Areas › Anger
Anger
Almost nobody wants to be the person who says the thing they cannot take back. The window between the surge and the words is short and it can be widened. That is most of what this area is about, along with the fear or hurt that anger is usually protecting.
Narrowed down
3 practicesTheme · What you are actually defending
How long you have
Approach · Mindfulness
When · Under stress
Anger and doubt cannot really occupy the same moment. Anger sharpens everything to a point, and a genuine maybe blunts it.
This is why an honest question does more than an argument. Not a challenge, which hardens things, but a real one: what if I have got part of this…
Not understanding what is happening frightens a person before it angers them. If you flare up when a situation is unclear, you are meeting something very old in yourself rather than a fault you invented.
Watch the order of it next time. First the blank, the not knowing what this means or where it is going, then a tightening in the chest or jaw, then…
The aim is not to work out the answer. It is to keep moving while the answer is missing, and to find that the fear does not have to run the day.
When something is unsettled, your mind hands you one job after another: replay it, check it, decide what they really meant. You can put those down…