Working with anger

Discussion of meditation in the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions.
User avatar
Taikor.Taikun
Posts: 69
Joined: Thu Oct 24, 2019 4:40 am

Re: Working with anger

Post by Taikor.Taikun »

I found an interesting article to share.

Balancing the 1st and 4th chakra energies:

A 4TH-1ST CHAKRA BALANCING MEDITATION
Sit comfortably, with legs long or crossed. Support your back so you can let your spine lengthen. Feel the sit bones spread evenly into your seat. Imagine the space widening, increasing your connection to the earth. Now imagine a red spinning vortex in the perineum, between the sit bones but just in front of them, in the center of your body. This is where the nerve endings of the 1st Chakra are located. Breathe into this energy. Give yourself gratitude for surviving until this moment. It is a beautiful feat. Breathe into the thick, solid, earth quality. Feel the sturdiness of your 1st Chakra. It gives you gentle boundary. Breathe into the feeling of being held up and supported.
As you breathe, invite balance into your 1st Chakra. Notice what you see as your 1st Chakra balances. What colors do you see, and do they become brighter, softer? Allow that balance of the 1st Chakra; the gentle support, the grounding, to float up to the heart. Imagine the heart resting in the nest of the 1st Chakra. See both of these energies at ease with the other.
Now see your 4th Chakra, a spinning vortex in your chest. Breathe into the heart, breathe into your enormous human capacity for love. Breathe into the airy quality, lightness of the flow. Feel the sensation of bringing oxygen to your heart, feel the joy of your favorite things. Feel the freedom of the heart, it has no pull or rigidity. Breathe into the wisdom and expansiveness of love.
Allow that wisdom to drift back down to the 1st Chakra, breathing new life into the ground. Allow the 1st Chakra to surrender the need for action, and fall into the easy rhythm, the inhales and exhales of the heart. See unconditional love surrounding both of the Chakras as they float along sweet breezes.
Now allow grounding and unconditional love to come in to perfect balance. Nervous system supporting immune system. Survival body supporting emotional body. Love supporting life.

Links
User avatar
PadmaVonSamba
Posts: 9438
Joined: Sat May 14, 2011 1:41 am

Re: Working with anger

Post by PadmaVonSamba »

Taikor.Taikun wrote: Tue Feb 04, 2020 4:59 am
Another situation is lingering pent-up anger. The event has passed. But we’re still very much affected by it. We need to get rid of it so that it never rises again. That’s the question i ask earlier. Perhaps we can ‘burn’ these negative emotions with the Third Eye chakra. I dont know. Another method is a Qigong method where one visualise green energy rises as we inhale with our hands rises from bottom of chakra to the top of the head and push it out with ‘shh’ sound and body slanting to the left. Some people watch a waterfall and imagine all the unhappy memorise flushed away
That all seems way too complicated to me, but if it works for you then do it.
I would get so distracted by all the details, I suppose the anger would certainly disappear. But then, couldn’t you also focus on any complicated procedure? I mean, when anger arises, you could visualize all the steps required to bake chocolate chip cookies. That would also work.

The vippassana practice, the analytical approach, is to look at anger and to see that it is emptiness, that there is nothing but a mental construct used to protect another mental construct, the self.

But whatever works for you, definitely go with that !


EMPTIFUL.
An inward outlook produces outward insight.
cjdevries
Posts: 598
Joined: Wed Feb 04, 2015 8:06 pm

Re: Working with anger

Post by cjdevries »

In the book Healing into Life and Death, Stephen Levine talks about working with anger. Here is an excerpt:

"relating directly with anger, we explore its roots...To allow anger to come into being without becoming it takes a very delicate balance, but to react to anger with fear is just more of the same old thing. Until anger, like boredom or restlessness, is equally invited to the heart of mindfulness, one will always be thrown off kilter by its momentary arisal...Anger, like all heavy states, even pain, is workable when we approach it with a merciful awareness...The exploration of such a state becomes a very interesting endeavor. You explore it, listen to it, feel it, come to know it. What is anger in the body? What is its voice in the mind?..Staying with the changing qualities of anger in the mind/body, the words in the mind, the images, the denseness in the body, we discover under all this anger a deep sadness. Omitting nothing, the investigation continues into the sadness, all the moments of not having, all the frustrated griefs of a lifetime, and beneath that sadness we find an ocean of love beyond our wildest dreams. So the investigation of anger becomes an end of injury in the world and leads us directly to the love beneath...Having taken anger into the area where we can respond to it, where we can investigate it, where we can embrace it, it emerges into the light of our wholeness. Then even anger does not close our heart. Then anger is no longer a hindrance but a profound teacher, a reminder to go deeper, to discover what is real."
"Please call me by my true names so I can wake up; so the door of my heart can be left open: the door of compassion." -Thich Nhat Hanh

"Ask: what's needed of you" -Akong Rinpoche

"Love never claims, it ever gives. Love ever suffers, never resents, never revenges itself." -Gandhi
User avatar
monkishlife
Posts: 56
Joined: Tue Feb 11, 2020 3:01 am

Re: Working with anger

Post by monkishlife »

We as Buddhists have to learn to become our own psychotherapists. Modern psychology in a non-Buddhist approach will many times more harm and great greater delusions for ourselves.

Vipassana meditation is one of the best things we can do for any mental affliction, whether it be extreme fear, panic, anger, jealously, etc. Until you see it what the emotion really is, you will identify strongly with the emotion, and therefore suffer from it. Also, when the negative emotion arises, we note it, give ourselves compassion, and let it go. The more we identify with it, the more it persists. It takes time.

I have a certain phobia that I am working on, but this is the advice that I have been given.

So Buddhism is all about how we handle our minds and our delusions; it is the essence of the Buddhism. Medical advice is necessary when we have a physical problem with our brains (schizophrenia, dementia, etc.).

We all have mental afflictions. It's the nature of existence.

Stay steady with a Vipassana meditation focus. That's all I know.

One more thing: breathing exercises are good, too, as preparation for meditation practice. They help us see more clearly during Vipassana.

If there are visualization meditations that are good...there may be as Tibetan Buddhism is full of them. I don't know of their effectiveness, however.

Peace and enlightenment to you.
Post Reply

Return to “Meditation”