Dealing with Anger

Dealing with Anger

"As a culture we swing from being afraid of anger to romanticizing it. I try to see anger for what it is, in myself, and neither fear it nor idealize it. We might romanticize the idea of being in touch with our anger, but in fact we don’t really enjoy the effects of anger. If we are lost in perpetual guilt, which is anger at ourselves, we don’t celebrate that. If we see someone hurting someone else, abusing them, beating them up, or screaming at them, we don’t rejoice in it; we don’t say, 'Oh, wonderful, they’re in touch with their anger!'

There is great potential for us to find a middle path with anger through mindfulness, not adding to our brutal self-judgments because of it, and not acting it out in ways that ultimately leave us isolated and regretful."

- Sharon Salzberg, "The Deluding Force," from the Summer 1998 Tricycle.

Easier Said...

"Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well-developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots. If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response—anger—then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance. It’s not that anger is repressed; anger never arises in the first place."

-Andrew Olendzki, "Calm in the Face of Anger," Tricycle, Fall 2006