Holding Anger
Jules Shuzen Harris,
Sensei
We must develop a measure of psychological
insight along with our meditation practice.
Anger hinders our liberation from suffering. It
takes its toll on our spirit and our health. Stress levels are on
the rise. The Harris Poll in 2002 recorded that tension levels in
almost half of Americans had worsened over the preceding year.
According to the American Institute of Stress, 75 to 90 percent of
doctors’ visits are for stress-related ailments. Psychological
distress such as anger, anxiety, and depression seems to be a good
predictor of high blood pressure, heart attacks, and sudden death.
But what is missing from this research is the “first cause,” the
damaged self—a belief that manifests as anger projected for the
most part onto others. On one level, this projected anger is a
defense against one’s “bad self.” On a deeper level, it represents
our feelings of vulnerability.
Over 2,500 years ago the Buddha identified anger as
one of the three poisons that hinder our progress toward liberation
from suffering. In the Anumana Sutta, a teaching on
self-observation, the venerable Mahamoggallana, one of the Buddha’s
closest disciples, counsels bhikhus against angry thoughts that
lead to disparaging others. The bhikhus are instructed to refrain
from unruly behavior such as hypocrisy, mercilessness, jealousy,
and selfishness, to name a few examples. In the Lekha
Sutta the Buddha asserts that there are three types of
individuals in the world and three ways they manifest anger. First,
he refers to the individual who is like an inscription on a rock.
His anger stays with him for a long time. It is not effaced by wind
or water. Next, the Buddha compares an individual who is often
angered, but whose anger does not stay with him for a long time, to
an inscription in soil that is effaced by wind or water. Lastly,
the Buddha describes a person who is like water. When this
individual is spoken to roughly or harshly, he or she remains
congenial, companionable, and courteous, just as an inscription in
water disappears immediately.
After more than 30 years of working first as a
therapist and later a practitioner of Zen, the poison that stands
out the most to me is anger. And while I believe that meditation
has some transformative power, as a former psychotherapist I
believe that teachers and spiritual guides need to address the role
that small mind plays with regard to anger. Meditation enables us
to see the transparency of our anger, and this is a good start, but
we can still remain blinded to the mechanics of our anger. The
Buddhist teacher and psychologist John Welwood asserts that “most
of us live caught up in prereflective identification most of the
time.” In working with dharma students, teachers must address the
deeper wounds from which anger has sprung. We must enable students
to see the anger they project onto others as a defense against old
story lines, such as “I’m damaged, I’m unlovable,” and so
on.
Anger is “habit energy,” to use Thich Nhat Hanh’s
term; karmic in its origin, it is deeply engrained and deeply
rooted. As Welwood says, we imagine that our thoughts and feelings
are an accurate portrayal of reality and therefore justified. If we
are to be effective in transmuting our anger into prajna
(wisdom), then we must develop an additional measure of
psychological insight along with our meditation practice that
focuses on the cyclical relationship between thoughts and our
body.
I saw chronic episodes of anger manifest when I
trained former criminal offenders in counseling techniques that
they could use to redirect youth caught up in the criminal justice
system. The anger the ex-offenders projected onto their clients was
cloaked in their judgmental attitude toward them. They were
hypercritical of behaviors they themselves once engaged in. This
behavior points to an aspect of anger that we don’t usually think
of. We typically attribute the source of our anger to someone or
something outside of ourselves: “I am experiencing great
displeasure because it is the ‘other’ who is at fault.” The
ex-offenders didn’t see their shadow beliefs and resisted
addressing them. Their anger toward clients was a defense—it
allowed them to distance themselves from their “bad
selves.”
In order to work on anger, we need to employ an
approach that incorporates psychosocial strategies in the service
of spiritual development. This approach embraces the transpersonal,
personal, and interpersonal. Mindfully held anger is a step in the
right direction. This approach requires that we contain our
anger—that we meditatively attend to our anger with an emphasis on
neither suppressing it nor acting it out. Being present with our
anger enables us to witness the process of it, which includes all
three levels of awareness. On the personal level, we witness the
felt sense of our anger, along with its cognitive and perceptual
dimensions. On a social level, we witness the effect our shadow
beliefs have on our interaction with others. On the transpersonal
level, we witness the “I,” or who it is who is angry.
Another approach to dealing with anger on the
psycho-social-spiritual level is mind-body bridging. This technique
enables us to see the impact that thoughts have on us viscerally.
The prime mover behind the impact thoughts have on the body are our
requirements: how we should be, how other people should be, and how
the world should be in order for us to feel acceptable. This
approach begs the question of how to bring compassion to our anger.
It is not easy to refrain from repressing or indulging our anger.
Our challenge is to embrace it with mindfulness and genuine
caring.
We must become intimate with anger to clear the way
to our connectiveness, to our vulnerability and an aliveness to
everything. In the end, our anger is transmuted to wisdom, which in
turn gives rise to compassion.
Jules Shuzen Harris, Sensei is a Zen teacher in
the Soto lineage and the founder of Soji Zen Center in Lansdowne,
Pennsylvania.