Healing Anger

Norm Gibson

Using the meditation steps from the First Aid Kit, we can work to heal anger.

Imagine in another lifetime you are a native warrior keeping watch as you paddle your canoe along the shore of your village. It’s getting dark as the sun sets, but then you suddenly hear something whizzing towards you. An arrow pierces your shoulder – the pain flashes up and down your body.

In the dark you can barely make out the silhouette of a canoe advancing toward you. You stand up bleeding, raise your bow and scream “Damn your soul!”

The canoe bumps right into yours with a dull thud. Empty. There’s nobody in it. Stunned, you turn to your wound and begin to tend to it. You head back to the village, letting go of the anger in your mind, your anger at an empty canoe.

We are angry at our own ideas about things, not at what they really are. When we are caught in anger, we find ourselves talking about our story, our version of the situation, over and over again. We may not realize that we are just fanning the flames, using anger to create more anger.

We can train the mind to work with anger in the most basic way. We can drop the story line, the words we repeat to ourselves, and connect with the bodily sensations which are under the words. There is a raw energy that arises in the body when we’re angry, beyond words. Connect with it. Breathe and stay present with it. Tend to the wound, so it can heal.

Thich Nhat Hanh describes anger as a crying baby that needs our attention. We must neither suppress its crying nor aggravate it. We attend to its needs. We are curious “Are you hungry? Tired or wet?” “Okay, there now. I am here. I will take care of you.”

Likewise, if you are pierced by an arrow, you don’t stand there shaking your fist. You gently remove it and take care of the wound. The alternative is to keep the chain reaction of violence going, and spend the rest of your life focusing on the offending party.

Revenge may feel good at first, until the cycle of emptiness and misery sets in. When we turn towards our pain – the wound or the crying baby – something new can happen. “If you feel it, you can heal it,” wrote Bruce Fisher.

Opening to your pain means opening towards yourself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 2:52 pmand is filed under Positive Anger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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