More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
All of us have a seed of anger in the depth of our consciousness. But in some of us, that seed of anger is bigger than our other seeds—like love or compassion. The seed of anger may be bigger because we have not practiced in the past. When we begin to cultivate the energy of mindfulness, the first insight we have is that the main cause of our suffering, of our misery, is not the other person—it is the seed of anger in us. Then we will stop blaming the other person for causing all our suffering. We realize she or he is only a secondary cause.
Once you have taken care of your anger, you become aware that she is still suffering. So now you can focus your attention on the other person.
When you suffer, you make people around you suffer. That’s very natural. This is why we have to learn how to handle our suffering, so we won’t spread it everywhere.
When someone is angry, and doesn’t know how to handle her anger, she is helpless, she suffers. She also makes the people around her suffer. At first, you feel that she deserves punishment. You want to punish her because she has made you suffer. But after ten or fifteen minutes of walking meditation and mindful looking, you realize that what she needs is help and not punishment. This is a good insight.
Because you know how to embrace your anger, you now feel much better, but you see that the other person continues to suffer. This insight motivates you to go back to him. No one can help, except you. Now you are filled with the desire to return and help. It is a completely different kind of thinking—there is no more wish to punish. Your anger has been transformed into compassion.
When you understand the suffering of the other person, you are able to transform your desire to punish, and then you want only to help him or her. At that moment, you know that your practice has succeeded. You are a good gardener.
As children, our fathers and our mothers taught us how to breathe, how to walk, how to sit, how to eat, and how to speak. But when we come to the practice, we are reborn, as spiritual beings. So we have to learn how to breathe again, mindfully. We learn how to walk again, mindfully. We want to learn how to listen again, mindfully and with compassion. We want to learn how to speak again, with the language of love, to honor our original commitment. “Darling, I suffer. I am angry. I want you to know it.” This expresses faithfulness to your commitment. “Darling, I am doing my best. I am taking
...more
Self-love is the foundation for your capacity to love the other person. If you don’t take good care of yourself, if you are not happy, if you are not peaceful, you cannot make the other person happy. You cannot help the other person; you cannot love. Your capacity for loving another person depends entirely on your capacity for loving yourself, for taking care of yourself.
Sometimes the wounded child in us needs all of our attention. That little child might emerge from the depths of our consciousness, and ask for our attention. If you are mindful, you will hear his or her voice calling for help. At that moment, instead of contemplating the beautiful sunrise, you go back and tenderly embrace the wounded child within you. “Breathing in, I go back to my wounded child; breathing out, I will take good care of my wounded child.”
When you climb a beautiful mountain, invite your little child within to climb with you. When you contemplate the beautiful sunset, invite him or her to enjoy it with you. If you do that for a few weeks or a few months, the wounded child in you will be healed. Mindfulness is the energy that can help us do this.
One minute of practice is one minute of generating the energy of mindfulness. It doesn’t come from outside of you; it comes from within. The energy of mindfulness is the kind of energy that helps us to be here, to be fully present in the here and the now.
When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you’re not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You’re drinking your projects, you’re drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your tea or your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self, and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.
Tea meditation is a practice. It is a practice to help us be free. If you are still bound and haunted by the past, if you are still afraid of the future, if you are carried away by your projects, your fear, your anxiety, and your anger, you are not a free person. You are not fully present in the here and the now, so life is not really available to you. The tea, the other person, the blue sky, the flower, is not available to you. In order to be really alive, in order to touch life deeply, you have to become a free person. Cultivating mindfulness can help you to be free.
mindfulness practice is very important. Yet it is not something that you have to train yourself for many months to be able to do. One hour of practice can help you to be more mindful.
Any moment of the day is an opportunity for you to train yourself in mindfulness and to generate this energy.
When you can tell your beloved, “Darling, I know you are there, and I am very happy,” it proves that you are a free person. It proves that you have mindfulness, you have the capacity to cherish, to appreciate what is happening in the present moment. What is happening in the present moment is life. You are still alive and the person you love is still there, alive, in front of you.
Mindfulness makes you and the other person happy and free. The other person may be caught in her worries, anger, and forgetfulness, but with mindfulness you can save her and yourself. Mindfulness is the energy of the Buddha, the energy of enlightenment. The Buddha is present whenever you are mindful, embracing both of you in his loving arms.
In the past, we were allied in making each other suffer more, allied in the escalation of anger. Now we want to be allied in taking good care of our sorrow, our anger, and our frustration. We want to negotiate a strategy for peace.
As enlightenment grows in you, confusion and ignorance will have to withdraw. It will not only influence your thinking, but also your body and your way of living.
So it is very important to go to your partner, to your beloved one, and negotiate a strategy of peace, a strategy of consuming, a strategy of protection. You have to bring the best of yourself: your talent, your skillfulness, everything, in order to succeed at this negotiation table so that you will no longer make each other suffer. You want to begin anew, you want to transform yourself.
Everything is possible when the door of communication is open. So we must invest ourselves in the practice of opening up and restoring communication. You have to express your willingness, your desire to make peace with the other person. Ask him to support
No matter how much the other person can do, you have to do all that you are capable of doing yourself. You must give one hundred percent of yourself. Whatever you can do for yourself, you do for him, or for her.
There are many ways to communicate, and the best way is to show that you no longer feel any anger or condemnation. You show that you understand and accept the other person. You communicate this not only by your words, but also by your way of being—with your eyes full of compassion and your actions full of tenderness.
When you begin with yourself, you will be able to restore communication, and the other person will change naturally.
When we suffer, we always blame the other person for having made us suffer. We do not realize that anger is, first of all, our business. We are primarily responsible for our anger, but we believe very naively that if we can say something or do something to punish the other person, we will suffer less.
When you say something really unkind, when you do something in retaliation, your anger increases. You make the other person suffer, and he will try hard to say or do something back to get relief from his suffering. That is how the conflict escalates.
Punishing the other person is self-punishment. That is true in every circumstance.
So let us wake up; let us be aware that punishing the other is not an intelligent strategy. Both you and the other person are intelligent. You can use your intelligence. You must come together and agree on a strategy for taking care of your anger.
Take advantage of the moments when you are happy together to sign the contract, your peace treaty, a treaty of true love. Your peace treaty should be written and signed entirely on the basis of love, not like a peace treaty signed by political parties. They base their treaties only on national self-interest. They are still full of a lot of suspicion and anger. But your peace treaty must be purely a love treaty.
The Buddha never advised us to suppress our anger. He taught us to go back to ourselves and take good care of it.
We recognize it as it is, embrace it, and smile. The energy that helps us do these things is mindfulness, mindfulness of walking and mindfulness of breathing.
This does not mean that you have to hide your anger. You have to let the other person know that you are angry and that you suffer. This is very important.
In true love, there is no pride. You cannot pretend that you don’t suffer. You cannot pretend that you are not angry. This kind of denial is based on pride.
Our tendency is to say, “I don’t need you to be happy! I can be on my own!” This is a betrayal of our initial vow to share everything.
you also have to let the other person know when you suffer, when you are angry with him or her. You have to express what you feel. You have the right. This is true love.
There may be some sadness in your voice, that’s fine. Just don’t say something to punish or to blame.
You must do this as soon as possible. You should not keep your anger, your suffering to yourself for more than twenty-four hours. Otherwise, it becomes too much. It can poison you.
You may feel you are not capable of telling him or her right away because you are not yet calm. You are still very angry. So practice mindful breathing and walking outdoors. Then when you feel calm and ready to share, you speak. But if the deadline comes close, and you are not yet calm, then you have to write it down. Write a Peace Note, a peace message. Deliver the letter to her and make sure she gets it before twenty-four hours have passed.
You can add, “I’m doing my best.” This means you refrain from acting out of anger. It means that you are practicing mindful breathing and mindful walking in order to embrace your anger with mindfulness.
That will inspire confidence and respect in the other person. “I am doing my best” means you are living up to your commitment to go home to yourself and take good care of your anger.
While embracing your anger, you practice looking deeply to see the nature of your anger because you know that you may be the victim of a wrong perception. You may have misunderstood what you heard and what you saw. You may have a wrong idea of what had been said, what had been done. Your anger is born from such ignorance and wrong perceptions.
You remember that you should not be so sure that you are the victim of the other person’s wrongdoing, the victim of the other person’s words. You yourself may have created the hell inside you.
The third sentence follows naturally, “Please help me. Darling, I need your help.” That is the language of true love.
If you are capable of writing or saying these three sentences, you are capable of true love. You are using the authentic language of love. “Darling, I suffer, and I want you to know it. Darling, I am doing my best. I’m trying not to blame anyone else, including you. Since we are so close to each other, since we have made a commitment to each other, I feel that I need your support and your help to get out of this state of suffering, of anger.” Using the three sentences to communicate with the other person can quickly reassure and relieve him or her. The way you handle your anger will inspire a
...more
Because you are doing your best, I end up doing my best. I go back to myself and practice. In order to be worthy of you, I have to look deeply, and also do my best. I have to ask myself, “What did I say, what did I do to have made her or him suffer like that? Why did I do that?” Just listening to you, just reading the Peace Note you gave me, I can recover myself. The dharma, after having touched you, is now beginning to touch me, and it is my turn to be inhabited by the energy of mindfulness.
If during this time, one of you experiences an insight into what is really going on, then you have to tell the other person right away what you have discovered.
Now, the other person is a co-practitioner. Your mutual respect for each other continues to grow, and respect is the foundation of true love.
Some of us keep a pebble in our pocket, a beautiful pebble we picked up in the front yard. We washed it very carefully and always carry it with us. Every time we put our hands in our pocket, we touch the small pebble, and hold it gently. We practice mindful breathing and we feel very peaceful. When anger arises, the pebble becomes the dharma. It reminds us of our three sentences. Just holding the pebble, breathing in and out calmly and smiling, can help you tremendously.
Anger is a zone of energy in us. It is part of us. It is a suffering baby that we have to take care of. The best way to do this is to generate another zone of energy that can embrace and take care of our anger. The second zone of energy is the energy of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the energy of the Buddha.
Mindfulness means to be present, to be aware of what is going on. This energy is very crucial for the practice. The energy of mindfulness is like a big brother, big sister, or a mother, holding the younger one in her arms, taking good care of the suffering baby, which is our anger, despair, or jealousy.
