Anger

by Thich Nhat Hanh

Anger always goes together with confusion, with ignorance.

The parents are full of ignorance, they are full of violence and anger, and that is why their child suffers.

If we do this, we will see that the roots of their anger and violence are in the family, in the way parents conduct their daily life. And the roots of family violence are found in the way society is organized and how people consume.

on what basis should that action take place? On the basis of understanding.

It is your country that you must help, not a political party.

He began to see that he always blamed other people for his suffering.

He hadn’t understood until now that he was responsible.

His habit energy pushed him to continue to live and consume in a way that poisoned his body and mind.

No matter how hard you tried to be sweet, to be patient, he always cut you off, and didn’t allow you to finish your sentence.

He was never capable of listening to you. You were patient, but you have your limits. Communication was impossible and so you gave up.

We must look back, and look deeply in order to understand.

You have to see how things have deteriorated between you and her: how you treated her, how you made her suffer, and how she left you.

Angelina is always there. Love is still in her heart. She is ready to forgive, if you know how to burn the incense of your heart, the incense of the Mindfulness Trainings, concentration, and insight.

I always look at that picture and bow to all my Angelinas. Then I sit down and I vow to live in such a way that my Angelinas will never leave me. I vow to practice mindful speech, to practice the Mindfulness Trainings, and not to betray my Angelinas. By doing so, I avoid causing suffering to my Angelinas and I am able to bring them joy. This makes me very happy.

Where is my Angelina now? How have I treated her? And if she has left: What should I do in order to bring her home again?

Not all internal formations are unpleasant. There are also pleasant internal formations, but they can still make us suffer.

The strength of the internal knot is pushing you and controlling you. So internal formations deprive us of our freedom.

Falling in love is a big internal formation. Once you are in love, you think only of the other person. You are not free anymore. You cannot do anything; you cannot study, you cannot work, you cannot enjoy the sunshine or the beauty of nature around you. You can think only of the object of your love. That is why we speak about it as a kind of accident, “falling in love.” You fall down. You are not stable anymore because you have gotten into an accident. So love can also be an internal knot.

Pleasant or unpleasant, both kinds of knots take away our liberty. That is why we should guard our body and our mind very carefully, to prevent these knots from taking root in us. Drugs, alcohol, and tobacco can create internal formations in our body. And anger, ...

Anger is an internal formation, and since it makes us suffer, we try our best to get rid of it.

To be mindful of something is to recognize that something is there in the present moment. Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware of what is going on in the present moment.

In Buddhism, the practice of meditation should be the practice of embracing and transforming, not of fighting.

When anger comes up in us, we should begin to practice mindful breathing right away: “Breathing in, I know that anger is in me. Breathing out, I am taking good care of my anger.” We behave exactly like a mother: “Breathing in, I know that my child is crying. Breathing out, I will take good care of my child.” This is the practice of compassion.

If you don’t know how to treat yourself with compassion, how can you treat another person with compassion?

Anger may continue to be there for some time, but you are safe, because the Buddha is in you, helping you to take good care of your anger.

When you practice mindful breathing and embracing your anger, you are under the protection of the Buddha. There is no doubt about it: the Buddha is embracing you and your anger with a lot of compassion.

When you are angry, when you feel despair, you practice mindful breathing and mindful walking, to generate the energy of mindfulness. This energy allows you to recognize and embrace your painful feelings.

Instead of fighting, we are taking good care of our emotion. If you know how to embrace your anger, something will change.

Everything will be fine if you know how to keep the Buddha within you alive.

We need to practice mindful breathing or walking in order to touch the Buddha within us. When you touch the seed of mindfulness that lies in your consciousness, the Buddha will manifest in your mind consciousness and embrace your anger.

The energy of mindfulness contains the energy of concentration as well as the energy of insight. Concentration helps you to focus on just one thing.

If mindfulness is there, and you know how to keep mindfulness alive, concentration will be there, too. And if you know how to keep concentration alive, insight will also come. So mindfulness recognizes, embraces, and relieves.

It is what frees us and allows transformation to happen.

Embracing your pain and sorrow with the energy of mindfulness is exactly the practice of massaging, not our body, but our consciousness.

You generate a strong source of energy so that you can recognize, embrace, and take care of these negative energies.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

Fear gives life to anger. You don’t have peace when fear is there, so it becomes the soil on which anger can grow.

When we are afraid of something or when we are angry, our breath is shallow and the quality of our breathing is very low. Our breath is short, noisy, and not peaceful at all.

Once your breathing has become calmer and deeper, you can continue breathing like this in order to embrace different parts of your body.

To stay on the level of the intellect is dangerous. Strong emotions are like a storm, and to stand in the middle of a storm is very dangerous.

although an emotion may be very strong, it will stay only for a while and then go; it cannot last forever. If you train yourself to practice like this during difficult times, you will survive these storms.

When we embrace our joy and our compassion with mindful breathing like this, they will be multiplied ten or twenty times. Mindful breathing helps us sustain them for a longer time and experience them more deeply. Therefore it is very important to embrace our positive mental formations, like joy, happiness, and compassion, when they arise, because they are a kind of food that helps us to grow.

Everyone has a seed of anger in the depth of his or her consciousness.

A good practitioner is not someone who no longer has any anger or suffering. This is not possible. A good practitioner is someone who knows how to take good care of her anger and suffering as soon as they arise.

Someone who does not practice does not know how to handle the energy of anger when it manifests, and he or she can easily be overwhelmed by anger.

And yet, even with this intelligence, we still do things out of anger, we still say things out of anger. Therefore, many of us have caused a lot of suffering in our relationships with other people. After the damage has been done, you are full of regret and you vow that you will never do such a thing again. You are very sincere; you have a great deal of good will. But the next time the situation presents itself, you do exactly the same thing, you say exactly the same thing, and you cause the same damage again and again.

Making Happiness a Priority

From time to time we have to make a decision, and sometimes the decision is very difficult. We are forced to make a painful choice. But if we know what is most important to us, what we most deeply want for our life, the decision-making will become easier, and we won’t have to suffer a lot.

If your desire to be a monastic is less than one hundred percent, don’t become a monastic. It must be more than one hundred percent.

We tend to forget this. We see only our own suffering, and then we exaggerate, thinking, “No one else suffers like I do; I am the only one who suffers like this.”