Loving Your Anger: How meditation practice can help you work through rage

Meditation practice can be a powerful way to examine and work through our anger. Oftentimes, we may have the tendency to suppress our anger in an effort to not express it, turn the anger we are feeling towards ourselves, or lash out at others when we are consumed by anger. These reactions to anger are especially easy to choose when our personal and political experiences are rife with conflict, violence, oppression, and injustice.

There is a misconception that meditation and/or Buddhism is about staying calm and sweeping any “negative” emotions under the rug. Rather than choosing to suppress anything, especially our rage, we are trying to look at the truth of what is happening. These practices invite us to witness our experience and what is arising for us. 

By tending to our anger and rage, we can begin to see the underlying hurt and grief that wants to be held and acknowledged. By giving it the space it needs, we are also creating new ways of responding rather than reacting to our anger. When we meditate, we are practicing being present – breath by breath, moment to moment – and connecting to our bodies to see the truth of what is coming up for us right now. With this understanding of what is present, we can then decide how we want to respond in a more skillful way.

In my book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger, I write:

[All] that meditating and change I was experiencing was only reorienting myself back to the hurt. I had to learn how to start grieving and mourning in a way that I had never learned how to do. It’s not as if I was instantly liberated from my anger, but that was the beginning of the work for me. That was all based on love, not only the little love I had for other people wanting me to be different than I was, because I knew that I was a source of suffering for people around me because of anger.

It is the act of recontextualizing my anger through the intention of love that helped me commit to this work of healing myself and working through my anger, so that I don’t perpetuate harm towards myself and others. It helped me commit to the work of intergenerational, ancestral, and collective liberation as well. This work is not only for ourselves but for all beings and phenomena that we are connected to. 

Are you seeking to shift your relationship with anger? Here are some reflection questions for you to contemplate:

• Do you struggle with anger?
• What is the hardest aspect of working with anger?
• How have you hurt people with your anger? How have you hurt yourself?

Interested in learning more about practices to work through anger, rage, and grief? Ready to go from reacting to your anger to responding from a place of love? 

Check out my Self-Guided Love and Rage course HERE, and join the thousands of people who are transforming their relationship to their anger as a ground for liberation!