Perhaps you, like myself, find there seems to be a weak spot in your practice, in your living. For me, I can say, I sometimes feel as if the speed bump that keeps you from going from 0 to 120 in a few seconds is sadly defective in me when confronted with anger, with taking offense when verbally attacked by another. Of course, you may perhaps find yourself becoming depressed in such circumstances, or frightened, or deeply aggitated or, even with the best of intentions, driven to try and explain your position. It is as if one assumes that if you could just explain it, the other person couldn’t help but understand!
Not so.
One of the great spiritual teachers in the world at this very moment is Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese zen teacher who actually was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King back more than a few years.........
I happened into a Half Price Books today and picked up a Thich Nhat Hanh book I’d never seen before, since I haven’t read him in a while. The book is Anger: Wisdom For Cooling the Flames. I sat on my back porch today in what was the perfect balance of breeze, sunlight, shade and temperature. Oh, yes, and birds. I found myself reading the entire book, and there was a quote in it that stunned me in its appropriateness and illumination in my own life:
Perhaps this particular passage in the book will strike you the same way or you can copy and paste and print it out and stick it in a drawer somewhere because, in time, it will register with you as it did for me:
'When we are angry, we suffer. If you really understand that, you also will be able to understand that when the other person is angry, it means that she is suffering. When someone insults you or behaves violently towards you, you have to be intelligent enough to see that the person suffers from his own violence and anger. But we tend to forget. We think that we are the only one that suffers, and the other person is our oppressor. This is enough to make anger arise, and to strengthen our desire to punish. We want to punish the other person because we suffer. Then, we have anger in us; we have violence in us, just as they do. When we see that our suffering and anger are no different from their suffering and anger, we will behave more compassionately. So understand the other is understanding yourself, and understanding yourself is understanding the other person. Everything must begin with you'.
So, what is one to do from that point?
Don’t fight your anger and don’t suppress your anger. Learn the tender way of taking care of your anger, and transform it into the energy of understanding and compassion. Now, one might reasonably ask, how in the world do you do that? Thich (a Vietnamese title for Teacher) Nhat Hanh writes:
'In Christianity, it is said that Jesus has the energy of God, of the Holy Spirit, within him. That is why he is able to heal many people. His healing energy is called the Holy Spirit. In Buddhist language, that energy is the energy of the Buddha, the energy of mindfulness'
.
Mindfulness is at the core of Nhat Hanh’s approach, and is as simple as being here now (which is not that easy) by being mindful, by paying simple attention to one’s breathing as a guide that leads beyond itself.
He suggests, basically, one confronted with this kind of opposition has, at his or her base, the understanding that is in the longer quote above. What does one do? I’m paraphrasing (or really amplifying) here — “Breathing in, I know there is anger in me. Breathing out, I smile and hold my anger like a baby until the embrace quiets it and it can evaporate and return to the small seed that is always within me. In doing this, I water the good seeds in me, the seed of compassion and mindfulness.” This is the meaning, the practice is much simpler — While breathing in, “I know the anger in me,” and while breathing out, “I will take good care of you, don’t worry.”
Mindfulness does not fight anger or despair. Mindfulness is there in order to recognize. To be mindful of something is to recognize that something is there in the present moment. Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware of what is going on in the present moment. “Breathing in, I know that anger has manifested in me; breathing out, I smile towards my anger.” This is not an act of suppression or of fighting. It is an act of recognizing. Once we recognize our anger, we embrace it with a lot of awareness, a lot of tenderness.
When it is cold in your room, you turn on the heater, and the heater begins to send out waves of hot air. The cold air doesn’t have to leave the room for the room to become warm. The cold air is embraced by the hot air and becomes warm—there’s no fighting at all between them.
If you want to ponder all this for a while — and I hope you will — and try it (and I really hope you will) then I’d suggest you keep in mind another quote that is amongst my favorites found in the New Testamant. Paul, who it seems to me could be so on target one moment and off the next, hit the bullseye when he said, “Not I, but Christ in me.”
I believe that this look at dealing with anger and the ways we can overcome anger in ourselves and others with compassion is rooted in the marvelous spiritual expanse behind those six words or Paul.
Blessings,
Brian (
citn@christianityinthecity.com )
Droplets from Life:
http://www.dropletsfromlife.blogspot.com/ . I would love to hear your commentsn this article. Please feel free to email me at:
christinesdroplets@yahoo.com.au
