Aware of how my thoughts feed my emotions, I may pursue a certain thought or I might let go of it and return to my breathing, chose another thought with awareness. By doing so I take responsibility for the world of my emotions, my solidity, my well-being, my inner peace.
Nirvana / Cooling is Possible
Thoughts touch seeds in our store consciousness.
As humans we all have the same seeds, it is our practice that empowers or disempowers us.
- Recognize
- Embrace
- Look Deeply
Passionate and destructive feelings can live in us and we can feed them daily.
If we wish to apply the buddhist practice, it means that we call on our mindfulness to recognize the emotion and call it by its true name – honesty, clarity.
Secondly we do not push it down or deny it. We embrace it and accept it. It is part of our humanity as much as other emotions and capacities. It is welcome, but we do not want to feed it and let it grow, because it can harm our relations with our self and others.
The Concept of JUSTICE as a Source of Anger
What I see as injustice, another person will see as justice. A judge or a ruling cannot change this.
Our sense of justice relates to our perceptions, our personal evaluation of life and what we would need to make our life more beautiful – but we frame this requests in terms of right-wrong thinking – and then we can feel it as a demand. And that leads to tragic results.
Please do not kill me, I am innocent.
Please do not kill my children, they are innocent.
These are heart-breaking requests.
And yet – people send bombs from planes into buildings where innocent people live. We learn about it – sometimes from the news – sometimes because we are living right next to this, when it happens – and today people can share about it pretty much live and so such a reality comes right into our homes in peaceful countries, who are not at war right now. Striking our seeds of FEAR, perhaps pushed away by chosing ANGER instead – not to feel the fear that lives beneath the anger.
Injustice can be seen as a request for things to change. And sometimes we become stuck in that request, deeply stuck. We DEMAND that things change – and therefore make it into a story of blood and war at times.
Injustice is based on our perception, on the narrative that we believe in and our habit of judging things as right and wrong. “It is wrong to kill a person.” Jugmental thinking is a habit and a whole culture, that we are growing up in and that surrounds us. Any war is fed by differing stories that people tell themselves on both sides. I fight for freedom, I fight for survival … such stories.
But reading this or saying this is not how we can overcome this very human affliction. We need to create a daily practice of awareness, to become mindful of how news/stories or experiences impact our thinking – which is very fast and usually unconscious – is leading us to feel certain emotions – especially destructive emotions. Anger is an important destructive emotions and it is widely practiced in public discourse and – dare I say – in our thinking.
Why are you like this?
Take why questions for example. They often – but not always – mask anger. With such a question we can indicate that we can indicate that we find a certain behaviour WRONG. And we can be unaware of this judgment, but we can become aware of it, if we ask ourselves about the energy in us. Are we just a bit curious about something or do we have this vibrating energy inside of a light or stronger anger?
Taking time to ask this question – that is stopping and concentrating, focusing.
So what is the value that lives inside of me, that is hungry? What is my request for change exactly? What is it, that I would like to see?
Even making this clear to my inner mind may already help me to cool my emotion, give me some inner peace through clarity. And therefore to stop making a DEMAND and rather make a REQUEST or even chose to direct my energy in a different, more hopeful direction to get what I would like.
Any yes – the longer I am unaware of anger – unaware of how I keep feeding the same narrative again and again, without taking time to stop, breathe and focus on what is going on in me, the stronger the affliction can grow. So – I have the opportunity to change and to practice – wonderful!
Happy mindfulness, dear friends!