“Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames” by Thich Nhat Hanh
What is anger?
Anger is a sign that someone is suffering, from whatever causes. We can tell that a person suffers deeply from the way they speak that are full of bitterness, always ready to complain, and blame others for their problems.
Anger is a manifestation of our physical condition. Modern medicine is now aware that sickness of the mind may be a result of sickness in our bodies, and vice versa. Mind and body are not 2 separate entities, they are one.
Anger is in our food, where the food that we consume can play a very important role in our anger. When we eat the flesh of an animal with mad cow disease, madness and anger are there in the meat. When we eat an angry and unhappy chicken, we are eating anger.
Anger is also in the over-eating. Over-eating can create difficulties for our digestive system that cause pain and anger, it can produce too much energy that if we cannot handle this energy it can become the energy of sex, violence and indeed anger. When we eat well, we can eat less.
Anger is in our consumption in other senses. What we view on television, what we read in newspaper and magazines, what we consume on social media, and even conversations can also be toxic as it may contain anger and frustration. In one hour of conversation, the other person’s words may be toxic and ingest a lot of anger, which we will express later on.
And of course, anger is an overall negative energy that are trapped inside us.
So, how to treat anger? By focusing on the right thing. As Thich Nhat Hanh remarks, “If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. If you run after the person you suspect has burned your house, your house will burn down while you are chasing him or her. That is not wise. You must go back and put out the fire. So when you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while everything goes up in flames.”
So, how to put out the fire? First and foremost, what not to do: don’t settle for a temporary solution. The roots of anger lie in ignorance, wrong perceptions, lack of understanding and lack of compassion. When we vent our anger, we simply open the energy that is feeding our anger. The root-cause of anger is still there, and by expressing the anger by venting we are strengthening the roots of anger in ourselves.
And so instead, the key step to contain the fire of anger is to go back to mindfulness.
How to treat anger: breathe. Anger is like a baby in a tantrum, crying and suffering. The baby needs his mother to come and calm him down. We are the mother for our baby, our anger. The moment we begin to breathe mindfully in and out, we have the energy of a mother ready to embrace the baby and the baby will feel relief right away.
How to treat anger: embrace it and fix the source. The Buddha never advised us to suppress our anger, and instead he taught us to take a good care of it. Just like when something is physically wrong with our stomach or body we have to take care of them, do some massage, use a hot-water bottle, etc. And like our organs, our anger is part of who we are, and we should acknowledge its pain, threat it carefully, and fix its wound.
How to treat anger: tell it to them nicely, and don’t keep it to yourself. We should not keep our anger and suffer silently ourselves for more than 24-hours. Otherwise it can becomes too much and poison us. So we have to tell the source of our anger about our suffering. 24-hours is the deadline.
How to treat anger: seek understanding. When we understand the situation that the other person is in and the nature of their suffering, anger could vanish because it will transform into compassion.
How to treat anger: focus on the positive seeds. Anger is within us in a form of seed, so do love and compassion. In our minds there are many negative and positive seeds. The key is to avoid watering (i.e. putting attention to) the negative seeds and to cultivate the positive seeds everyday.
How to treat anger: listen (or being heard) deeply. When firemen come to put out a fire, they have to have the proper equipments such as water, ladder, and clothing to protect them from the fire. They have to have the skill to protect themselves while surrounded by the fire. When we listen deeply to someone who suffer, we step into a zone of fire. It is the fire of suffering and burning anger, and if we are not equipped we might become a victim of the fire in other person. This is why we need the proper equipment, which is compassion.
How to treat anger: Recycle the energy into something good. An organic gardener does not throw away the garbage, because she can use it after she transformed it into compost, and the compost turn into flowers, lettuce, cucumber, and radishes again. Anger and love are both organic in nature, so that means they both can change.
How to curb anger: give them present. When nothing else seems to work, the Buddha proposes that we give the other person a present. Because, when we’re angry with someone, we want to hurt her. But giving a present changes that feeling into wanting to make her happy.
All in all, this is another excellent book by Thich Nhat Hanh. In his signature style of short but weighted words he breaks down the elements of anger, and produce simple but powerful solutions to treat them. And indeed, sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ones. I would recommend this book to anyone struggling with anger.
THE CHAOS THEORY 