How to Deal With Anger
http://www.articlesonmartialarts.com/articles/65/1/How-to-Deal-With-Anger/Page1.html
Robert Morgen
Robert Morgen is a Reiki Master who holds a Black Belt in Hoshinjutsu and a Brown Belt in Combat Hapkido. He’s founder of the Mystic Village Online Community at http://www.mysticvillage.org
He writes a regular column on subtle (or internal) energy for Fight Times Magazine and a column on Kundalini Awakening at Kundalini Awakening Magazine. He’s the author of 3 books and 4 CDs on meditation and energy work.
He’s a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids as well as the International Bujinkan Dojo Association, Canemasters International and the International Combat Hapkido Federation.
You can learn more about his books, Kundalini and Martial Arts Seminars and free events and newsletters at his website.
His new book “Easy Meditation for Martial Artists” (ISBN: 0-9773801-3-0) is also now available.
By Robert Morgen
Published on 12/13/2006
By: Robert Morgen
"When you are offended at any man's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger."
Epictetus
As humans we have to deal with anger on a fairly constant basis. Some of us tend to be a little quicker to anger than others, but in general anger is one of the daily trials that we all have to work towards overcoming.
"When you are offended at any man's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger."
Epictetus
As humans we have to deal with anger on a fairly constant basis. Some of us tend to be a little quicker to anger than others, but in general anger is one of the daily trials that we all have to work towards overcoming.
Dealing with Anger
By: Robert Morgen
"When you are offended at any man's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger."
Epictetus
As humans we have to deal with anger on a fairly constant basis. Some of us tend to be a little quicker to anger than others, but in general anger is one of the daily trials that we all have to work towards overcoming.
Dealing with anger brings us to some of the core principles of Kundalini Awakening, namely awareness. It’s very easy to become stressed and then lose our tempers. It’s incredibly hard at first to deal with some of the unfairness of life without getting angry and upset, but that’s exactly what you have to learn to do. This was (and still is) a very long journey for me and I’m still being tested fairly regularly with no reason to believe that the tests will ever stop.
For example, I was recently filling out my financial aid paperwork to go back to college and take some classes. In the process I discovered that the IRS had apparently lost every one of my tax returns since 1999. Only a few months ago this would have sent me into a rage (and a righteous one too!) yet this time I tried to remember that I was supposed to be handling this properly. During the entire ordeal (about 20 hours worth of phone calls, wrong instructions and outright ineptitude from the bureaucracy), I tried to remember to make things as pleasant as possible for the person on the other end of the conversation. While I probably could have handled it better, I still showed a marked improvement over how things would have been even a few years ago.
Like any other real change in our lives, dealing with anger is an incremental process. It’s all about winning the little victory right now rather than worrying about winning the war on anger. As humans we’ll probably never eradicate anger, but we can develop better strategies for dealing with it.
Identifying the causes
Here are a couple of examples of things that make me angry. We all have a list like this, and my advice here is to actually write it out and then write out the solutions for it.
Cause #1 - I’ve found that I’m most likely to get angry when I feel like I’m running late or short of time. Solution – If it turns out that I’m running out of time, for whatever reason, I try to call ahead and make other arrangements for my appointments. While this necessity can still make me unhappy, it’s at least a positive step and keeps me from being any ruder than I can help to the people waiting on me.
Cause #2 – I have a very low Stupidity Tolerance. I find incompetence and ineptitude to be one of the most amazingly rude things imaginable and a symbol of a business owner’s lack of respect for their customers.
Solution – Lighten up, Old Man! We’ve all been new on the job or thrown out to the wolves without proper training. Take a minute and try to view things from the stupid-ees point of view and it may turn out that the situation isn’t really anyone’s ‘fault’. Try to see the humor in it and see if it can all be turned into a joke.
Another tactic that I use in general and that I have pretty good results with is to view everything as a test. This works well for my personality type and may not work at all for others, but give this a try and see. Try the ‘Sacred Space’ test and let me know how it works for you.
To do the “Sacred Space’ test first you have to understand that you can’t change the world, but you can change the area directly around you, your bubble of influence.
With that in mind the test is to always have a bubble of happy sacred space around you, no matter what’s going on. As your awareness increases you may find this easier to do. You are a living, breathing sacred space generator and everyone who comes in contact with you enters your area of sacred space and therefore should pass out the other side of it feeling better than when they went in to it.
The challenge with this is to feel that way about everyone, no matter how they’ve treated you, or how stupid, rude inept or downright mean they act. We all have the ability to be total jerks. Just as we’ve accidentally shown our bad sides to others, then others will show their bad sides to us. It’s entirely possible that the one bad moment you witness from your adversary may be the only bad moment that person has ever shown. Judging them as a perpetual jerk may be as utterly unfair as the times when others judged you as a perpetual asshole.
When you bring the jerk into your bubble of sacred space then your goal at that point is to make their day better. Get beyond your own ego and the attitudes of “How dare they treat ME that way” and see if you can help break them out of their bad mood. Look at it like a game. Have fun with it.
Does this always work? Of course not. Sometimes the other person is still going to be a jerk, and sometimes in the case of a potentially violent situation this tactic may still not be enough to avoid the confrontation. As I often point out in my martial arts classes “You may still find it necessary to bend, fold and spindle an attacker, but at least this method keeps you from doing it in anger or hatred”.
Another thing to remember about anger is that the usual response to it is more anger. What’s the first thing that you feel when someone becomes angry with you? If you’re like most of us then you also begin to get angry. It develops into a circle and keeps growing until it either spills over or sanity prevails.
The thing to remember with anger is that it’s just like love. Someone can give you all of it that they want to, but it’s up to you to accept it. Like the old example the monks use; if someone offers you a cup of tea and you refuse it then whose tea is it? It still belongs to them. If someone offers you anger and you refuse it then whose anger is it?
The next time you feel yourself becoming angry try this:
Begin your belly breathing drawing your breath deep into your hara. Let your muscles relax and let any tension flow out and down into the earth. As you inhale feel the earth energy flow up into you until it fills your entire body. On your exhales continue to let stress and tension flow out.
Begin drawing chi in through your liver. Don’t worry if you don’t know where your liver is, just open up and intend for the energy to flow into it and you’ll eventually be able to actually feel your liver as you do this. Experiment and play with this. If your concentration is good then if nothing else it may take your mind off whatever you’re angry about.
Remember that the Law of Reciprocity applies here also so if you send out anger then you’ll receive anger in return.
Forgiveness
Of course, since none of us are perfect it’s important to remember about forgiveness. When someone ticks you off the first thing to remember once you cool down is to forgive them for whatever they did to make you angry. This is extremely important because until you do this then you’re still carrying the seeds of that anger around with you. Take a moment to forgive them for whatever moronic, utterly imbecilic action they committed, and then forget about it.
Of course, you also have to remember to forgive yourself. Most of us get just as annoyed with ourselves for losing control and giving in to the anger as we do at the person who inspired it. This is just one more area where keeping a positive attitude can be helpful.
Take a moment to critique the incident without assigning blame to either party. Look at the lessons learned and see what you could have done better and then forgive everyone involved and get on with your life.
Righteous anger
Of course, looking at the world today it makes you think that there are times when we should be angry. Human Rights abuses, starvation, injustice, etc. When you start getting mad about those things where do you stop? It might sound perfectly reasonable if you say “I’m only going to be righteously angry about the worst injustices and then stamp them out”. If you’re amazingly effective (more so than anyone has ever been) then you’ll single handedly make the world a better place. However, you’ll reach a point where you’ve cleaned up the entire planet and you begin to vent your righteous anger on some guy who spits on the sidewalk because that’s the worst thing that’s left.
Of course no matter how angry you get you can never stamp out injustice or abuse. Those things are part of our basic nature and you can’t be angry about our basic nature, you can only accept it. Once you accept it then you can get beyond it.
Even righteous anger is subject to the Law of Reciprocity also. You may feel justified at being angry at the person who screwed up, but we all screw up occasionally. Personally I’d prefer to give compassion rather than anger (and I eventually hope to get good at it). When you react out of compassion then at least you don’t have to worry about anger degenerating into hate.
© 2006 Robert Morgen. This article may be used by anyone, anywhere as long as the author’s bio and links are included.
---
“Dealing with anger” is an excerpt from Robert Morgen’s new book “Easy Meditation for Martial Artists” (ISBN: 978-0-9773801-3-8 )
"When you are offended at any man's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger."
Epictetus
As humans we have to deal with anger on a fairly constant basis. Some of us tend to be a little quicker to anger than others, but in general anger is one of the daily trials that we all have to work towards overcoming.
Dealing with anger brings us to some of the core principles of Kundalini Awakening, namely awareness. It’s very easy to become stressed and then lose our tempers. It’s incredibly hard at first to deal with some of the unfairness of life without getting angry and upset, but that’s exactly what you have to learn to do. This was (and still is) a very long journey for me and I’m still being tested fairly regularly with no reason to believe that the tests will ever stop.
For example, I was recently filling out my financial aid paperwork to go back to college and take some classes. In the process I discovered that the IRS had apparently lost every one of my tax returns since 1999. Only a few months ago this would have sent me into a rage (and a righteous one too!) yet this time I tried to remember that I was supposed to be handling this properly. During the entire ordeal (about 20 hours worth of phone calls, wrong instructions and outright ineptitude from the bureaucracy), I tried to remember to make things as pleasant as possible for the person on the other end of the conversation. While I probably could have handled it better, I still showed a marked improvement over how things would have been even a few years ago.
Like any other real change in our lives, dealing with anger is an incremental process. It’s all about winning the little victory right now rather than worrying about winning the war on anger. As humans we’ll probably never eradicate anger, but we can develop better strategies for dealing with it.
Identifying the causes
Here are a couple of examples of things that make me angry. We all have a list like this, and my advice here is to actually write it out and then write out the solutions for it.
Cause #1 - I’ve found that I’m most likely to get angry when I feel like I’m running late or short of time. Solution – If it turns out that I’m running out of time, for whatever reason, I try to call ahead and make other arrangements for my appointments. While this necessity can still make me unhappy, it’s at least a positive step and keeps me from being any ruder than I can help to the people waiting on me.
Cause #2 – I have a very low Stupidity Tolerance. I find incompetence and ineptitude to be one of the most amazingly rude things imaginable and a symbol of a business owner’s lack of respect for their customers.
Solution – Lighten up, Old Man! We’ve all been new on the job or thrown out to the wolves without proper training. Take a minute and try to view things from the stupid-ees point of view and it may turn out that the situation isn’t really anyone’s ‘fault’. Try to see the humor in it and see if it can all be turned into a joke.
Another tactic that I use in general and that I have pretty good results with is to view everything as a test. This works well for my personality type and may not work at all for others, but give this a try and see. Try the ‘Sacred Space’ test and let me know how it works for you.
To do the “Sacred Space’ test first you have to understand that you can’t change the world, but you can change the area directly around you, your bubble of influence.
With that in mind the test is to always have a bubble of happy sacred space around you, no matter what’s going on. As your awareness increases you may find this easier to do. You are a living, breathing sacred space generator and everyone who comes in contact with you enters your area of sacred space and therefore should pass out the other side of it feeling better than when they went in to it.
The challenge with this is to feel that way about everyone, no matter how they’ve treated you, or how stupid, rude inept or downright mean they act. We all have the ability to be total jerks. Just as we’ve accidentally shown our bad sides to others, then others will show their bad sides to us. It’s entirely possible that the one bad moment you witness from your adversary may be the only bad moment that person has ever shown. Judging them as a perpetual jerk may be as utterly unfair as the times when others judged you as a perpetual asshole.
When you bring the jerk into your bubble of sacred space then your goal at that point is to make their day better. Get beyond your own ego and the attitudes of “How dare they treat ME that way” and see if you can help break them out of their bad mood. Look at it like a game. Have fun with it.
Does this always work? Of course not. Sometimes the other person is still going to be a jerk, and sometimes in the case of a potentially violent situation this tactic may still not be enough to avoid the confrontation. As I often point out in my martial arts classes “You may still find it necessary to bend, fold and spindle an attacker, but at least this method keeps you from doing it in anger or hatred”.
Another thing to remember about anger is that the usual response to it is more anger. What’s the first thing that you feel when someone becomes angry with you? If you’re like most of us then you also begin to get angry. It develops into a circle and keeps growing until it either spills over or sanity prevails.
The thing to remember with anger is that it’s just like love. Someone can give you all of it that they want to, but it’s up to you to accept it. Like the old example the monks use; if someone offers you a cup of tea and you refuse it then whose tea is it? It still belongs to them. If someone offers you anger and you refuse it then whose anger is it?
The next time you feel yourself becoming angry try this:
Begin your belly breathing drawing your breath deep into your hara. Let your muscles relax and let any tension flow out and down into the earth. As you inhale feel the earth energy flow up into you until it fills your entire body. On your exhales continue to let stress and tension flow out.
Begin drawing chi in through your liver. Don’t worry if you don’t know where your liver is, just open up and intend for the energy to flow into it and you’ll eventually be able to actually feel your liver as you do this. Experiment and play with this. If your concentration is good then if nothing else it may take your mind off whatever you’re angry about.
Remember that the Law of Reciprocity applies here also so if you send out anger then you’ll receive anger in return.
Forgiveness
Of course, since none of us are perfect it’s important to remember about forgiveness. When someone ticks you off the first thing to remember once you cool down is to forgive them for whatever they did to make you angry. This is extremely important because until you do this then you’re still carrying the seeds of that anger around with you. Take a moment to forgive them for whatever moronic, utterly imbecilic action they committed, and then forget about it.
Of course, you also have to remember to forgive yourself. Most of us get just as annoyed with ourselves for losing control and giving in to the anger as we do at the person who inspired it. This is just one more area where keeping a positive attitude can be helpful.
Take a moment to critique the incident without assigning blame to either party. Look at the lessons learned and see what you could have done better and then forgive everyone involved and get on with your life.
Righteous anger
Of course, looking at the world today it makes you think that there are times when we should be angry. Human Rights abuses, starvation, injustice, etc. When you start getting mad about those things where do you stop? It might sound perfectly reasonable if you say “I’m only going to be righteously angry about the worst injustices and then stamp them out”. If you’re amazingly effective (more so than anyone has ever been) then you’ll single handedly make the world a better place. However, you’ll reach a point where you’ve cleaned up the entire planet and you begin to vent your righteous anger on some guy who spits on the sidewalk because that’s the worst thing that’s left.
Of course no matter how angry you get you can never stamp out injustice or abuse. Those things are part of our basic nature and you can’t be angry about our basic nature, you can only accept it. Once you accept it then you can get beyond it.
Even righteous anger is subject to the Law of Reciprocity also. You may feel justified at being angry at the person who screwed up, but we all screw up occasionally. Personally I’d prefer to give compassion rather than anger (and I eventually hope to get good at it). When you react out of compassion then at least you don’t have to worry about anger degenerating into hate.
© 2006 Robert Morgen. This article may be used by anyone, anywhere as long as the author’s bio and links are included.
---
“Dealing with anger” is an excerpt from Robert Morgen’s new book “Easy Meditation for Martial Artists” (ISBN: 978-0-9773801-3-8 )
Robert Morgen is a Reiki Master who holds a Black Belt in Hoshinjutsu and a Brown Belt in Combat Hapkido. He’s founder of the Mystic Village Online Community at www.mysticvillage.org
He writes a regular column on subtle (or internal) energy for Fight Times Magazine and a column on Kundalini Awakening at Kundalini Awakening Magazine. He’s the author of 3 books and 4 CDs on meditation and energy work.
He’s a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids as well as the International Bujinkan Dojo Association, Canemasters International and the International Combat Hapkido Federation.
You can learn more about his books, Kundalini and Martial Arts Seminars and free events and newsletters at his website at www.mysticwolfpress.com
" Robert Morgen’s Easy Meditation CD Set" (ISBN 0-9773801-6-5) is available at amazon.com, retail outlets around the country and directly from the publishers website.