Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (8 page)

Then what we need to do is stop following our particular strategy of behavior. Whether it’s to blame the other person, to justify our own stuff, to suppress, to wallow—whatever its flavor—we refrain from following that strategy. This is not to simply modify our behavior, to make us act like a “better” person. It’s so we can then experience the actual emotional reaction that we’re feeling. But to practice in this way requires the willingness to just be with our experience, even when it’s painful.

In this case, suppose the man is experiencing some form of anger. If he really can stay with this experience of anger—hearing the believed thoughts and feeling the sensations of the emotion in his body—it’s likely the anger will subside. Another emotion may emerge as he takes the elevator ride deeper into his being; perhaps the emotion of hurt will arise from a layer underneath the anger. Then, staying with that, he might be able to go further down to some deeper layer where he feels grief, a sense of sadness and loss. Staying with that, perhaps he will be able to go even further, touching in with the feeling of the fear that underlies so much of our emotional experience.

It takes repeated efforts to stay with and experience our reactions in this way. But if we do it, practicing like this will eventually take us back to the original “hole,” whatever it is: feeling separate, abandoned, utterly hopeless, full of fear and dread. Only by uncovering and entering this dreaded part of ourselves can we see through the artificial construct of our substitute life and ultimately reconnect with awareness of our basic wholeness.

Are we willing to move out of the fantasy world in which we see practice as some vague and romantic union with silence? Are we willing to do the painful work of looking at what we do, how we react, how we follow mechanical strategies that lead us to close off, shut down, lash out? Once we can clearly articulate our core decisions and basic strategies, the next stage—residing in the hole that these decisions were meant to protect us from—becomes more straightforward and less dramatic. We can see through and experience our “suffering,” not as high drama but as just our “stuff”—the energy of deeply believed thoughts and deeply held bodily sensations. Our life then becomes more workable as we discover that what we thought was the deepest, most negative truth about us is not really as solid as we believed.

We can come to see—
to experience
—that we are not broken, that we were never broken, and that we don’t need to be fixed. This is the essence of the practice life: continuing to see through the crippling boundaries that we ourselves maintain with our blind belief in the solid reality of our substitute life.

8

Practicing with Anger

T
HE PRACTICE LIFE
is about learning to live from our true openhearted nature. We have to learn to practice with this big picture in mind, observing what gets in the way of our basic connectedness. What separates us from our open heart? What shuts life out?

Often we lose sight of the bigger picture. The point of practice is not to feel better but to learn and to see. We need to see into our own system, how we leak energy through our habitual reactions and strategies. We have to learn how to stop these leaks, so as not to find ourselves continuously depleted as we deal with daily life.

For example, when we are caught in anger, we are always cutting ourselves off from the bigger picture and from a sense of our basic connectedness. If we could see our angry emotional reactions clearly, it would become obvious that they deplete us and narrow our life. We would see how they are aversions to life, how they separate us and keep us closed.

Yet, in spite of the fact that we hurt ourselves and others with our anger, we hold on to this restricting emotion with a puzzling tenacity. Even as we continue to inflict pain by leaking our energy through angry emotional reactions, even as we narrow our life to one of petty self-centeredness, we continue to indulge in angry thoughts and behaviors with a stubbornness that defies common sense.

What is anger really about? When life is not the way we want
it, we react. If we have expectations, we expect them to be met. If we have requirements, we require them to be met. If we have strong desires, we will not be satisfied unless they are fulfilled. Though life is neutral, with no bias toward fitting our pictures of how it should be, we continue to believe that life should go the way we want. And when it doesn’t, the result is often anger, in one form or another.

I’m not talking only about big explosions of anger. Even on mellow days, we leak energy through anger, in subtle ways, from morning to night. We can be angry in the form of impatience if we have to wait in traffic at a red light. We can be angry in the form of irritability if our television remote stops working. We can be angry in the form of self-righteousness if someone arrives late. We can be angry in the form of frustration if our team loses. We can be angry in the form of indignation if we feel we are ignored or not appreciated.

Most of the time we don’t even see how we leak away energy through anger, how we narrow our life, or how we perpetuate our suffering through our attachment to life’s going a particular way. Most of the time we simply follow one of the two characteristic ways we have been taught to deal with anger when it arises.

First, if our conditioning tells us that it’s not OK to be angry, we will suppress our feelings. Even when we know this approach is not good for our physical or emotional health, if the conditioning is strong, we will still tend to stuff our anger. Interestingly we continue to do this even in spiritual practice. It is not uncommon for meditators to unskillfully suppress their anger in an attempt to fulfill some ideal picture of how they’re supposed to be. But whether we use meditative bypass or other diversions such as food or television, pushing our anger out of awareness does not free us from it. It continues to imprint on us, festering inside as unhealed pain. Whether it visits us as disease, depression, passive aggression, or an explosion of rage, sooner or later it will arise.

The second, more common, way of dealing with anger is to express it. We express it internally through ruminating or wallowing; we express it externally through blame. The point is that our expression always entails
believing
in our reaction, with all the consequent self-justification. We have a forceful determination to be right and to prevail, even if only in our own mind.

Whether we suppress or express our anger, in neither case do we ever clarify it, nor do we really
experience
it. Even when we’re caught up in expressing anger, we’re rarely in touch with its energy. We’re so lost in the juiciness of believing our thoughts and in blaming that we don’t experience the anger. In fact, one of anger’s functions seems to be that it allows us to avoid facing what’s really happening. What are we avoiding? We could be avoiding the more painful emotions of hurt or grief. We could be avoiding facing the core fears that almost always underlie our anger. It’s so much easier to be angry—especially when the juices are flowing—than it is to experience hurt or grief or fear. No wonder we spend so much time indulging our anger! But even when we feel the power and juiciness of being angry, of being right, we are still shutting life out and closing our hearts.

How do we practice with anger? First, of course, we have to realize that the very occurrence of anger is our path. Anger arising is a signal for us to point the arrow of our attention inward. It’s an opportunity for us to see the ways we keep ourselves enclosed in the protective reactive shell out of which anger is born. It’s a cue for us to look at the ways we’re wanting life to meet our expectations, requirements, and desires. In order to clarify these pictures, we have to look inside, without self-justification and blame. And we need to do this with unrelenting honesty and precision.

There is a particular practice relating to anger: “Do not express negative emotions.” This instruction often causes reaction and confusion. It might seem like just another moral dictate,
another way of suppressing feelings we judge to be bad. It’s important to understand that the nonexpression of negative emotions is very different from suppression. When we suppress, we don’t feel. In fact, even when we physically or verbally express negative emotions such as anger, we rarely experience what we feel. But when we practice not expressing our anger, we can actually
experience
it. Experiencing is about feeling and clarifying the emotional reactivity.

The practice of nonexpression is, in part, a way to avoid creating harm in the world, one of the basic tenets of the practice life. Yet even if expressing causes no harm—for example, we might beat a pillow—it still avoids real experiencing.

In order to experience, we have to abandon blaming and justifying, the powerful protective strategies that prevent us from feeling the pain beneath the anger. This is where thought-labeling comes in. It’s difficult work and it takes precision, but even when we’re feeling anger, we can do this practice. For example, “Having a believed thought that he’s so inconsiderate.” “Having a believed thought that no one should have to put up with this.” “Having a believed thought that this isn’t fair.” “Having a believed thought that this isn’t right.” Until we can label thoughts in this way, thereby breaking the intense identification with our thinking, it will be very difficult to practice clearly with anger.

The second benefit of nonexpression is that we learn to reside directly,
quietly
in the “what” of the emotion. It’s not some vague “I’m in touch with anger,” or “I’m feeling angry.”
Angry
is just a five-letter word; it’s a concept. To really feel anger is not vague—it is very specific. So we ask, “What
is
this?” The answer is not analytical, theoretical, or historical. It’s the physical “what” of our experience. We can reside in the emotion—really feel it—sensation by sensation. Tightness? Where? What does it feel like? Heat? Pulsing? Pressure? Our awareness flickers back and forth, absorbing more and more information, until the felt-sense of the witness becomes operative
. With witness awareness we experience a bigger container, an increased spaciousness, a stillness within which to feel the emotion.

This is the essence of how to practice with anger: First, we become aware of it, remembering it as our path. Second, we refrain from our strategies—of suppression, or self-justification and blame. Third, we clearly see our believed thoughts and label them. And fourth, we experience the anger itself, directly in the body. When we let ourselves experience it, the anger may peak and transform; we may feel a release from the constriction of believing that this emotion is “me.” Then we may be able to access deeper layers—of hurt, grief, fear—each stage requiring this same
experiential
process. Our willingness to be with an emotion in this way allows us to stop identifying with it. We see that who we really are is much bigger than the little “me” that we want to believe in.

It’s necessary to acknowledge that we often love our anger, even when it makes our life miserable. We often mistake the feeling of power that accompanies our anger as being somehow authentic and self-validating. This is the so-called ego at its work of perpetuating the self-centered dream.

One of the main difficulties in working with anger is that often it arises suddenly or right in the middle of messy and complex circumstances that aren’t conducive to a focused attention on the emotion itself. Perhaps the best we can do is to just watch ourselves go through our familiar angry response. Or perhaps we have experienced the same old pain enough to know at least to keep our mouth shut, to refrain from causing further harm. This in itself could be a big step forward.

We have to understand that it’s not bad to feel anger; anger is simply our conditioned response to life when it doesn’t match our pictures. We only make matters worse by adding to the anger self-judgment and self-hatred, both of which are rooted in
more
pictures of how we, or life,
should
be. Instead, we can
bring loving-kindness—the essence of which is nonjudgment—to our practice, lightening the heaviness and self-importance of our own drama.

To practice with anger, we have to be willing to work with it, not as the enemy, not as the ancient burden of “my suffering,” but as just the stuff of our conditioned life. When we see this clearly, we also see that not visiting our anger on others is a very big step in learning to clarify it. Learning to keep our mouth shut when we would otherwise vent is no small task. This is not to suppress, but to put our potentially harmful behavior on hold for the time being.

Then, as time allows, we can revisit what actually happened. When we next sit down to meditate, we can
re-create the upset
in our mind. We all do this anyway when we wallow and selfjustify, but I’m talking about doing it as practice, intentionally and with awareness. When we deliberately re-create an upset, we remember what actually happened—where we were, what was said, how we felt. If it’s difficult to access the same emotional punch, we can exaggerate the circumstances simply to reconnect with the original feelings. The point is to experience the anger (or any emotion) within a practice environment. Even if we can’t re-create the exact emotional reaction, we can still work with it in a way that would not have been possible in the confusion and speed of the original episode.

One helpful tool that I learned from Joko is to break down the re-created emotional experience into three components: the objective situation, the emotion itself, and the behavioral strategy that followed the emotional reaction. This helps bring clarity to the process.

For example, your mate or coworker criticizes you, and before you know it, you’re in an angry exchange. Later, when you re-create this experience, you first ask yourself, “What was the objective situation? What actually happened?” Often all that happened is that words were spoken, or even more objectively, sounds connected with the tympanic membrane in your
ear. The words themselves had no emotional load. You grafted the emotional reaction onto the objective events. Once you see this, you can then look at the second component: the emotional reaction itself. What specific emotion or emotions did you feel? Be as precise and honest as you can in identifying your feelings; often we don’t even know what they are. Then move to the third component, the behavioral strategy. What was your strategy—to comply, to attack, to withdraw? Though the strategy is not the same as the reaction, they are often connected in the same predictable pattern.