going around in bodies that are
uptight with angry tensions, without knowing it . . . and spring-loaded to wound others. Again, it is the failure to include the experience of anger
into our spectrum of awareness of reality that leaves us vulnerable to being automatically violent.
People who are violent in angry ways do not know they are being angry. Hurting people with their words, actually physically hurting people . . . they
just do what they do do, like knee-jerk reactions. They don't know of anything else. You might even ask them what they are being so angry about.
And they would deny that they were angry! Heh-heh. They would deny that they were angry *angrily*! If they could begin to experience that
anger awarely, and realize it was there, they could begin to understand the natural relationship that suppressed anger has to acting-out violence
unconsciously.
Suppressed anger = automatically acted-out violence
Awarely experienced anger = moments of quiet space to reflect
Anger is a natural human emotion that comes up in all of us from time to time, when things go wrong. Things go wrong in all of our lives. Practically
all of us get angry somewhat regularly, in fact, when these things go wrong. These are all the times when we cuss. And some of us don't even do
that, we just go "Grrrrr!"
Being aware of the occurrence of anger in one's body when it comes up enables a mindful warrior to get his or her feet on the ground steadily, and
get centered, have some moments of quiet space to reflect . . . before automatically jumping forth and acting-out.
When we are angry, the acting-out we do is likely to be punishing . . . technically, this acting-out is "violence." We all know it's true that things done in
anger in life by so many people would often better not have been done. And we don't *have to be* violent when we are being angry, if we can wake
up and realize we are being angry, and realize we might do things that better not be done.
That's simple enough. Yet, it can only be attempted with mindfulness, and some intentional practice.
It is not the anger, itself, that is an "evil" in the world. The anger is only *a message*! The anger is only an alarm of possible evil to come, a warning
that things are going wrong. That's a good alarm to have, unless we go too far with it. For a mindful warrior, anger is just a flag that waves, saying,
"Wake up, and watch out! Things are going wrong!" For it is possible—if one wakes up in this situation—to *not just go right on ahead* with a knee-
jerk angry reaction to whatever is going on. It is possible not to do violence automatically. — And as we know, in our sanest moments, the whole
situation may look quite different a little farther on down the road. What we do in anger today may turn out to be something that would have been
better off not done.
In fact, one thing that might enter a mindful warrior's contemplation in the midst of such an angry event is that . . . . . the whole thing that they are
being so angry about might turn out to be *forgiveable*.
And if it were to be forgiveable, violence would be unnecessary, completely superfluous.
Or, there might be another way to go about the whole thing . . . if cooler heads prevail. Diplomacy might work. This is especially true, if mutual
contrition and mutual forgiveness can come into the picture.
Or one might even find that the whole thing was a big mistake—a huge, incredible misunderstanding all the way around! Heh-heh. CNN reports a
new Gallup Poll, taken in a bunch of Middle Eastern countries, where the big majorities of the people in every one of those countries don't think Arabs
took part in the 9/11 attack.
If a mindful warrior can remember the enormity of misunderstanding that goes on between people on this planet, he or she might be able to
remember, as well, that the stinger that one hastily gives in anger is going to be coming right back on you with equal force and pain. That's another
cool thing to take into consideration, when one is able to wake up and buy some quiet space for contemplation.
Being a "mindful warrior" is being aware of all this . . . . not by believing what I say about it, but by having looked with your own eyes, and having
seen and experienced it to be so, or not.
........................................................................
When we were little children, we became angry at our parents sometimes. It was natural, and inevitable. If your Mother said, "Don't you *ever* get
angry at your Mother again!" and your Father said, "I'm going to teach you a lesson not to get angry at your parents with this switch!" . . . . . . Well, if
something like that happened in your childhood, you may have grown up with a propensity to suppress the natural feeling of anger as you were
growing up. You might have done that out of fear of your parents, or out of anxiety that they wouldn't approve of you and take care of you.
It's one of the most tragic things in the evolution of human society that people have not understood the difference between experiencing the feeling of
anger as a message, and the acting-out of anger as habitual violence.
Everybody's parents are against anger. But what we ought to be against is not anger, but the unconscious acting-out of anger. If we had parents
who said, "I understand you are angry," then we didn't have problems along these lines. But, let's face it, most of us had parents who were
prejudiced against anger, itself, and Kindergarten teachers (the first time around, Deirdre) who had the same attitude. Only "bad girls" and "bad
boys" get angry! "And you don't want to be bad children, do you?" said our Kindergarten teachers. And the farther along we went after that,
exploring adult society, the more we got the message that "anger is bad," that "we're not supposed to feel angry."
Oh, the parents of many of us got angry alright—did they ever!—and they fought it out before our eyes. And seeing this may also have contributed
to our bias against anger as we were growing up. We saw the effects of angry acting out in our Families, and we made the assumption that it was the
fact that anger, itself, comes up, which was the cause of human suffering. Anger, itself, was to blame. And some of us may have made vows to our
Selves that we were not going to let our Selves *ever* be angry in our lives, because we had seen all the damage that *does* come along when people
are being angry, and asleep.
It strikes me that this may be my own case. Perhaps I once made such a vow. My parents fought like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." (!) From
seeing that, having my body being impacted by those dreadful vibes over those years, I grew up being more avoidant of being angry than anyone else
that I knew (and it went so far that it even seems to have atrophied my sense of humor). But I knew I didn't want to be like my Mother and my
Father that way!
It took experiential gestalt workshops with Sascha in Honolulu, and with Mits, for me to discover the spiritual values of anger. It was difficult to see at
first, but along the way I realized that feeling the sensations of anger in my body through and through *letting the tension of it off, awarely* really
worked for me. It made me feel "more whole," and more relaxed and at peace. And when I processed the anger that way (by focusing my aware
attention on the physical sensations of it, and letting go, letting go, letting go . . .) I wouldn't wind up sitting around angrily stewing after that, like I
usually used to do before I learned how to do that. — I simply learned to make the reality of the physical anger a part of my whole, while, at the same
time, gaining an experiential perspective where a more-integrated-I didn't have to act-out the anger unnecessarily . . . . . . . when I'd wake up on it,
that is.
It's true that in most societies around the world, there is a "taboo" against being angry. Being angry itself is already regarded by most people as "a
wrong." And yet, anger *is*, in nearly all of us at certain times. Anger keeps coming up in members of the human race. How are we going to
reconcile this? The answer that this training proposes is that we are going to reconcile this by simply feeling the anger awarely and practicing being
alert enough not to act-out the anger violently.
The first few times, it may not go that way. (That ol' ego, so to speak, will hang in there, and try to frustrate you in any change you try to make!)
But if one practices with anger, deliberately, one can get quite good at this. And if one does feel the anger when it's there, the body releases the
anger . . . So, we're not walking around carrying a big store of anger tensions around on angry muscles—spring-loaded, at the drop of a hat, to act-
out anger once again, because every minute we are experiencing anger awarely, we are releasing anger from the muscles of our bodies.
This is a kind of a spiritual discipline. The spiritual blessing of anger is that it warns you. Anger's message is: "Anger is going on now!" It lets you
know what's going on in the present in your life. It can wake you right up out of sleep when it happens! Try this out, if you'd like, and see how it
works for you. (If you don't like it, you can always throw it away and forget it!)
You can hear your cussing and growling (in your thinking mind, if not what you say out loud), and wake up on it! You can hear your Self making
angry judgments out loud, and you can wake up on it. And, you can feel the tensions of that angry growling in your jaws and wake-up on it. That's
the physical anger itself, that growling tension in your face. And every time you become aware of those tensions, you are letting off those tensions.
Let 'em go!
And the blessings of regularly experiencing your anger this way when it comes up, as an exercise, are that you go around much less often being
unconsciously uptight, and you don't have to be violent so often when anger does show up squawking on your body again. For a mindful warrior of
peace and harmony, those are powers worth learning to deal in. It doesn't mean you have to give up "the cause" that you are angry about! It only
means you can give up the suffering over it, and the unconscious damage you are liable to do if you don't wake up and transform it.
There are other ways to approach "the cause" you are angry about . . . like communicating candidly and honestly—not by manipulating, but by saying
what you'd like and wouldn't like.
........................................................................
But saying all these things about anger isn't enough for some honest and dedicated students. For some of you, this is still "all just words." There are
some of us who have such an out-and-out aversion to allowing our bodies to be angry, that the idea of it is simply *implausible*. If they only know
one thing in the whole world, it is that there is no healthy place in this world for anger.
It's possible that an aversion like this came out of a very traumatic event in childhood. That's possible. The event might not even have involved the
child directly, but others that the child witnessed being angry. And it may have involved the child. An outburst of terrible anger occured, and the
outcome was so devastating that it changed the child's whole life.
One example of thousands of possible examples might be that the Mother got angry at the Father, and the Father went away, leaving the Family
destitute and suffering. Or the Father may have hit the Mother in anger, and the Mother may have stopped caring about anything any more. It
would have to be something shocking and profound, so profound that the little child, seeing this, would make a solemn vow to their Self that he or she
would never be angry again, because anger was "the end of happiness," or something like that, anger had "spoiled their whole life." You get the
picture.
In fights between the parents (such as nearly all of us have seen) the little children who are around *very commonly* feel very guilty about it. Children
manage far too easily to find ways to blame themselves, and take the guilt of it onto their own bodies. Children tell themselves that if they had acted
differently, their parents wouldn't be fighting, and the fearsome things that came out of that fighting wouldn't be happening. And some of us may
grow up through adulthood, carrying this guilt along with us (and, anger back to back). If a person remembers such a childhood scenario when they
are a little more mature, they are usually able to see through it right away, that yes, they felt very guilty about it at the time, and no, they were really *
not* to blame.
"If I wasn't angry, my parents wouldn't have gotten divorced." That's not the truth. "If I wasn't angry, my brother wouldn't have died." Not the
truth. "If I wasn't angry, my parents would have loved me." Not the truth. Whatever we can remember that happened in any of our childhoods, *it
wasn't in our hands*. Perfect though we had been born, childhood enlightenment was all but forgotten by then, and we hadn't yet become mindful
warriors. We couldn't do *anything* about those traumas and tragedies that happened back then in our childhood years, even if we, yes . . . even if
we pulled the trigger. Later, as adults, without special training, we couldn't be expected to understand.
So . . . what if a child got very angry in a rowboat, and another child fell overboard and drowned that day! Wouldn't that be a tough one to see
through? Wouldn't it be difficult for that person, years later, to be able to tolerate hearing me coach that anger has a healthy place in human life?
If a person happens to feel guilty about having been angry when they were a child, that's a configuration that could do that. If a parent, or a teacher
said: "Jesus won't love you because you are an angry child," that could do that. And, in so many words, many of our parents have told us just that.
Each of us in different ways have some degree of resistance to seeing and experiencing anger within us. To some extent the idea may seem absurd to
any of us that anger has a healthy place in life.
........................................................................
There is another enormous factor in this area, and that is the bias against anger of so many spiritual teachers, organizations and schools. I've done
what I could about this in my life. I've been "a champion of anger," in fact. Where teachers have made a virtue out of not being angry, I've spoken up,
again and again. Strange Fate, for a guy that doesn't get angry that much. But I do—heh-heh—I do get angry about this "'spiritual' bias against
anger" that we find so prevalently around among spiritual teachers who are widely respected and revered.
So, I'm going to work on this anger of mine for awhile, this anger against teachers who put down acknowledging anger, before I continue with this
part of this workshop on anger. Let's see if I can manage to be more peaceful than I've ever been before in addressing this touchy subject.
Maybe this is a good place, anyway, to break off for today.
Feedback, anyone?
Okay, tomorrow's another day.
Coach
Perk came up with a wonderful phrase for what I'm talkin' about here. He called it: "false equanimity." We were sharing our respective perspectives
on this over the years, and he pointed up that many spiritual teachers and some psychotherapists, put on a kind of show of, and *advocate* for their
students to put on a kind of show of . . . false equanimity. Well, I'll get to that dangerous topic tomorrow, I guess. And some of you may be pinning
my ears back for being so outrageously disrespectful of the majority in this field, and so independently bold.
Come to think of it, my own teacher, Mits, addressed this topic, too, when he said the most common lie on the face of the Earth is . . . . . "Fine."
Continue with Winter 2002 Classroom Talk or
Post a new discussion in the current Classroom Talk
Archived 05/02/2002