A student once asked me: Do I ever have the right to be angry?
I get this genre of question frequently. Should I be angry? How can I not be angry? Do I have the right to be angry.
Or students who are obviously angry will deny being angry or feeling anger.
Some people think anger is not spiritual, and we should suppress it or bludgeon it into submission with our spiritual practices.
Others, usually privileged people, think that anger has no place in public discourse, and we should always strive to be “reasonable.”
Still others are afraid of their own anger.
Our vital energy
I often surprise students by encouraging them to feel their anger. Anger is an aspect of our vital energy. It’s very alive—full of movement, texture, temperature, and intensity.
When we suppress anger or don’t acknowledge our anger, lots of secondary effects arise that deaden our self-expression and cloud our perception.
We can remain stuck in chronic sadness or grief. This can feel safer to people than anger.
We can become exhausted from contriving a ‘not-angry’ personality and monitoring our speech and emotional expression.
We can become passive aggressive—letting our unacknowledged anger out in sneaky ways that are meant to undermine and hurt others while maintaining plausible deniability.
If we are afraid of loss of intimacy or abandonment, we can get into a habit of suppressing or deflecting anger with self-blame and self-depreciation.
If we are being abused or oppressed, it is often dangerous to express anger, but we still have to feel it internally in order to take appropriate action to protect ourselves.
Feeling anger is a very important part of recovery from abuse and oppression.
As practitioners, we want to understand that acknowledging and feeling our anger is functional. It frees up our vital energy and brings clarity to our situation.
But if we identify with anger as a right, or if we strongly identify with outrage or rage as an aspect of who we are, we get stuck in habit, and we cannot discover the more expansive, enlightened forms of anger.
The right to be angry
What does “the right to be angry” mean?
Basically, it means we are enshrining or installing anger as the proper response to particular situations.
We are justifying the response of anger in a way that binds it to specific conditions, and we are conditioning ourselves to respond with anger as a matter of course.
But from the perspective of the traditions I practice and teach in, there is no response that is permanently tethered to particular circumstances.
For instance, many people who are survivors of horrible crimes such as internment or torture or rape, are really angry, but some are not. Some are so traumatized that it’s hard for them to feel anger. Some few feel compassion for their oppressors and attackers.
Some people cultivate anger. Some people strive for forgiveness. Some people just feel pain without anger or blame.
An infinitude of responses is possible depending on the circumstances and the condition of the person experiencing these harms.
All of them are perfectly “right” and within your rights because you are here and that is your response.
But not all responses are what we want to identify with or hold onto forever as practitioners.
As a practitioner, rather than thinking that anger is the only right response, or that I have a right to be angry, it’s better to just have the attitude that “I am angry.” Our anger is a fact, not a life sentence or a diagnosis or a mission.
If we make this small change, we can feel our anger as vital energy. We begin to free our attachment to a certain emotional state and its narrative. Our anger can have more clarity and start becoming more useful to ourselves and others.
Eventually, but maybe not in this lifetime, anger will transform along with other emotions into even more expansive expressions.
Enlightened anger
Everything here in our ordinary experience is a contracted, more limited version of a more expansive expression of this alive-aware reality.
Or you could say, everything here can eventually reveal its source in wisdom through a process of relaxing and unfolding. We encourage this process when we do practices such as mantra and meditation.
The inherent wisdom of anger is clarity. Self-liberating anger is like fierce, illuminating lightning. It transforms a situation instantly with its cutting-through energy and brilliant light.
However, self-liberating anger disappears right after the flash. It doesn’t hang on, exhausting itself by continually repeating, rehearsing, and trying to hurt and destroy. It reveals sharply, but it never aims to harm.
The anger that expresses in this way leaves behind the freshness of a summer lightning storm.
Have mercy
Suffering at the hands of others can be a very powerful experience, but we do not ultimately want to be at its mercy.
Without ignoring our pain and anger, we should try to view every situation in our lives as an opportunity to discover more wisdom even when we are harmed or great harm is happening to many people.
When reactivity threatens to overtake you, first of all, try to remember what you really want. Where is your life headed?
Use your practice—mantra, breath, and thinking of your teacher if you have one. This is very hard. But even during times when we experience all kinds of compulsive reactivity, we should try to relax and remember what we are really here for, what we really want.
Thinking of my Guru always makes my deepest longing immediately appear in the midst of more contracted versions of emotions. When I think of her, I always know right away that she is my beacon, and my reactivity is not.
Remembering this, I can relax. Emotions reveal their deeper messages and illuminations. I can be more skillful and helpful and even kind in a natural way.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
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This is really enlightening and a much more practical way to process anger than the westphalian way of repressing or using it to channel pariochal narrow mindedness.
Beautiful cut on anger. The shift from “right to be angry” to “I am angry” unlocks breath. Lightning, not bonfire. Flash. Reveal. Gone. I’ll be practicing that today, especially where I still rehearse rage instead of listening to it.