Exploring Working with Anger

by Mark Donovan
From a talk given at Prescott Insight Meditation, April 8, 2025

Tonight I’d like to explore anger - understanding it with a little more nuance.  What is anger? What is anger for each of us? I’ll offer some reflections.  Is it good or bad? And how do we practice with it - the other important question.

This talk is inspired by a recent experience I had with a work colleague where I  reacted with anger to a perception that this person was dissembling about their understanding of current events.  I had regrets about my reaction, apologized, and we have since repaired the relationship.  However, the intensity of my emotion scared me, so I met with a counselor to explore what happened.  He helped me to see that underneath the anger was a lot of fear related to my perceptions: the undermining of democratic norms,  public health, national security, bullying and alienating longtime geopolitical allies, nihilistic destruction of government from a president I view as having an appetite for unlimited power.

In my previous role as an occupational therapist I facilitated anger management groups at the Albuquerque VA, a common “problem” emotion for persons with PTSD and hyperarousal, overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system.  Excessive anger can cause health problems and relational problems.

This talk includes material and insights from Zohar Lavie of Gaia House and Donald Rothberg who teaches at Spirit Roth.  Both of them suggest that this is a really important and underexplored topic in western Buddhism today –that western Buddhists have a lot of confusion about anger.  An important topic for our times and the interplay between our practice and present social realities.  Rothberg notes the core teaching of dependent origination in which it’s said if we’re not mindful of what’s difficult and painful, and when we’re organized by habitual tendencies, we go into reactivity, we use various ways to push away pain including being judgmental, rigid, having views.  Anger can quickly go into negative views about others and about ourselves.  He notes how many people in the US harbor anger, maybe it’s about economic hardship or confusion about changing gender roles, and when people don’t skillfully work with their pain it’s easy to manipulate them–whether we call it scapegoating, divide and conquer, whatever.  

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