Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (28 page)

group) had the lowest blood pressure of all. While one cannot say from a study like this one whether anger style determines blood pressure or the other way around, such findings are consistent with a mindful approach to emotions. In their book
When Anger Hurts,
the authors Matthew McKay, Peter Rogers, and Judith McKay summarize the physiological costs of anger this way:

It seems that it does not matter whether anger is expressed or suppressed. It’s just plain bad for you. Chronic anger that is expressed is bad for you because it feeds on itself. It prolongs and supercharges all the associated hormonal changes. Chronic suppressed anger is damaging because it mobilizes the sympathetic nervous system responses without providing any release of the tension. The effect is the same as flooring the accelerator of your car at the same time as slamming on the brakes.

Angry outbursts hurt our relationships. If we have a lot of practice at being angry, we are difficult to be around. This not only hurts the people around us, but it hurts ourselves, as people withdraw from and avoid us. It can have devastating effects, too, on our ability to get along with others and make our way in the world.

Anger also prevents others from receiving whatever wisdom we have to offer. Young protesters of the 1960s, for example, had good points to make to those in power. But many of these protests were done in an angry, polarizing way. The effects of this anger and the counteranger it elicited are still with us today. By viewing people with other perspectives simply as legitimate objects of anger—as people who are somehow less human or less moral than ourselves—we only create more suffering. Protests conducted in an angry, self-righteous spirit do not help, whether the subject of the protest is the Vietnam War in 1968 or the meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999.

Care Now: Decide Later

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feelings. You need to touch your calmness. If you have been practicing mindfulness, you can develop enough facility to deal with most angerprovoking situations by simply calming these feelings and working with the breath. Psychology can also help us look more deeply. In most situations, you do not have to decide what to do right away. You can take care of the anger first and decide later what to do about the situation that triggered it. You can always say something like,

“I’ll get back to you on that,” or, “I’ll have to think about it.” For example, Jack’s doctor recommended an herbal remedy only available in a store on the other side of town. He called ahead and verified that the store was open and that the remedy was in stock, but when he got there, it turned out that, while they normally carried this product, they were out. The person on the phone had not bothered to check the shelves. Jack felt his anger rise as the clerk asked if he would like them to call him when they got more in. Formerly, Jack might have given him a very hard time or sworn at him and then stormed out in a huff. But he remembered he didn’t have to do that, and he didn’t have to decide now. So he said, “I’ll let you know.” When he got home, Jack practiced mindful breathing with his feelings of anger and frustration for fifteen minutes or so and then felt much better. Only then did he consider what he wanted to do about obtaining the remedy.

When we examine angry thoughts, we find that they have a particular quality. For the most part, they are either thoughts about who is to blame, or shoulds. The fallacy behind angry thinking often involves an assumption that other people should do what
we
think that they should do—which means what furthers our own needs. This assumption is the culprit behind a lot of angry thinking. A more reasonable assumption is that
other people will try to seek their own hap-
piness and avoid suffering according to their best available understanding
at this point in their growth
—which is after all what we ourselves are doing. Once you look deeply into this more reasonable view, you will see that it is inevitable that sometimes people will act in a way that puts them in conflict with what we perceive to be our own needs. Conflict of interest then becomes normalized, and we can see this as natural, and calmly try to get what we need without hurting others.

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It is helpful to review the kinds of thoughts that tend to feed our anger. McKay, Rogers, and McKay report eight kinds of such thoughts—four types of “shoulds” and four types of “blamers”:

Shoulds

1.
The entitlement fallacy.
If I feel a need very strongly, others should take care of this need. (More helpful: Others have needs of their own to take care of. I am responsible for my own needs.) 2
. The fallacy of fairness.
My view is fair and correct. The other person’s view is not fair. (More helpful: There is no objective standard of fairness. It is natural for conflicts of needs to arise.) 3.
The fallacy of change.
People should change for us if we apply pressure. (More helpful: Change is difficult. People only change when they want to change. Pressure sometimes makes it harder for people to change.) 4.
The letting-it-out fallacy
. This fallacy is based on the belief that others bear total responsibility for my pain, and that they therefore should be punished for their misdeeds. Therefore, I will feel better if I express my feelings of hurt and anger. (More helpful: I always bear responsibility for taking care of myself. Expressing angry feelings may damage my relationships, and I also may be cultivating a destructive habit of anger.)

Blamers

1.
Good/bad dichotomies
. Others are “bad” when they don’t meet our needs. (More helpful: Other people are, like us, trying to find happiness and avoid suffering.) 2.
Assumed intent
. Similar to mind reading. For example, “She is trying to hurt me.” (Actually, we never know for sure what other people are thinking, feeling, or intending.) 3.
Magnifying
. Using global terms like
terrible, awful, disgusting, always,
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and
never
. For example, “He’s
always awful
to me.” (The words
al-
ways
and
never
are usually wrong, since only one contradictory instance is required to refute them. For this statement to be true, it would have to be the case that he never once was anything but awful. If that were indeed the case, there would probably not be any relationship with him in the first place. Magnifying only makes a conflict of needs worse.)

4.
Global labeling
. “He’s a jerk.” Also: “neurotic,” “insecure,” “crazy,”

“useless,” “stupid,” “incompetent,” and so on. (More helpful: Think of specifics. “I don’t like the way she did
that
.”)

Work with Anger Thoughts

After doing a little conscious breathing to center yourself, think of two or three occasions on which you became angry. Then, on a sheet of paper, summarize what happened, trying your best to be neutral and objective in your description. Then think about what happened
inside—

what you were telling yourself or thinking. Write down these thoughts, and compare them with the list above. See if you can identify what kinds of
shoulds
or
blamers
you may be using. Then write a more reasonable way of seeing the situation. For example, instead of, “He was acting like a jerk,” you might write, “What he said hurt my feelings, since I am sensitive about my looks.” Instead of, “She always treats me poorly,” substitute, “Sometimes I don’t like the way she treats me.” If anger is a difficult area for you, you might like to do this exercise repeatedly, gradually cultivating a new mental habit. Transform Anxiety

Even if you do not suffer from depression or anger, many of us are plagued with worry and anxiety. The early twentieth century was dubbed the age of anxiety, and there is no indication that this is changing much as we move into the twenty-first century. 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 179

As always, such insights must become more than intellectual. They must sink deep into our awareness. To allow them to penetrate in this way, we can contemplate the truth of impermanence again and again as we watch our worries come and go, come and go. What follows is a powerful way to work with worry.

Work with Worries

To contemplate a truth is to allow it to penetrate your awareness by holding the central idea in mind and turning it over and over gently, not trying to take it apart or elaborate upon it, but simply holding it in awareness. You may from time to time repeat some words to yourself that are central to the idea you are contemplating—especially when you lose focus—but this is only to point the way. You start with an intellectual idea, but the rest of the process is not intellectual. To work with worry, fear, and anxiety, first calm the body and the mind with breath meditation for five or ten minutes. Then contemplate 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 180

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the following ideas in a leisurely way, turning the idea over in your mind, coming back to it when you wander from it, perhaps occasionally repeating key words and phrases:

•

Worries come, worries go.

•

Each worry pretends to be of great importance, but then disappears.

•

Worries come and go; I am not this worry.

•

I am not this body.

•

I am not this span of life.

•

I am not my career.

•

I am not what people think of me.

•

I am not my finances.

•

I am not _______ (fill in whatever else you may overidentify with).

•

If I am not these things, what am I?

•

I am life itself.

•

I am love.

•

I am peace.

•

I am joy.

•

I am light.

Practice “Maybe It Will be Okay”

My morning walk involves crossing a few streets. Even though I walk early enough that traffic is not a problem, I noticed that cars seemed to come out of nowhere whenever I needed to cross a street and were scarcely to be seen otherwise. I began making jokes about it, as though drivers were hiding around the corners until they saw me coming and then quickly coming by as I crossed.

Mindful of this pattern, I determined to change my attitude. Whenever I needed to cross, I told myself, “Maybe it will be okay.” From that moment on, it seemed as though cars almost never came by when I was crossing. Whether reality changed, or my perception changed, or whether those are really much the same thing, I cannot say. I can only say that it helped my morning walk to be more pleasant. Whenever you find yourself worrying about something, try telling yourself: “Maybe it will be okay. Maybe it will work out.”

And maybe it will.

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There is a golden thread running through this discussion of caring for negative feelings. That thread is: We need to take responsibility for these feelings rather than blame other people or circumstances. No one but us can do the work of calming and looking deeply, of changing and transforming. Thich Nhat Hanh expressed the Buddha’s teaching on this matter this way:

When a wise person suffers, she asks herself, “What can I do to be free from suffering? Who can help me? What have I done to free myself from this suffering?” But when a foolish person suffers, she asks herself, “Who has wronged me? How can I show others that I am the victim of wrongdoing? How can I punish those who have caused my suffering?”

Everyone who comes into my office for therapy nourishes the hope, sometimes secretly and sometimes explicitly, that I will be able to tell them how to turn their feelings off. Their feelings are painful, and they just want them to stop. But there is no way to do that. And what is more, our efforts to avoid feelings cause a lot of problems—at least as many as wallowing in them. But when you know how to take care of feelings, you become confident. You are no longer afraid. Buddhism emphasizes that the Buddha was a human being. That is, he was someone just like us—just like we can become. To become like him, we need to be responsible for our own well-being. When Do I Need More Help?

If a negative mood lasts more than a few hours or days, if it is intense and severe, and if it has begun to interfere with your work or affect important relationships, you may want to give yourself the gift of psychotherapy. Take a positive view of making this step. Therapy can assist us in becoming more mindful and aware. Taking care of our emotions can help us avoid major health problems down the road. And compared to that, the cost of therapy is trivial, not only financially, but also in terms of suffering.

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