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.  

First thing, what is anger? What are some of the definitions of anger – there’s a big range.  Unpacking some of these definitions, what anger can be and how it affects us.  And then where that sits within a dharma framework and how to attend to this strong emotion.  And a lot of the things relevant to anger are relevant to other strong emotions as well.

Wikipedia: Anger is an intense emotional state involving a strong, uncomfortable and non-cooperative response to perceived provocation, hurt or threat.

American Heritage Dictionary: A strong passion or emotion of displeasure or antagonism excited by a real or supposed injury or insult to oneself or others or by the intent to do such injury.

Webster: A strong feeling of displeasure and usually of antagonism.
Cambridge: A strong feeling that makes you want to hurt someone or be unpleasant because of something unfair or unkind that has happened.

These definitions touch differently on how it impacts experience, both what we perceive and what it motivates us to do.  Some of the definitions emphasize how it feels, others what causes it, and others how it impacts on mind and action.  So this is an interesting lens into the complexity of this emotion.  In bringing a dharmic lens we see the complexity, we see the nuance, we see the range, we see that we can look at it from different directions.  How does it impact? What does it feel like? What sparks it to happen?

Anger.  A lot of origins.  In old Norse, angr means grief.  This is interesting.  That connection between when we feel anger and we feel hurt, pain, grief - something that is painful or we’re grieving.  It also relates to Old English and Old high German words, slightly different but similar to each other, that mean narrow.  So that’s also interesting.  Part of the impact of anger can have is that it narrows our perspective and vision..  And also working with contraction as a practice, noticing the sense in the body of narrowing and contracting.  That’s one of the impacts it can have.  Last linguistic  origin from Latin is ira means strangle.  That’s interesting.  Maybe you’ve noticed a feeling of being strangled in the throat, like a block of energy that’s there.  And of course some people also relate it to a violent impulse that can come.  The impulse to hurt someone was in one of those definitions.

Another thing to note is how when we tune into anger it can sometimes switch to sadness or fear.  Some psychologists say anger is a cover emotion, that it covers up something else.

So, let’s kind of go into this…what does anger feel like, and as dharma practitioners, this is what we do when we want to understand something that is present in ourselves and in the world, and something that we’re very much meeting in these times, we want to start to ask, what does it feel like? And so the Wikipedia definition was touching on that, it’s an intense emotional state involving a strong, uncomfortable and non-cooperative response.  That’s a description of the emotional arising of anger.  It feels uncomfortable, it’s strong, and has this sense of I don’t want to play with you.  Non-cooperative.  So that’s how, when anger arises, it feels emotionally, but we also want to reflect on how it impacts the body, what does it feel like in the body.  

And how does it impact the mind? Strong desire to get rid of it, tension around the head/throat/chest, less inhibition, less clarity, narrowing of perception/tunnel vision, self-righteousness and fierceness, sense of separation, me and that/it/them, need to control.

There’s a tremendous confusion about anger in western culture.  In the Christian and Jewish bibles God gets angry, the Jewish prophets get angry, Jesus gets angry, and then later in the Christian tradition it’s said anger is one of the seven deadly sins.  How’s that for confusion? There’s a psychologist, Carol Taverese, wrote a book, “Anger.”  She says anger is the most misunderstood emotion in western civilization.  Perhaps we’re even deeply confused about what emotions are.  Are emotions just raw energy, are they connected with thoughts, are they independent of thoughts, are they connected with cultural conditioning.  A lot of confusion about all that.  Again, going back into history, among the ancient Jews, anger was often seen, although God got angry, as negative.  In the Jewish bible it says God loves one who never gets angry.  Do not get angry and you will not sin.  So God gets angry, the prophets get angry, and you’re seeing the set-up for confusion? Among the Jewish prophets, the prophet Isaiah speaks of God’s anger burning because of the peoples’ sins.  But, it seems like that anger is connected with love and  mercy, with compassion.  And there’s a similar view among the ancient Greeks that anger can be both positive and negative.  This is from the philosopher Aristotle:
“Someone is praised for being angry under the right circumstances and with the right people and in the right manner and at the right time.  Those that do not show anger at things that ought to arouse anger are regarded as fools.”
As mentioned, Jesus gets angry and throws the moneychangers (billionaires) out of the temple.

Now  there’s also confusion in the Buddhist texts about anger - ready?? Some of it comes from the translations.  This is from the Dhammapada:
Give up anger, conquer anger and non-anger.  If one is not angry, then one enters into the presence of the gods.  Guard against anger arising in your body.

And often in the translations there are negative views about anger.  From Shantideva (8th c) Guide to the Bodhisattvas Way of Life:
Whatever wholesome deeds have been amassed over a thousand aeons will be destroyed in one moment of anger.

One thing to name in the dharma context is that anger is often spoken of as one of the three poisons or kleshas, the three poisons at the root of all suffering.  It’s often used in dharma language synonymous with hatred.  The three roots of suffering: greed, hatred and delusion; sometimes translated as greed, anger and delusion.  Attachment, aversion, ignorance.  So a number of Pali scholars say that using anger in this context is not so precise or skillful.  The Pali word dosa has entirely negative connotations, so hatred comes closer.  The Dalai Lama, actually, often talking with psychologists said that he would never again translate any of the Tibetan terms, which had previously been translated to anger, into anger in English. 

So through our practice, and this may take quite a long time but that’s just how it is journeying this path, right? It’s not about perfection but about learning.  So we can learn how to really touch our anger, touch what’s painful.  Joanna Macy said, “Where anger goes sour is when it denies the source of its pain.”  As we become more familiar with the experience of anger in our mind-heart-body, we begin to find more of a middle path.  Not suppression or spiritual bypass - “I’m a good person, a spiritual person, I don’t get angry.”   Not going into total reactivity, shutting down and lashing out.

The basic idea is that when we’re not skillful with our anger, we go into reactivity.  And we often go into negative views about others, and about ourselves.  But when we’re skillful  with anger, we don’t go into reactivity, and often we can act skillfully about what was the basis for the anger.  

Because anger can carry wisdom and insight.  It can carry wisdom, it can carry love.  It can carry ethical energy.  The Greeks thought that anger is the recognition of the violation of an ethical boundary.  Anger can direct our attention to something we care about, it can direct our attention to harm that’s happening that needs to be stopped.  The teacher Robert Masters says: Bringing one’s anger into one’s heart is not only an act of love for oneself but for all beings, since such a practice generally increases the odds that anger will not be allowed to mutate into aggressiveness, hostility and hatred, but rather into compassion-centered activity.  And no longer abandoning or destructively harnessing our anger (he says these are our two problems with anger- one that we suppress, and two, that we act it out- these are the two dangers).  In no longer abandoning or destructively harnessing our anger we move a little closer to being the very love that we most desire from others.  Anger can be love.”  

So when we feel anger, we have, like with any emotion, any thought, any body sensation - we have a space of responsiveness there that opens up.  We notice-here’s the anger moving through, do I just get caught or do I actually go and listen to what it’s saying.  It has a message.  Maybe it’s a message that I need to stand up for something I care about.  And, because it brings a lot of energy we can learn how to use that energy to act and to attend both internally and externally.  There is the possibility of both unwholesome/unskillful responses as well as wholesome and skillful responses.  With practice we get caught less often.  And when we can find the love and care within it, that transforms it, and turns it into something that is onward leading.  Not easy, but possible.