Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

For example, suppose angry feelings come up at
some point in your day. If you find yourself feeling
angry and expressing it, you will also find yourself
monitoring that expression and its effects moment by
moment. You may be in touch with its validity as a
feeling state, with the antecedent causes of your
strong feeling, and the way it is coming out in your
body gestures and stances, in your tone of voice, in
your choice of words and arguments, as well as the
impression it is making on others. There is much to
be said for the conscious expression of anger, and it
is well known medically and psychologically that
suppressing anger in the sense of internalizing it is
unhealthy, particularly if it becomes habitual. But it is
also unhealthy to vent anger uncontrollably as a
matter of habit and reaction, however "justifiable."
You can feel it cloud the mind. It breeds feelings of
aggression and violence - even if the anger is in the
service of righting a wrong or getting something
important to happen - and thus intrinsically warps
what is, whether you are in the right or not. You can
feel this even when you can't stop yourself
sometimes. Mindfulness can put you in touch with the
toxicity of the anger to yourself and to others. I
always come away from it feeling that there is
something inadequate about anger, even when I am
objectively on high ground. Its innate toxicity taints all