Tools for Dealing with Anger | Thich Nhat Hanh (short teaching video)

The Buddha said,
when you get angry,

go back to your breathing.

Breathing in, I know I'm angry.

Breathing out, I know anger is
not good for my health

and for the health of the world.

That is a bell of mindfulness.

You know that.

You agree with the Buddha.

And the Buddha persuades you
to do better than that also.

To recognize the fact that anger
is not good for your health,

and he also offers you tools to transform your anger.

When you get angry,

your anger is supported by many things within you.

The old experiences of anger,

the face of the person, who was not kind
to you reappear in yourself.

And that image manifests and supports your anger.
You get more angry.

And you remember what he or she said.
You get angry.

So many things in you that you still keep
and have not been able to transform come up

and support your anger.

And suddenly your anger falls like cascade,
very strong.

And you become the victim of your anger.

And your body also goes along with that.

The beating of your heart,
the chemical in you are triggered

in order to go with that anger.

So...

"Breathing in, I know that I am angry.

Breathing out, I know anger is not good for my health,

and for the world and for the community."

This is the first step.

The second step
is to visualize the outcome of the anger.

You have to visualize how anger destroyed
your health and destroyed your community,

destroyed the world.

You can see. And in yourself,
in the store consciousness,

you have these images.

You have seen anger destroying
families, couples, and others.

You see the suffering.

And if you are able to bring these images
back, your anger will stop.

Visualization.

In dealing with your anger, you should know

what tools to make use,
what images and sounds to make use.

They're all there inside of you
and around you.

Suppose you know someone who is capable of
smiling during the difficult situations.

And his or her images...
and if you are able to think of him or her

and seeing his or her smile in a provoking situation,
that image will help.

And you want to be like him or her.

Sitting solidly as a rock and not allow anger
to carry you away.

The Buddha said that the person who is angry,

while trying to do harm to you

to provoke you, that person
may be suffering a lot.

And if you know that,
instead of becoming angry at him or her,

you can look at him or her and think of him
or her with compassion.

and this is possible.

In the 1970s, one day I got very angry.

because I received a letter from a refugee
camp in Thailand.

An 11-year-old girl, after she was raped by a sea
pirate,

and her father tried to intervene to protect
her,

and then the sea pirate threw him into the ocean.

During the '70s news like that came everyday.

We were trying to help the boat people.

Many of them stayed in refugee camps in Thailand,
Malaysia, and Indonesia.

You get angry at the sea pirate

who threw [the father into the sea]

and raped the 11-year-old.

And after being raped,
after having seen her father drown,

she also jumped into the ocean and drowned.

You get angry at the pirate.

You get angry to the point that you cannot eat.

You know that you have to do something
in order to transform your anger

otherwise you cannot eat,
you cannot sleep,

you cannot continue to help people.

So I went walking meditation
to calm myself down.

And that night during the sitting meditation,
I saw the pirate.

That was the practice of visualization.

If you are born in a very poor fishing family,

if your father has not had any chance
to go to school,

your mother also.

You have been poor for many generations.

You have never got a chance to get out
of that situation of chronic poverty.

And when you are 13,
your father asks you to go with to the sea

and you have to do very hard work.

And yet...

when your father died,
you continue his career as a fisherman.

But you cannot do better than him.

You're still in chronic poverty.

And one day another fisherman said,
the boat people, when they flee their country,

they always bring with them some valuables.

Gold and diamonds and things like that

because they left the country and they want
to start a new life in another country.

So if we go out
just one time, we can get enough

in order to get out of this situation
of chronic poverty.

Many young men became pirates
because of that.

In the high sea, there was no policemen,

and you see young girls,

and you know that you will not be punished.

so the young fisherman just did like others.

They rape.
If you are on the boat, what can you do?

If you try to intervene, they will throw you
into the ocean.

If you have a gun, what would you do?

You would shoot the sea pirate.

That sea pirate might be just 21 years old... or 22.

And I saw that in my meditation.

Suppose I was born in the coast,
along the coastline of Thailand 24 years ago

into a family like his.

My father was very poor,
my mother didn't have any education.

I was raised like that.

No one...

I have no chance to go to school.

I became a poor young fisherman.

Nobody has taught me to love,

to be responsible.

Nobody has helped me to get out of
my situation of chronic poverty.

And another fisherman came to me
and persuaded me to go out

in order to meet the boat people in order
to take their gold,

to take their diamonds.
And there I went.

And I would have done exactly
what the young pirate had done

because I have had no education...

I did not know how to love, to be responsible.
So I did exactly what he did.

And if you shoot me, I die.

I simply die.
Because no one has helped me

in my 21 years of life.

So when I meditated
at that point,

I identified myself with the poor fisherman.

I saw him as a victim of society.

It's really... no one has tried
to help him, his family.

No one has tried to educate him
to teach him how to be responsible, to love.

And when I saw that,
my anger just evaporated.

And suddenly I had a lot of compassion
directed to the fisherman, to the sea pirate.

Meditation is like that.

Meditation is to use the image of reality

in order to help you to be awake to be reasonable.

You should know that anger is not good to
your health,

and not good to the health of
people around you and society,

but that is not enough.

That is the first bell of mindfulness.
And you have to practice.

You have to know how to practice
to make use of the teaching,

those images,

the insight, the experience we have got

in order to embrace that anger and transform it.

In our body, there are lymphocytes,
the immune system.

Every time there is a foreign body
penetrating into our system,

they come in a rush, and they just embrace that,

and digest that foreign body

and transform it into protein
and other things.

We should have a
spiritual immune system in us.

We should have a macrophage...
leukocytes [white blood cells].

We should be able to use them
in order to protect us.

Every time anger or fear manifests,

we should call on these elements to come

to surround and embrace that

not to let do harm to our life,

to our body, to our mind.

The practice is very much the same
as the practice of the immune system.

We know that this is a poison.

If we do not take care of the poison,

if we are not careful,
we'll let the poison destroy us.

And the Buddha spoke about poisons:

confusion, anger,

craving, and so on.

A Dharma talk is not something
nice to hear, to listen to.

A Dharma talk should offer methods of practice

so that when you are in a difficult situation,
when you are caught by anger, by fear,

...by craving, you know how to deal with
these mental formations.

By observing, we know
craving can bring a lot of suffering.

By thinking back of our previous experiences,

we know craving has brought us
a lot of suffering.

So when craving is there, we have to visualize...

we have to think about the effect of craving.

Before saying something, before doing something,
we have to think of the effect that...

that our act or speech will bring about.

If we can see very clearly, we will be
able to stop saying that or doing that.

This is a matter of training.

We have failed before.

After having said that, after having done that,
we suffer and we make the other person suffer.

And yet, when the situation presents itself
again similar to that,

our pattern of behavior pushes us to do the same,

to say the same thing,
to do the same kind of acts.

And we create destruction again and again.

And again and again we feel sorry,

because that is the pattern of behaviors

that is deeply entrenched in us.

Now as we have got the teaching
and the instruments, we have to...

create new patterns of behaviors.