Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

it touches. If its energy can be transmuted to
forcefulness and wisdom, without the smoke and fire
of self-absorption or self-righteousness, then its
power multiplies, and so does its capacity to
transform both the object of the anger and the
source.
So, if you practice purposefully expanding the context
of the anger (yours or someone else's) right in those
very moments that it is arising and peaking, knowing
that there must be something larger and more
fundamental that you are forgetting in the heat of the
emotion, then you can touch an awareness inside
yourself which is not attached to or invested in the
anger-fire. Awareness sees the anger; it knows the
depth of the anger; and it is larger than the anger. It
can therefore hold the anger the way a pot contains
food. The pot of awareness helps us cradle the anger
and see that it may be producing more harmful
effects than beneficial ones, even if that is not our
aim. In this way, it helps us cook the anger, digest the
anger, so that we can use it effectively, and, in
changing from an automatic reacting to a conscious
responding, perhaps move beyond it altogether. This
and other options stem from a careful listening to the
dictates of the whole situation.