The Authentic Life (12 page)

If we could simply just let go of things we don't like or find unhelpful, we would already be quite happy! Just think about the last time you were really angry at someone. Think about how you were much more interested in being right than you were in letting go of your anger. If someone said to you, “Just let go of your anger”—how easy would it be to do that? It gets even more difficult to let go when dealing with our most deeply conditioned patterns and fears. Trying to let go is, in a subtle way, the same as trying to get rid of the things we don't like, especially the thoughts and feelings we find difficult to feel. We're seeing them as the enemy and wanting life to be different.

Letting be may sound similar, but it is actually quite different. Letting be means we don't try to drop it (let it go), nor do we try to alter it or force ourselves to accept it. Rather we simply acknowledge what's there and say yes to it, which means that we're willing to feel it, just as it is. We don't have to like it, nor, on the other hand, do we have to view it as an obstacle or an enemy—we just have to be willing to experience exactly what our life is right now.

Instead of seeing it as the enemy, we see it as our path, which is a critical difference. Interestingly, when we can truly let something be, it will often let go on its own, without any effort on our part to make that happen. In fact, the effort to
make it happen—the attempt to let go—will often guarantee the opposite.

It is certainly a good idea to have the intention to free ourselves from our fears and our conditioning. This intention, in part, is what, is behind the wish to let go of things. But having the intention and actually bringing it to fruition are two different things. To bridge the gap between the two, between wanting to live most authentically and being able to drop what prevents it, we need to learn what it means to truly let life be.

It's important to remember that the ego mind will consistently try to pervert our best practice intentions. It's predictable and inevitable that this will happen. The point is not to get caught in the ego's black-or-white thinking, where we tend to remain confused, or at least unclear. When we are more precise in our observations, we can watch and learn—and get an inward feel for the subtle shades of gray between black and white, between expectation and aspiration, personal love and Big Love, letting go and letting be. In this way we can better understand what we're doing on the path toward learning to live more genuinely.

PART THREE

Emotional Awakening

11

The Dilemma of Anger

H
ere's an interesting question: why do we continue to do things that are harmful to us? The perfect example is anger. One of my students, who is a psychologist, told me how frustrating it is to work with patients who are habitually angry. Even when they would acknowledge her good suggestions to work with the anger, they nonetheless wouldn't do what she suggested. It reminds me of a line from a poem by W. H. Auden: “We would rather be ruined than changed.” The fact is, when we express our anger, it doesn't just go outward—it is also toxic to us; holding on to our anger is like eating bad food. We can all probably recognize this tendency in ourselves—to continue to hold on to our anger internally and express it outwardly—even though we know it undermines our aspiration to live more openly and genuinely.

In part, living from anger is sustained by the illusion that we have endless time. We continue to let anger get the best of us because we don't yet truly realize that our life is precious and limited. Instead, we blindly indulge our entitled belief that life
owes us something. Even when we see how our angry emotional reactions separate us and keep us closed, we hold on to this restricting emotion with a puzzling tenacity.

What is anger really about? When life doesn't give us what we want, we usually react. For example, when we have an expectation or a strong desire, we will feel dissatisfaction if our expectation or desire is not fulfilled. We cling to the entitled belief that life should go the way we want it to go. And when life doesn't go that way, anger says, “No! I want what I want!” This is not only true in our big explosions of anger. We can be angry in the form of irritability if our computer starts malfunctioning. We can be angry in the form of impatience if we have to wait in line at a store. We can be angry in the form of frustration if our political party suffers a defeat. We can be angry in the form of indignation and self-righteousness if someone criticizes us.

Again the question, Given that we hurt ourselves and others with our anger, why is it so difficult to stop expressing it? In a way the answer is simple: we
want
to be angry, because the small mind of anger wants nothing more than to be right. There's a feeling of juiciness and power that accompanies the expression of anger, and this feeling can be quite intoxicating.

Seen from an evolutionary point of view, cultivating our anger makes even more sense. There was a time when our raw instinctual reactions served a real purpose: to help us ward off physical threats in order to survive. The fact that we no longer face the same kinds of danger that we did as cavemen doesn't seem to matter—our bodies and minds have not yet caught on. Even though the anger no longer serves us in the same way, the powerful, even “good” feeling of anger remains. This is the dilemma of anger: even though it undermines our aspiration to live a more authentic life, it is reinforced in the body as something desirable.

Anger is also reinforced in another, equally powerful way: it can shield us from feeling the hurt and fear that are often right below the surface of anger. For example, if someone criticizes us and we feel hurt, we may immediately move into self-righteousness and blaming in order to avoid having to experience the more vulnerable feeling of being hurt. Also, we may experience anger in the form of rage when we feel powerless, such as when our remote control stops working or when someone cuts us off on the highway. Rage gives us a false feeling of power and control, yet it is often a way of avoiding feeling the fear we don't want to feel.

There comes a critical point on the practice path when we finally realize to what extent anger adversely impacts our life. This is not the same as simply feeling guilty about being angry. Guilt is another, more subtle form of anger, turned inward at ourselves. Nor is it about the moral injunction “Don't be angry.” The deeper realization of the need to turn away from anger usually comes from the genuine remorse that results from realizing that we're disconnected from our true nature. We no longer want to perpetuate the suffering that so often results from our anger. Nor do we want to live a life based just on our attachment to life going a particular way. It is a sure sign that our practice is maturing when we develop the willingness to be with our life as it is rather than how we want it to be.

It's at this point in practice that the question arises, how can I effectively work with my anger? Over the years of clarifying my own work with anger it has become clear that what is needed is a step-by-step approach. The experience I've gleaned, both from working with myself and from working with others for the past twenty years, has helped me refine this step-by-step approach in a way that makes it accessible to anyone who is serious
about working with their anger. It is based on the five basic questions that were discussed in chapter 4, and it has proven to be very successful in helping people extricate themselves from their deeply entrenched patterns. However, this has also made it obvious that successfully working with anger can sometimes be a hit-or-miss proposition. We will occasionally fall back into our habitual patterns and perhaps even get swept up in an explosion of anger that seems to come out of nowhere. When this happens, it is easy to get discouraged; however, knowing that occasionally “failing” is part of the process can be helpful when we get stuck. It is also helpful to return again and again to remembering what we most truly want: to live authentically from our true nature.

S
TEP 1
: R
ECOGNIZING

The first step in working with anger is recognizing that we are, in fact, angry. This is not as simple or as straightforward as it may sound. When I was in my thirties, my family used to call me the Black Cloud, based on my angry outbursts and moods. If I was asked, “Why are you angry?” I would angrily reply, “Who's angry?” We're often not aware that we're angry, particularly with the more subtle forms of anger such as impatience, irritability, and passive aggression.

Sometimes we may feel that something is off but still not see clearly what is going on. In order to recognize where we are caught, we can ask the practice question “What's actually going on right now?” We usually don't see the difference between the three components of our experience: first, the
objective situation;
second, our
emotional reaction
to that situation; and third, the
behaviors
that arise from our reaction. Usually these three components seem to blend into an indistinguishable whole without
much clarity. For example, let's say we're waiting in a traffic jam and getting very hot under the collar. What is actually going on?
Objectively,
the main thing going on is that we're sitting in a car. We add the
emotional reaction
of impatience, and then out of that we may find ourselves indulging the
behavior
of slamming the steering wheel or cursing out loud. This example is a simple one, and here we probably know we're angry. Yet even here we may not distinguish between the objective situation, our reaction, and our behavior. In more subtle examples, our anger might not be that obvious. This is why it's helpful, whenever we feel caught or confused, to ask the simple question “What is actually going on right now?”

Asking this question can also help us clarify the subtleties in our own behavior. For example, if we were brought up being taught that it's not okay to be angry, the chances are strong that we'll suppress our feelings. This is true even if we're aware that suppressing feelings is not good for us, either physically or emotionally. A subtle variant of this can sometimes be seen even in established meditators. Such suppression gets justified because of an ideal image of ourselves as someone who is above anger. But whether we bypass our anger in this unskillful way or seek diversions, such as the Internet or overeating, we do not free ourselves from anger by pushing it out of awareness. It continues to imprint on us, festering inside as unhealed pain. Sooner or later it will arise—perhaps as passive aggression, depression, or even an explosion of rage.

The more common behavior that arises from anger is expression. We can express our anger in one of two ways: First, we can express it internally through thinking or ruminating. This is what it means to wallow in anger. Second, we can express it externally through blaming and self-justification. We all know the experience of the forceful determination to be right, to
prevail. Interestingly, whether we suppress our anger or express it, internally or externally, we are rarely in touch with what is actually going on within us. This is why it's so important to start with the step of asking, “What is actually going on right now?”

S
TEP 2
: R
EFRAMING

After recognizing our anger and seeing how it plays out in our behavior, the second step in working with anger is to see the anger as our path. In a way, we're not doing anything other than reframing how we relate to what we're experiencing. Instead of justifying our anger, or seeing it as an obstacle, we understand that the anger is pointing us in the direction of awakening. It is telling us to look inward, to see how anger captures us in a self-protective cocoon. It's also an invitation to look at our expectations and requirements out of which the anger is born. But to see our anger as our path requires a degree of courage—to be willing to feel what's there rather than get pulled back into self-justification and blaming. Reframing how we relate to our anger is like turning our old views right side up; what we once saw as a flaw we now see as an opportunity to go deeper into our life.

S
TEP 3
: C
LARIFYING

In order to abandon blaming and justifying, which are the powerful protective strategies that continue to fuel the anger, it is usually necessary to clarify what we're thinking and believing. Anger is often born out of our beliefs, particularly our expectations. In a way, our expectations are a setup for our angry reactions. For example, if we have the expectation that life should be fair, when we encounter something that seems to us to be unfair, our automatic reaction will be anger. Yet in the moment of
anger we may not even be aware that we have this expectation. This is where thought labeling comes in. Thought labeling allows us to clarify the thoughts and expectations we have on board with a degree of precision. For example, “Having a believed thought this isn't fair.” “Having a believed thought people are stupid.” When we label thoughts in this way, we break our identification with the thoughts as The Truth, and unless we do this, it will be very difficult to practice effectively with anger.

Sometimes our thoughts may lie below the surface of awareness, and it may not be obvious what we're believing. Even after we ask, “What is the most believed thought right now?” we may not get a clear answer. Sometimes asking, “How is it supposed to be?” will point us to exactly where we are stuck in an expectation or entitlement. For example, if we have the belief that people should be trustworthy and do what they say they will do, we are bound to sooner or later experience the anger of disappointment. We may feel totally justified in our anger, but the fact is, regardless of what another person did or didn't do, it's still
our
anger. This doesn't mean there shouldn't be any consequences if people break their word, but it doesn't alter the fact that if we're angry, we need to address it within ourselves.