Manage Anger Through Meditation
How Breathing Meditation Can Help in Controlling Our Anger
Learning to do simple Buddhist breathing meditation is a great way to help reduce anger and eliminate other negative emotions in your life
Simple breathing meditations have a wide variety of benefits. The more you do them, the more benefits you will find. As you continue to practice breathing meditations, you will soon begin to feel your thoughts forming in your mind and can watch them. You will begin to realize that there are three kinds of thoughts that can arise; positive, negative and neutral.
Learning how thoughts form in our minds
As one becomes more comfortable with breathing meditation, one can recognize the pattern of how thoughts form. They actually have a lifecycle like other living things. They arise, remain a while and then dissolve.
It is as a thought first arises that you have control over how you will deal with it. If it is a pleasant thought, you may choose to have it remain in your mind and under the influence of that thought, you are happy for a time - until the next thought shows up.
How to recognize our negative thoughts
Negative thoughts logically produce negative emotions. Probably the most common of these and the easiest to recognize is anger. It is also the most destructive. Buddhists believe that one angry action destroys many good deeds. Anger comes in many shapes and sizes; irritations, frustrations, impatience, annoyance and full blown violent rage.
It seems to our untrained mind that anger arises quickly and without control. How often have you said or felt that when something made you angry you just couldn’t help yourself. Your anger and the negative actions surrounding it came upon you before you knew it, often with very unpleasant results. But you couldn’t help it, right? You had no choice. Someone or something made you angry.
As you practice breathing meditation you realize it is the negative thoughts that come into your mind are the cause of your anger. As a result of doing breathing meditation, you become aware of how thoughts form and as anger arises in your mind, with a little practice, you now realize you have a choice.
How to deal with our angry thoughts before they turn to actions
Now, as the angry thought begins to form, you recognize it and can choose to grasp on to the anger and let it manifest or you can choose not to grasp on to the anger and let it pass away as if it were a cloud simply disappearing back into a bright blue sky.
What a liberating feeling to be able to have control over anger; and not by stuffing, suppressing or burying it deep inside where it molders and festers, but simply by not grasping on to the thought that produces the angry action.
Because we have been so angry for so many years (or lifetimes as the Buddhists believe) it will not be possible to eliminate anger from your life by next week. (As a matter of fact, the Buddhists have a way of doing these practices that puts no guilt on them if they repeatedly try something and fail. They say ‘abandon all hope for results’) The results will come in their own time as long as your intentions and effort are honest.
As long as one practices recognizing unwanted anger when it begins to arise in the mind and then simply chooses to let it go, a few months from now, you’ll be able to look back at situations that used to make you crazy, angry, frustrated and so forth and smile to yourself, knowing that anger no longer has control over you. You have control over it. And in the process, you have brought happiness and peace to your life and those of others around you.
In his book titled Anger, Buddhist monk and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Thich Nhat Hanh says;
Recognize first that main cause of your suffering is the seed of anger in you, and that the other person is only a second cause.
The excerpt above came from page 77 of the book “Anger – Wisdom for Cooling the Flames” by Thich Nhat Hanh; Copyright 2001 - published by The Berkeley Publishing Group – a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.
