Angridotes
The title of this piece of reflection, as you may have guessed, is the portmanteau of the words ‘angry’ and ‘antidotes’. I’ve been going over different ways in which I can work with anger, specifically when triggered by different people. Here’s some tricks that I was thinking about recently:
Consider Santideva’s advice. He says that when a wild animal (I think he mentions a bull) charges at you, you don’t get offended at the animal. You simply step out of the way. Then he says that we are personally under the grip of anger, we lose our capacity to think clearly. The degree to which we are under the grip of anger is the degree to which we can’t think clearly, and this is the same degree to which we become like a wild animal. Then he asks us to consider that when we encounter someone else who is angry at us, they have lost their capacity to think clearly with respect to us to whatever degree anger is twisting their mind. So, in essence, their angry mind has become like a bull charging at you. The only intelligent thing to do in such an event is to step out of the way. There is no wisdom or intelligence that advises us to fight them. However, if compelled to fight due to circumstances, even then, a non-reactive approach would be much more skillful.
Consider a visualization. Imagine that someone is angry with you. Now visualize as you habitually react to their anger, with either fear or with anger yourself, that just a moment ago, they reached out and pulled you away from a cliff, just as you were about to fall off. Visualize as well as you can the feelings that would arise if you were feeling intense, fully embodied gratitude to this same person who is angry at you. I want to be clear here. This practice is to work on your own mind. It is not meant to excuse abusive behavior. However, in order to skillfully deal with abusive behavior, the first thing that you must have is a mind that is untwisted by anger or fear yourself. Without this, it will be more challenging to sort out imagined grievances from what is actually happening. Make no mistake, once you have filled yourself with gratitude, and calmed the part of your mind that is getting triggered and feeling fear, then you can clearly analyze what the skillful way to respond to this situation is.
Consider this idea. This person who is angry with me, and who is directing his (her/their) anger at me, is someone’s little boy (girl/child). Visualize the same person who is displaying hostility to you as their 5 year old self. Ask yourself whether you would be angry at their 5 year old self. Ask yourself whether you would be afraid of their 5 year old self. Once more, this visualization is meant to untwist your mind (or perhaps I should say to untwist your heart). This is a feeling visualization. We are trying to apply an antidote to unskillful feelings like anger and fear, and using visualizations that engender feelings that serve as antidotes.
I think it was Ajahn Chah who taught that we must scratch where it itches. In other words, the antidote to any situation must be applied at the precise place where it is useful. This is equally true in our psychology. Given that most of the unskillful mental turbulence has the quality and tone of feeling as we know them in our experience, we must come up with words, ideas and visualizations that help us feel their antidotes. This is why practices such as metta and mudita are so powerful and yield such quick results. I have a sneaking suspicion that The Buddha was on to something.
