Cooling the Fire of Anger with Rain

Although humans like to believe that we’re rational cognitive creatures, we're actually fundamentally very emotional creatures. You might expect that we would be good with something that we have had experience with our whole lives. Yet one of the great ironies is that we are really pretty bad at relating to our own emotions, despite all this experience.

Unfortunately the process of socialization requires that we put artificial limits and layers of “should” all over our children’s emotions as they grow, so that by the time we are adults, we have very complex relationships with our emotions. So in this post, I’m going to describe an approach that can help us have a more honest and direct relationship with our emotions.  This is a technique that we can put into place immediately and right at the very moment that we’re having a difficult time with something.

 

It’s very easy for us to get caught up by our emotions, either by getting lost in our conceptions and story about what is going on, or by "amygdala hijack," where our emotions literally rule our behaviors without our having much freedom to direct the action.  Actually, in both of these scenarios we have very little freedom, as both our cognitive and emotional reactions tend to be conditioned by past experiences.  So how can we start opening up a door to let some new air in, or maybe even give us a new path to walk down?

When you first recognize that you are getting triggered or that you’re caught up in a cascade of thoughts, you can do the RAIN technique. 

Recognize – Pause long enough to recognize what you're feeling and label it (it may be more than one thing); Recognize the situation you’re in, the reactions you may be having, your habitual reactions, etc.

Allow - Accept that this is how it is right now, so there’s no reason to try to pretend otherwise. A complex history of causes and conditions have come together to get to this point, and it has momentum.  It is as it is, and fighting it will be wasted energy, so allow it to be for the moment.

Investigate - Investigate what and how you feel your emotional reaction in the body, what it brings up, where it comes from, what it makes you feel like you “should” do to change the situation, etc. What beliefs do you have? Investigate with an intimate and kind intention.  You are not trying to find where you made mistakes, but to understand what you believe you want or need, and how you experience that in your body.

Non-identification - This is the tricky one.  In one sense, it is a natural outgrowth of the first three, but it can also be enhanced with intention. We usually believe our thoughts and feelings are who we are, and that things are really happening to us - we usually take everything very personally. In fact, we are part of a much bigger fabric or things co-emerging. The situation is in constant motion, and we can step back and let things emerge without our feeling an immediate need to have to do something.  The goal is to separate what we are feeling from the sense of it being a personal attack - we are much more than just the bad feeling we're having right now. We are actually much more stable than this momentary feeling of instability. If we can find that point of balance in the middle of the swirl, we can see it for what it is without taking it as a personal attack.

The RAIN approach allows the situation to unfold with a little more space, where the habitual reactions can be slowed down and examined.  It can allow us to find the “gaps” between feeling and craving, and between craving and grasping (to put it in 12 Nidana terms).  There’s a freedom that is found when we discover the space that is available to us at all times, especially when it feels claustrophobic, like you’re about to be overwhelmed, or like you get stuck.


Image sources: Here, here, and here.

The Wisdom of Anger and the Illusion of Freedom

Anger is a funny emotion, because although it often causes us and those around us suffering, we deep down kind of like it.  We like the feeling of power it gives, the sense of righteousness that sometimes accompanies it, and the feeling of control we can get through it. So although we know we suffer because of it, we often don't really want to change our relationship with it.

Although we believe that our experience of reality is like a camera recording perfectly what it sees, our experience of reality is in fact an active creation of our minds.  If we can watch the cause and effect nature of our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, we can become more accurate and more competent creators of our experiences.

Emotions affect thoughts, thoughts affect emotions, both affect behavior, and each thought or feeling helps to give rise to the next one.  Thoughts beget like thoughts, which is why positive or negative self-talk is important, and also part of why the meditative techniques can have powerful effects.

Let’s talk for a bit about the cycle of what normally happens with anger.  You may be going along, minding your own business doing your job, when your boss comes up and says something that really irks you.  This gets an immediate emotional reaction, which begins a cascade of thoughts, which often intensify the emotion, which continue the thoughts, etc.  As noted by neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, any emotional reaction will run its full course physiologically in 90 seconds unless we continue to feed it.  Our attention gets focused, by which I really mean limited. We perseverate on the issue, and even when we try to stop thinking about it and to get some work done, we often find ourselves distracted by rehearsing some aspect of it again which just keeps the feeling going.  How many of you have had this experience?

The Tibetan word for this stuckness of our emotional reactions is shenpa.  It’s not the emotion itself, but the way that our experience of emotion narrows our vision, enhances the feeling of self and other, and captures our attention.  It is related to our past conditioning, in that we tend to have much the same reactions over and over, even to new insults.  

Recall the classic psychological study of conditioned emotions on Little Albert. Although he initially was not scared of small animals, by pairing the sight of a white rat with a loud sound, he learned to fear not only the rat, but other small animals like white and brown rabbits.  It is likely that for the rest of his life he would have had a habitual reaction to any new white rat or small animal.  He will think that his anxiety is "his."  He won’t remember why he has these feelings, just will accept them as if they are truth and that he's always felt this way.  We do this all the time – we have a reaction that is largely controlled by our past conditioning. The funny thing about it is that we believe it is freedom.

One way karma can be defined is it is an acquired loss of free will (thanks to Ethan Nichtern for this definition).  When we are stuck within the cascade of emotional and cognitive reactions, we are almost always thinking and feeling in ways that have we have practiced many times before.  This is why we have the same arguments over and over with our spouses, parents, children.  We are sick of the argument, and yet we don’t seem to ever find a way out.  If someone tells you that you need to stop reacting the same way, you feel outraged that they’re taking away your freedom.  But are you really free?  The only way to truly exercise freedom is to refrain from doing what you want to do long enough to be able to choose thoughtfully, not based on an emotional reaction or on habit energy.

I do not mean, however, to suggest that we shouldn’t be guided by emotions, nor do I mean to suggest that emotions are somehow bad or that we should learn to reduce or eliminate them. Instead, the Vajrayana view of emotions is particularly useful here - we need to see that emotions have co-emergent properties of wisdom and confusion.  These two properties co-emerge almost at once when you feel an emotion.  The trick is to learn to separate them and to act only from the wisdom side.

The wisdom of anger is seeing clearly that something is wrong.  There has been some injustice, or some goal has been frustrated.   Notice that this wisdom doesn’t necessarily say what one should do.  Finding the skillful action to take is entirely dependent on the exact situation at that moment, which is why our habitual reactions are almost never skillful. It may be that the skillful action to take is no action.

If we act on the wisdom component, it should usually help the situation.  If we act on the confusion component, it will often harm the situation or the other person.

How can we tell the difference?  First, we have to learn to refrain from following our usual patterns.  Until we do that, we cannot even begin to see how our actions contribute to the problems. People don’t like talking about refraining, because they incorrectly believe it is taking away their free will when in fact it is the first step on restoring it to them.

Second, we can begin to watch the course of cause and effect.  Why do we feel what we do?  What exactly do we feel? It’s not usually as simple as simple anger – there’s usually hurt, disappointment, a feeling of loss of control, old resentments, etc. that jostle with it.  We can try to trace where some of these feelings and thoughts come from. We can also watch what happens once we think something – how does it affect our feelings and future thoughts.  Finally, we can watch what happens once we do or say something – how does it change the situation for better or for worse?

Third, we need to begin to understand our motivations for taking action.  Unfortunately, most of our motivations are actually hidden to conscious thought.

For example, Wayne Warburton and his colleagues have done a series of interesting studies about why people behave aggressively when made upset. Here's the general (over-simplified) setup:  First I insult you in some way, so that you are angered.  Then you are put in a room alone and told that you will have to endure a really loud and unpleasant noise for about 30 seconds.  Participants are randomized into a no-control or a having-control condition. In the no-control condition, the noise just comes on at some point. In the having-control condition, you have a button you can press to start the noise when you are ready for it.  In both cases everyone hears the same unpleasant noise.  After hearing it, people are given an opportunity to be mean to someone else (such as the person who insulted them). If they were in the no-control condition, they are much more aggressive than if they had been given a small sense of control from getting to push the button to start the noise.  This (among other experiments they conducted) shows that we will behave aggressively partly to regain a sense of control.  

Given that these motivations to restore a sense of control are unconscious, it takes a lot of work and time to begin to notice what is truly motivating our actions. The story we tell about why we do something is almost never accurate, because it’s designed to show you off in the most positive light possible (both to others and to self).

So if this the steps above will take a lot of training, what can we do right away? We can try to notice the feeling tone that goes with our action, because that’s a little more observable to conscious awareness.   If we are acting with an angry feeling, then whatever action we have chosen is almost certainly coming from the confusion side.  Buddha said that hatred is never solved by hatred.  If instead we act out of a feeling of compassion, then the action has much higher likelihood to work from the wisdom side.

Within the Buddhist framework, we build our karma primarily from intentions. So the same action could build positive outcomes and habits or negative outcomes and habits, depending on the intention behind it.

Going back to the example of someone insulting or offending us, we get angry and immediately think of things we would like to say or do in response.  What is our motivation for saying or doing any of them? Although you could spin it in several directions, such as to clarify the others’ mistake, to defend yourself, to get back at him/her, to put the other in his place, to just hit him, etc., they actually have one thing in common – they are motivated by the feeling that they will make you happier if you do it.  So your motivation is driven by a self motivation. This will almost ensure continued or enhanced division.  This is the confusion aspect of the emotion.

What if, instead, we acted from a motivation of compassion?  This is the wisdom aspect of anger – something is wrong, and we have an opportunity to try to help the situation. So consider the anger that might be built up if one lived with an alcoholic. Tara Brach (Radical Acceptance, 2003, pp. 296-297) relates the story of a family setting up an intervention to send a loved one to a treatment program.  

"I worried about how the participants - his wife, two sons and elderly father - were going to manage being 'loving and nonjudgmental' when each one was so furious with him. They were filled with grievances: the sons who couldn't bring friends home from school because their father was such a loose cannon; the wife who had lost a partner she could count on and who treated her with care; the father who never saw his only son. I feared they'd just curse him out, rather than communicate their caring. 

"I was wrong. Harry came into that room and, he later told me, looked around at the faces of those he loved best in the whole world. They were all looking at him, all there for him. Something happened to the air in the room, he said, it seemed to beat like a pulse. After he sank down in a chair, I suggested that Marge, his wife, begin the confrontation. But, instead of reciting his absences, his missed commitments, she just got up and kissed him. 'Thank you for coming, Harry,' she said. Then, to my surprise, each of the others, even the boys, got up and hugged him....When his family did go on to say what needed saying, Harry was listening. Afterward, he took the [space in the treatment facility] that had been saved for him."

Notice that this approach does not try to eradicate anger, but is about learning to use its wisdom and energy in a way that benefits others rather than satisfies the self.

Above I noted that Buddha said that anger and hatred are never solved by hatred. That is only the first part of what he said – he also said what can solve it:

Animosity does not eradicate animosity. Only by loving kindness is animosity dissolved. This law is ancient and eternal.

- The Dhammapada (translation by Ananda Maitreya, 1995, Parallax Press)

So loving kindness is the direct antidote to anger, and it can help to solve the problems that are fostered and nourished by anger. This approach, however, doesn't come naturally to everyone, but it IS something that can be trained in anyone (although it again takes time).  The technique is called metta or loving-kindness meditation (for more details, see HERE or HERE). Practicing this can begin to train us to be guided by and act from the wisdom side of anger, rather than the confusion side. Gaining relief from our habitual feelings and response patterns truly gives us freedom, rather than the illusion of freedom that we usually have.


Image sources: Here, here, and here. This was first published at www.theidproject.org

The Brahmaviharas: Loving-Kindness

The idea of cultivating loving-kindness through meditation is one of the ideas that people generally like. Despite its positive connotations, however, it may be useful to consider the darker side that it combats.

The original Pali word metta can be translated into English in many ways, such as loving-kindness, friendliness, good will, benevolence, fellowship, amity, inoffensiveness, and non-violence. It is a wish for the welfare and happiness of others, without the self-interest that is often subtly underneath our friendly behaviors.

As ideal as this sounds, Buddhist practices are not meant to be theoretical - they are meant to be practical. They are designed to achieve specific goals. The Brahmavihara practices are designed to help us alleviate our suffering, which coincidentally alleviates others' suffering. Metta practice is designed (in part) as an antidote to anger. Why, however, should we care about lessening anger? Culturally, we're told that anger is good (at least for men) - it makes us strong.

The Buddha stated that when you are angry, there are seven things that are gratifying and helpful to your enemy.  The seven, in abbreviated form, are:

1. An enemy wishes for his enemy, Let him be ugly.  Anger makes us ugly.
2. An enemy also wishes, Let him lie in pain.  No enemy relishes your lying in comfort.
3. An enemy wishes, Let him have no prosperity.  When you are ruled by and prey to anger, you mistake good for bad and bad for good.  Thus, mistakes are made that harm you.
4. An enemy wishes, Let him not be rich.  When angry, though you may have built up riches by the strength of your arm, earned by sweat, lawfully gained, yet the king’s treasure gains through fines due to your being prey to anger.
5. An enemy wishes, Let him not be famous.  Yet, when ruled by anger, what fame you may have acquired by diligence is lost through being prey to anger.
6. An enemy wishes, Let him have no friends.  When ruled by anger, the friends you do have, companions, and even relatives will keep away  from (or even be harmed by) your anger
7. An enemy wishes, Let him suffer death and hell afterwards.  When angry, prey to anger, ruled by anger, a person misconducts himself in body, speech, and mind, and by this misconduct, reappears in a state of deprivation, in a bad destination, in perdition, even in hell, through his being prey to anger.

For more details, read The Practice of Loving Kindness  

The underlying psychology behind the Brahmavihara practices are that if we can change our minds, then we can have more peace both for ourselves and for others. Metta is the antidote for anger, annoyance, and hatred. The Buddha himself listed 11 benefits of cultivating metta:

"Monks, for one whose awareness-release through good will is cultivated, developed, pursued, handed the reins and taken as a basis, given a grounding, steadied, consolidated, and well-undertaken, eleven benefits can be expected. Which eleven?

"One sleeps easily, wakes easily, dreams no evil dreams. One is dear to human beings, dear to non-human beings. The devas protect one. Neither fire, poison, nor weapons can touch one. One's mind gains concentration quickly. One's complexion is bright. One dies unconfused and — if penetrating no higher — is headed for the Brahma worlds."

 It is worth examining the sutra where the Buddha taught metta practice in some detail. There is, of course, a mythological story that goes along with it (adapted from here):

500 monks received individual instructions from the Buddha, and went to the Himalayan foothills to spend a four-month rainy season retreat living in intensive meditation.  According to the commentary by Buddhaghosa, it “appeared like a glittering blue quartz crystal: it was embellished with a cool, dense, green forest grove and a stretch of ground strewn with sand, resembling a pearl net or a silver sheet, and was furnished with a clean spring of cool water.”  The monks were captivated.  There were also some towns and markets nearby, where they could beg for alms. 

The residents apparently were pleased the monks were here, and offered to build each a hut near the grove so that they could spend their days under the ancient boughs of the majestic trees.  After settling down contentedly into these huts, each monk selected a tree to meditate under by day and night.  It was said that these great trees were inhabited by tree-deities who had celestial mansions with the trees as the base.  The deities did not like to remain above them, so stayed away, assuming the monks wouldn’t stay long.  But after several days, the deities decided to try to scare the monks away by showing them terrifying visions, making dreadful noises, and creating a sickening stench.  The monks soon could no longer concentrate on their meditations.  So they traveled back to the Buddha to ask what should be done. 

He recited the Karaniya Metta Sutta, which they learned by rote in his presence.  Then they went back, meditating on the underlying meaning, and projecting metta toward the wrathful deities.  As they returned, the hearts of the deities became so charged with warm feelings of good will that they invited the monks to occupy the bases of the trees, and helped to maintain them for their retreat. 

The practice of metta is therefore not simply to change our hearts, but it also has the power to change those of others.  It is sometimes likened to cultivating a great tree, that starts as a small seed, but makes it grow into a useful, generous, and noble tree, heavily laden with luscious fruits sending their sweet odor far and wide, attracting others to enjoy it.  These three aspects are included in the Karaniya Metta Sutta (sprouting of seed and growth are verses 1-6, fruition are verses 8-10).

Many Buddhist practices, including the metta practice, are designed to liberate us from suffering through two primary processes: Renunciation and Cultivation.

The Pali commentaries explain:

One loves all beings:  (a) by the non-harassment of all beings and thus avoids harassment;
(b) by being inoffensive (to all beings) and thus avoids offensiveness;  (c) by not torturing (all beings) and thus avoids torturing;  (d) by the non-destruction (of all life) and thus avoids destructiveness;  (e) by being non-vexing (to all beings) and thus avoids vexing;  (f) by projecting the thought, "May all beings be friendly and not hostile";  (g) by projecting the thought," May all beings be happy and not suffer";  (h) by projecting the thought, "May all beings enjoy well-being and not be distressed."In these eight ways one loves all beings; therefore, it is called universal love. And since one conceives (within) this quality (of love), it is of the mind. And since this mind is free from all thoughts of ill-will, the aggregate of love, mind and freedom is defined as universal love leading to freedom of mind.

From the passage above, it can be seen that metta implies both the "outgrowing" of negative traits - renunciation of offensive actions toward others (a through e above) - and the cultivation of positive traits (f through h above).

The traditional approach is to meditate on several phrases in seven phases.  The phrases are "May I be safe. May I have happiness and the causes of happiness. May I be healthy. May I live with ease." There are other phrases that can be used, and you should use the ones that feel best to you.  The seven phases are to start with offering these feelings to your self, then to a loved one, then to friends, then to a neutral person, then a disliked person, then all of the above as a group, and then all beings in all directions.

A few clarifications may be useful. 

Metta is not the same as love, which in Pali is pema.  Metta is instead related to mitta, or friend.  It is universal friendliness to all.  It is good will to all, but it doesn’t mean you become a door mat, sublimating your needs to those of others.

In the Cunda Kammaraputta Sutta, Buddha says the following phrase can be used: 'May these beings be free from animosity, free from oppression, free from trouble, and may they look after themselves with ease!' 

Note the last part, that they look after themselves with ease.  You are not saying you will do it for them.  You are not saying you will have to be there all the time, or be responsible for their happiness.  This is why it’s important to pair metta with equanimity.  It’s too easy to become overwhelmed if we believe that by changing our habits of mind and behavior to be more loving that we accept responsibility for others’ happiness.  As Thanissaro Bhikkhu says, actually, “most beings would be happier knowing that they could depend on themselves rather than having to depend on you.”

For people to be happy, we need to understand the causes of happiness and then act upon them.  If it harms someone, then it won’t lead to true happiness.

Regarding the mother-child part of the Metta Sutta, it’s often misunderstood to mean that we should be willing to give our lives for others.  But this is incorrect.  Buddha is saying that just as the mother works hard with dogged effort to protect her child, so should we work with just as much clarity to protect our good will, our metta. 

Good will is an attitude you can express for everyone without being hypocritical.  It recognizes that people will become truly happy not as a result of your caring for them, but as a result of their own skillful actions, and that the happiness of self-reliance is greater than any happiness that comes from dependency.

Furthermore, it’s more skillful than trying to be loving.  Not everyone is ready or wants your love.  It could actually make things worse to try to be loving toward everyone.  My ex doesn’t want me expressing my love for her.  But she’s totally content when I wish that she find her own happiness.

It’s difficult to generate metta toward a disliked person, and I’m not sure you should try for very long (at least not when just beginning this practice). It's better to pick someone who is only somewhat difficult, rather than the most difficult person in your life. If it's difficult to wish him/her happiness, it may help to start with somewhat different phrases, such as: May I have no hostility toward him/her, may he/she also not have any hostility toward me.  May he/she have happiness and the causes of happiness.

Working with Anger (and other Strong Emotions)

On the American Buddhists group on the Insight Timer app, a question came up about dealing with strong emotions.  In particular, this colleague asked,  "How do I apply the peace of mind I feel while meditating when I finish my session?  I have anger issues."

There's obviously not one single answer nor is there a simple answer (well, there is - it's practice and time, but that's not a very satisfactory answer at the moment you're feeling the anger). 

In the Buddhist view, emotions have two properties that are co-emergent - wisdom and confusion. That is, when you are feeling an emotion, there is an aspect of wisdom behind it. With anger, it's usually the recognition that something isn't right. The problem is that co-emerging with the wisdom is also ignorance/confusion/clinging - we feel the anger and then (1) believe we have to DO something because of it, (2) believe that our story about it is somehow "real," and (3) our clarity of thinking often gets impaired, so we act unskillfully. So when you are seized by anger, can you separate the wisdom part out from the ignorance part? Can you allow yourself to feel it but not feel the need to act, at least until you've considered what would be a skillful action?

Another way of thinking about using what you find in meditation in the moment may be to focus on the gaps. This is kind of hard to explain in words, especially if you haven't really noticed it in your practice yet, but one thing many people notice in their mindfulness meditation is that there are actually spaces between thoughts, feelings, and impulses to act. In our normal lives we usually just let them run together so that they not only feel continuous, but they feel causal - you said that which caused me to feel this which caused me to say that. But in truth, there can be a gap between all of these parts. Can you find it in the moment? Focusing on that gap can greatly lessen the intensity with which you feel the anger, or can lessen the intensity with which you feel you must react to the feeling or the other person.

These are not the only approaches one could take (e.g., you could try to find compassion for the person annoying you, but I think that's really not realistic for someone struggling with anger issues). You also might want to stop trying to achieve peacefulness in your meditations, and instead begin to do mindfulness of feelings, seeing where anger comes from and where it goes. If you're only using meditation to try to achieve a special state (i.e., peace of mind), then you're not getting everything out of it that you could.  In a sense, meditation doesn't really get "rid" of anything we feel, but it can help us to not be so caught by the feelings that we feel trapped into a habitual pattern.

There's a Lojong slogan that is sometimes translated as "Don't be so trustworthy."  I like this because it encapsulates very simply how we are such creatures of habit.  Something triggers our anger, and we already know how we're going to feel, how we're going to react, and what will come of that - it has a feeling of destiny like a rushing freight train.  This is especially true in our relationships, where we've often spent many years practicing the patterns.  That may be where the real fight is with your anger issues -- there is a habitual trigger and a habitual response.  These conditioned states are the hardest to break, and yet they're so central to our peace (or lack of it).  So the slogan is meant to help us realize that there is a gap between trigger and response, and we don't have to be so trustworthy - don't do what you and everyone else expects you to do.  Do something different.  Maybe it will turn out badly, but maybe it will just be surprising enough to derail the rushing train of habitual events, or at least push it onto a new track to see where that goes.

Ultimately, this isn't the path just for anger issues, but for all of our habitual emotional reactions that keep us stuck in bad patterns (the kleshas).