Anger is a misunderstood emotion. Anger is not even a state, it is a response. Anger is no neither good or bad. It is as mechanic as the fact that water freezes at below 0 temperatures. Anger is essentially protection. Anger is how we respond to threats. Anger is seated in the solar-plexus area in the body. It is warm, focusing and activating. Anger can be imagined as the walls around a garden. The garden is our inner child, or our natural sensitivity and vulnerability. We are born with this natural responsibility and sensitivity to the world, and throughout our upbringing and conditioning learn to hide and protect it. We protect it when we perceive the world as an unsafe place. It is interestingly enough that the angriest people also are the most vulnerable ones. Great vulnerability requires great protection, similar to how our heart and lungs – our vital organs – are hidden and protected by the fortress of our rib cage.
Yoga does not see what we call personality as the core of the human being. Our personalities, in the yogic context, are a reaction to events in our lives. The personality is like an operating system, or a software. It is a strategy developed by our unconscious minds for operating in the world. There is as such, in yoga, no such thing as an angry person. There are, however, people with malfunctioning operating systems that require updated software.
Anger is developed when the world is perceived as threatening. Intense experiences wherein our boundaries are crossed against our wills, or where our safety is taken away from us will all serve to inform the subconscious mind that the world is a dangerous place wherein martial law is the norm. If we experience that we’re not protected, or that we can be attacked, betrayed and excluded with short notice, the automatic mind has no choice but to develop protective measures that can shield us from these experiences. These protective measures are anger, and “angry people” are essentially people who inhabit an unsafe universe. Anger is also closely linked to arrogance, especially for those who have experienced exclusion, in any way. Arrogance is a habit of the mind wherein we automatically establish distance between ourselves and others. The purpose of this distance is to make sure we cannot be hurt. If people are bad, stupid or selfish, we know what to expect, and we do not have to take the step into faith, sensitivity and openness with them – they will fail us anyway. Arrogance, or a negative, pessimistic view of other people is essentially self-exclusion. It hurts less to establish distance to others oneself, than to be open and vulnerable, and then be met with betrayal. The child that cannot understand why their parents treat them the way they do must in some way develop the ability to see their caregivers as “less” than them in order to make sense of the world.
We should as such strive to meet angry people with patience and compassion. The state of anger is a state of great suffering. It’s incredibly lonely. Anger is a mechanism that protects those who have never been protected. We should actively strive to imagine how we would feel in their situation, rather than seeing them as bad people. Anger is the last resort the subconscious mind has.
When dealing with anger, we are dealing with a process of demilitarization. The antidotes to anger and arrogance are trust and patience. Anger is an habit of the mind. In order to pacify it, it must be replaced by another habit. The underlying, habitual fundament of anger is distrust of the world. This distrust must be mitigated by its opposite: trust. The way to deal with anger is to gradually, in a gentle pace, begin to give the world a chance, to offer other people the opportunity to show themselves as safe and kind, rather than automatically placing them into the enemy-friend axis of the angry mind. Remember that anger is the wall, and the garden is vulnerability. Whenever anger arises, see it as a messenger, as a tool for self-exploration. What part of you felt hurt – what version of you is anger rising up to defend? If we can define that – let’s say that we for example felt unheard, not considered or excluded, we can communicate that rather than unleashing our anger. It is much, much harder to express vulnerability than to hate. Yet, anger creates loneliness. If our anger and arrogance are permitted to function without our attempts to understand and integrate them, the walls of the garden will eventually be so high that no-one can climb them, or see what’s inside. Healing the angry mind is a process whereby we slowly but surely let people glance at the garden inside. Remember that when we are dealing with these patterns of mind, we are dealing with the mind at the level of instinct. We do not tell a scared dog that it doesn’t have anything to worry about. Rather, we show him, day after day, that he will not be beaten, and that he’ll have food everyday. Over time, he will begin to move out of his habituated responses, and learn to trust. When we are dealing with anger, we are teaching our instinctual, reactive selves a different way of being in the world. This part of us must be shown, not told, that the world is not a place of danger. This takes time. In Buddhist philosophy, it is said that patience is the enemy of anger. Dealing with anger, whether it is your own or that of someone else, requires great patience. One has to re-learn how to be in the world, and interact with others – to recondition one’s inner child into a new narrative.
And yes, we will be disappointed. People will by all likelihood hurt, betray, ridicule and exclude us. The only way to avoid these experiences is by erecting unscalable walls around our hearts. What we can do, is at least allow people the chance to prove us wrong, to not let our past become the script for the entire rest of our lives. By trusting people, and believing in the fundamental goodness of the human soul, we are doing the world a great favor. People function at their best when they are met with trust and faith, rather than suspicion. Teach yourself trust, one step at the time. Provide people with the tools they need to be kind. If one struggles with anger, and develops the courage to take the step into the unknown by surrendering to faith rather than distrust, one breaks a karmic chain. Whatever patterns and narratives handed down to us by our ancestors are dissolved like shadows during sunrise. The path away from fear and anger is slow, scary and tedious, but it is an adventure that eventually leads to a world much less scary and lonely than the one we had the misfortune to once experience.
