Ways to Deal with Anger

[CroMagna]

My thoughts make me angry and so do people sometimes.  So I ignore them, disengage, and most of all distract myself.  

Is that a good coping strategy?

[kieranperez]

@CroMagna people don't make you angry. You make yourself angry.

Most inefficient strategy you can have.

Look at Leo's videos on emotions. 

[Spiral]

Long term: Suffer until you no longer can be angry.

Short term: Then you start to feel angry focus on your breathing and try whenever possible to get out of the conversation or switch topic. The earlier the better if you think a topic might trigger you, avoid it before you get angry. So i guess it's a alright way to deal with it.

Leos video is also good. 

Edited March 19, 2018 by Spiral

[Charlotte]

I find trying to ignore them will make them stronger, I would put that under resistance, same with distracting yourself. I recommend two videos for you...

 

[Arman]

On 3/18/2018 at 10:05 PM, CroMagna said:

My thoughts make me angry and so do people sometimes.  So I ignore them, disengage, and most of all distract myself.  

Is that a good coping strategy?

No, it isn't 

Learn to be with feelings. There are lots of different kinds of practices and meditations out there. A lot of relevant videos by Leo

What you're doing is not fruitful for your well-being and it hinders your growth. 

[CroMagna]

Thanks everyone.  @Arman I feel like if I sit with negative emotions, then the emotions balance out and happiness doesn't win out, which makes life pointless.  What do you all think?

Edited March 20, 2018 by CroMagna

[Arman]

34 minutes ago, CroMagna said:

Thanks everyone.  @Arman I feel like if I sit with negative emotions, then the emotions balance out and happiness doesn't win out, which makes life pointless.  What do you all think?

I think it's the negative emotions themselves that make life feel pointless. By sitting with them, we are making the commitment to work through them and overcome them so we live a life that isn't victim to the negative emotional roller-coaster.

It both an immediate and a long-term game. On the short term, when we choose to sit with emotions we are reclaiming our power by acknowledging that we have the capacity of courage and willingness. Allowing emotions begins to defuse and disperse the energy making us less prone to the dysfunctional behavior that the energy creates - whether it's the fear which stops us from moving forward, or anger that makes us want to take it out on ourselves and those around it. 

For most people on the planet, there is a lot of negative emotions buried within and it will take some time before these complexes are integrated. Each time you sit with a feeling and allow it to process, you are dispersing part of the energy reservoir of that particular feeling/theme, which means you are becoming more free. Eventually these reservoirs are depleted and you won't have those energies come up and they cannot be triggered. 

If you choose to sit with a bad feeling, then you're going to have bad feelings. If you have bad feelings, it's natural for 'bad' thoughts to occur. Thoughts that make it seem difficult, arduous, pointless - but that's only the manifestation of the very feeling that is being worked with and that will eventually be overcome. Can you see the subtlety in this recognition? The objections to the process are not separate to the very thing that is being overcome. 

Therefore the expectation if a quick fix, of immediate happiness or something to immediately solve your problems have to be surrendered and replaced with qualities like courage and willingness. It helps to learn more about emotions and how to overcome them because it will provide the understanding and context that will make willingness automatic. Once the mind recognizes that these are directions towards freedom, then it will choose so accordingly to the degree that it's not overcome by the ego's attempts at self preservation (aka telling you it's not worth it.)

Without moralizing on the subject, we see two directions - one that leads to growth and one that doesn't. What is the cost of holding on to negative emotions? Nobody is forcing you to deal with your anger, you can choose to ignore and disengage if you wish.

[CroMagna]

Thanks everyone for taking the time to respond.

Do you think meditation will help me heal past my anger?

[Nahm]

@CroMagna @Kisame

In case you didn’t see it... ❤️ This could be very helpful... 

Two main forms of meditation are usually taught in the West, and both are beneficial for different reasons. I personally switch between these two most of the time. They are:

Concentration meditation. This develops concentration, i.e. your ability to focus on one specific thing for long periods of time. A common technique is focusing on the breath. You can focus on the feeling of your belly moving as you breathe, the feeling of the air passing in and out of your nostrils with each inhale and exhale, or any other aspect of the breath, but pick something about our breath and just focus on that. Let your breath be as natural as possible. When your mind inevitably wanders, and you suddenly remember that you're supposed to be focusing on the breath, just bring your focus  back. If you wish, you may count ten breaths, and each time you lose count because of mind wandering, start from the beginning again. This will give you a general sense of how good your concentration is. 

Mindfulness meditation. This is "meta-cognition," being aware of thoughts as thoughts, and sensations as sensations. For example, usually what happens when you think of something that made you angry (e.g. someone cut you off in traffic, or your boss was acting like a dick), you just get lost in the memory and become angry. When you properly apply mindfulness, you are aware that you are becoming angry, rather than just becoming angry. You see the angry thought arising, rather than getting lost in the thought. Then, when you see the thought as just a thought, you deliberately observe it with detachment, and (insofar as you are able) just let it go. Don't pursue trains of thought. Some thoughts will be "stickier," like anxious or angry thoughts, and will want to hang around. This is fine, simply remember to observe them with detachment and let them come and go. 

When you get better at concentration meditation, you can enter really peaceful, relaxed, and stereotypically "blissed out" states of awareness. This is nice, but note that it's hard to bring this state of altered consciousness to everyday life, because rarely in real life do you get the opportunity to focus on one thing exclusively for long periods of time. This sort of meditation and super-concentrated absorption existed before the Buddha's time, but wasn't a particularly reliable path to radical alterations in consciousness (i.e. enlightenment), since as I mentioned, it's difficult to replicate in everyday life.

The Buddha  is usually credited with formalizing the second type of meditation, mindfulness, which is also called vipassana or insight meditation. That is, insight into the nature of reality. Theoretically, mindfulness meditation is a far more reliable path to awakening than concentration meditation. When you get really good at this type of meta-cognition, and detachedly recognizing all your thoughts and perceptions as nothing more than fleeting subjective phenomena, you begin to grasp the insight that your "true self" is not the things of which you are aware, but rather the consciousness that is aware of them. 

   On 3/29/2018 at 3:33 AM,  TruthSeeker47 said: 

Also do any of you experience pain in your back or legs after 20 - 30 mins of meditation? and if so what helps you cope with it?

Yes, this happens to everyone, and it's actually a great opportunity to apply mindfulness meditation specifically. Many awakened individuals have apparently superhuman levels of pain tolerance. There are the marathon monks of Mount Hiei, Thich Quang Duc who burned himself alive in gasoline and didn't so much as flinch, or guys like Peter Ralston who can undergo a root canal with no anesthesia as though it's nothing. The reason they're capable of such things is that they have enormous sensory clarity, in that they can distinguish between physical sensations and negative thoughts, and the constant experiential awareness that they are not the sensations and they are not the thoughts. They can disidentify from both, and watch them detachedly as nothing more than sensory phenomena. Rupert Spira always uses the metaphor of a television screen. The screen is consciousness itself, and all things that the screen shows are thoughts and sensations. But no matter how negative or painful the images that appear, they can never fundamentally change or damage the screen. When you have true insight that you are the screen, and not the screen's images, the images lose their power. Hence the pain tolerance.

So what I'm saying is, when you begin getting uncomfortable or bored, meditate on the discomfort. Try to tease out the differences between the physical pain and the negative thoughts that the pain provokes, and with mindful awareness explore how they interact, congeal together, and occasionally separate. 

Of course, don't push it to the point of actual injury or anything, but generally speaking, if you can get into your meditative position and hold it with no issues for the first couple of minutes, it's not going to permanently damage you if you hold it for another hour. 

[CroMagna]

*Hugs* That was really helpful.

What do you think of this form of meditation?

 

[pluto]

Breatheee

[Barbarian Number 8]

On 2018-03-18 at 3:05 PM, CroMagna said:

My thoughts make me angry and so do people sometimes.  So I ignore them, disengage, and most of all distract myself.  

Is that a good coping strategy?

Yes.

But dealing with the source of it is better.

Good luck!