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
4 practicesTheme · Equanimity and perspective
How long you have · Five minutes
Approach
When · Under stress
Fighting your own anger tends to make it louder. The part of you that flares does better treated as something to work with than something to defeat.
In the moment that can be as small as thinking, there you are, instead of, not this again. Pushing it under works for a while and then it arrives…
Sitting practice teaches four useful things about anger: everything passes, the senses are calmer ground than the story, you do not have to attend to every thought, and you are not the words you use about yourself.
Take them one at a time. When something flares, the quickest of the four is usually the second: put your attention on your feet or the sound of the…
Nobody has to send kind wishes to the person who hurt them, least of all on somebody else's schedule. If that step is being pushed on you, you can decline it and keep the rest of the practice.
Reaching for warmth toward someone who did real harm can bring shame, or a flood of the original event, or the queasy sense of having been talked…
Have three or four openers ready before you need them. For what it is worth. Can I run something by you. You might not like this, so give me the benefit of the doubt.
When you are stirred up you will not compose diplomatic language on the spot, so the phrases have to be picked in advance and worn in. Say them aloud…