Taming The Tiger Within: Meditations on Transforming Difficult Emotion

1.
Recognition
One of the main causes of our suffering is the seed of anger inside of us.

Recognize and embrace your anger when it manifests itself. Care for it with tenderness rather than suppressing it.

We are more than our anger, we are more than our suffering.

Why do you get angry so easily? Is it because your seed of anger is too strong?

If you get angry easily, it may be because the seed of anger in you has been watered frequently over many years, and unfortunately you have allowed it or even encouraged it to be watered.

Many other people, confronted with the same situation, would not get angry like you. They hear the same words, they see the same situation, and yet they are able to stay calm and not get carried away.

Anger has roots in nonanger elements. It has roots in the way we live our daily life. If we take good care of everything in us, without discrimination, we prevent our negative energies from dominating. We reduce the strength of our negative seeds so that they won't overwhelm us.

Before we can make deep changes in our lives, we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming. We have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Then, we will have the strength to allow the best in us to arise, and we will no longer be victims of anger, of frustration.

Look at someone who is angry. When you see the tension in her, you become frightened, because the bomb in her may explode any minute.

Whenever anger comes up, take out a mirror and look at yourself. When you are angry, you are not very beautiful, you are not presentable. Hundreds of muscles on your face become very tense. Your face looks like a bomb ready to explode.

When you see your face looking like a bomb ready to explode, you are motivated to do something to change it. You know in your heart what you can do to look more beautiful. You don't need cosmetics. You need only to breathe peacefully, calmly, and to smile mindfully. If you can do that one or two times, you will look much better. Just look in the mirror, breathing in calmly, breathing out smiling, and you will feel relief.

It is very helpful to see yourself in moments when you are angry. It is a bell of mindfulness.

Anger always goes together with confusion, with ignorance.

Anger is born from ignorance and wrong perceptions. 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 has been said, what has been done.