Unmasking Anger

Many people believe that anger is "unspiritual," a damaging misconception that often causes us to stuff it inside. Spiritual traditions such as yoga and Buddhism can teach us how to react skillfully to anger without repressing it.

The most harmful force known to humanity is not high-tech weaponry but raw anger. Anger is lightning in a bottle, and the bottle is us. If we fan anger's embers inside us, the heat can consume our love, rationality, and emotional and physical health. If we direct the heat at others, it scorches everything in its path, friendships, work relationships, marriages, and families. At its worst, anger even maims and kills.

We know that we're saner and healthier when anger isn't igniting our thoughts and actions. But anger can't be wished away; sometimes it flares up inside us as spontaneously as hiccups. Other times, we feel justifiably provoked, by a lover who betrays us, a work partner who lets us down, injustice in society. So the real question is: How can we deal constructively with this potentially destructive emotion?

For thousands of years, spiritual traditions such as yoga and Buddhism have offered detailed anti-anger prescriptions because anger undermines their main goal: attaining happiness and freedom. More recently, psychologists and medical researchers have studied anger to help prevent the damage it causes to both the perpetrator and the target. This accumulated knowledge makes clear that anger can indeed be tamed, because despite its destructive power, anger barely has a toehold in reality.

Anger comes in several forms, including outrage, frustration, jealousy, resentment, fury, and hatred. It also masquerades as judgment, criticism, and even boredom. Like all emotions, it is a complex, ever-shifting state involving thoughts, feelings, and bodily changes.

The physiological effects, which include a two-stage jolt from the class of neurotransmitters called catecholamines (e.g., adrenaline), do for anger what gasoline does for fire. The first surge lasts just minutes but energizes the body for immediate action, either fight or flight depending on how we see the situation. Our fight-or-flight response is usually biochemical overkill, a holdover from the days when the main threats to our daily equanimity were sabertooth tigers, not telemarketers calling at dinnertime. This may explain why we sometimes act all out of proportion to whatever provoked our anger. The second surge of catecholamines lasts longer, from hours to days. It puts us in an extended state of arousal and may account for why, when we're already having a bad day, we'll strike out at anything that moves, our kids, our spouse, the dog, for behavior that normally wouldn't bug us. It also underlies the seductive, sometimes enthralling power of anger, high on catecholamines, we feel strong, clear, and purposeful, dark though that purpose may be.

Beyond this, anger is tough to categorize because first, different people respond differently to it, and second, researchers don't agree where it fits on the emotional spectrum. All emotions have variations and some emotions include blends of others. For instance, jealousy combines anger, sadness, and fear. So, is anger a primary emotion from which other emotions spring or a secondary effect of more basic feelings? While the research community continues to argue about anger's qualities, however, many who counsel angry people believe that not just jealousy but all anger conceals more fundamental human responses.

Ven. Thubten Chodron, an American-born Buddhist nun and author of Working with Anger (Snow Lion, 2001), finds insights into anger from traditional Tibetan Buddhist sources. Besides unhappiness and fear, she lists habit, inappropriate attention, and attachment as key sources of anger. Sometimes we get angry because we.ve developed the habit of reacting angrily instead of with patience and compassion, she says. We become angry through inappropriate attention, by exaggerating negative aspects of people, situations, or other objects of our ill feelings. Our attachments lead to anger, she suggests, because .the more attached we are to something or someone, the angrier we get if we can't have it or it's taken away from us.

Yogis understand anger as an energy existing, like all emotions, halfway between a physical and mental experience. Like heat or other energies, anger wanes naturally, if we don't hold it back with psychological defenses, say, denying or repressing it: "Anger tends to arise in a very visceral wave. It arises, crests, and then passes away."

Anger may be superficial and transitory, but that takes nothing away from its real and present dangers. Angry people hurt themselves and others, sometimes grievously and indiscriminately.

Gandhi found no problem with feeling anger, only with how it was expressed. That is a crucial distinction that many spiritual practitioners miss. Many people believe anger is "unspiritual," a damaging misconception that leads them to stuff the emotion, trapping it inside themselves.

If we're stuck with our anger, what's the trick to mastering it? The ancient yogis didn't have access to the sophisticated knowledge of anger's biochemistry that researchers do today. But their mind-body-energy concepts are a fairly good analogue for the model that researchers apply to anger now; that partly explains why yoga is such an effective approach to dealing with it.

In yogic theory, asanas, pranayama, and meditation comprise a comprehensive toolkit for freeing up blockages at the mental, physical, or energetic level.

The technique, called "riding the wave," employs five sequential steps: Breathe, Relax, Feel, Watch, Allow. To begin the process, Breathe from the diaphragm, thereby switching your focus from your physical body to the world of energy. This switch can lead to dramatic insights and emotional release, as the prana carried in the breath penetrates blocked areas of the body and their associated blockages in the psyche.

Next, Relax your muscles as much as possible to help remove physical blocks to feeling the wave of energy. The wave's spontaneity and intensity can be frightening, spurring you to defend yourself by tensing up. Cueing yourself to relax enables the wave to continue doing its psychically liberating work.

Then, Feel, which here means focusing on the wave's sensations and investigating their qualities. What's their mood, color, texture, shape? Where do you feel them most intensely in your body? After answering these questions, Watch, that is, engage what yogis call the Witness. "If you can stand in the Witness, what Freud called the observing ego, and stay present with the wave of sensation, then it moves through you and you can make discerning choices about how to respond to it rather than reacting to it."

The final stage of the technique, Allow, simply involves trusting the intelligence and positive outcome of the wave and not resisting it. The brilliance of riding the wave, is that you stay with the raw feeling without acting on it "until you're really clear."

Classical Buddhism approaches anger in much the same way: "In Buddhism, we are constantly practicing the mindful observance of ourselves, including the arising, abiding, and subsiding of destructive emotions like anger. We don't stuff our anger down, but we don't buy its storyline either. Sometimes we can just watch it, and it will lose its power and dissipate. Other times we apply an antidote to it, a more realistic or beneficial way of looking at the situation'so that the anger evaporates."