Problematic Emotions -- Anger

I have been posting everyday in order to quickly cover some basics and familiarize myself with the website I'm using to guide me along the way.  I will probably slow down to once a week or so because I am getting to where I actually put into use and practice Buddhist principles.

As we have covered, the mind creates its own suffering.  It creates emotions that distort our view of what is happening and provoke us into behaving in ways that cause ourselves and others pain and misery.  The first emotion I want to explore is anger. When things happen our mind labels the experience as pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. When we decide it is unpleasant we have an aversion to it.  We want to get away or we want it to get away from us.  We need to create some distance.  It is an aversion.  We want to avoid getting what we do not want, we want to avoid unhappiness, we want to avoid being unknown, and we want to avoid blame.  To do this we exaggerate. It's not just that the person did something and we were hurt.  No, all of a sudden they are a bad person.  We exaggerate how awful they are and how hurtful they were.  See how that is a delusion?  See how that is a distortion of what really happened?  That is how a Buddhist might define anger; it is an aversion but with an exaggerated point of view.

In the eight fold path I listed “Correct Understanding.” It was the fifth one on the list.  I have seen it also called “Right View” and listed number one.  So now the question becomes, how can we restore or create a right view or correct understanding. The first thing is; we do not repress the emotion.  I am a person who rarely loses their temper but inside I am a seething cauldron of anger. I stuff it and this is not the solution.  We are neither to repress nor do we indulge the emotion (from Pema Chodron.)  We can go ahead and feel the feeling but we try not to act out.  Instead, we do what is called "analytic meditation."  In Buddhism there are two forms of meditation. One is called “Samatha” and the other is "Vipassana."  The first is what we ordinarily call meditation.  It focuses on something like the breath for example.  It has a calming and quieting effect.  It is covered by Correct Concentration in the eight fold path. The other is covered by Correct Mindfulness. It is, in this case, paying attention to the emotion and feeling it.  It pays attention to where it came from and what it is doing to us.  What thoughts are created, what other feelings or memories does it trigger?  By analyzing it in this way we correct the distortions.  We might realize that the person was not as bad or as hurtful as we made he or she out to be.  In daily practice, if we were working on this emotion and we had the time to devote to it, we might do a calming meditation for twenty minutes or so followed by up to an hour of analytic meditation.  In this way, over time, we develop a habit of not immediately getting angry over things.  Without doing this, getting angry can develop into a habit and actually get worse over time. We can become quick to anger and develop all kinds of prejudice and bigotry.

That is a problem with me.  Before I stop and think I say something that I shouldn't and the damage is done.  Once, I had a friend that was hospitalized and I visited her everyday.  Well, I hate hospitals but that is what friends do so I did it.  I repressed the feeling and after awhile I got very selfish and did not think I was getting enough appreciation and pretty fed up.  After she was released she had an emergency and had to go back. She called late at night for a ride home and I picked her up but I was angry enough that I said something that was cruel and hurtful.  She is still a friend but I am afraid that we will never be as close as we once were.  All we can do in a case like that is do the analytic meditation afterward and maybe prevent incidents like that from happening again.  I don't hate hospitals like I did but I can still be self righteous and hurt about fairness and who is giving more and so on.  That leads me to the opposite of anger which I will write about next time; attachment.  The feeling one has when losing a friend or losing a lover, or wanting to be closer to a friend or lover can be just as distorting and delusional as anger but it is based on an attraction instead of an aversion.