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Guided Meditation: Not Defined by Anger

So, good day. And in a sense, continuing with the theme of patience for the week, and yesterday talking about patience under insult or not giving in to anger. We might feel angry, but not give in to it.

Sooner or later when people practice mindfulness, they probably will encounter within themselves anger, resentment, and feelings of hostility towards other people. And these are important areas of practice to be present for, and to learn how to be present without giving in to them or collapsing into them. But also to learn how to be respectful of them, to not condemn them or condemn oneself that these states are present, and then to learn to be wise about them.

And then what I talked about yesterday, about really seeing the difference between the thoughts that have to do with other things, other people that take us away from our present moment experience. That's such an important discovery because you really see that difference. And then to be able to appreciate the value of presence, the value of being right here and not going into stories and ideas that are not here.

This allows for a possibility, a very important possibility of, in a certain way, becoming larger than our angers, larger than our resentments. So rather than figuring out how to let go of them or how not to have them, we learn not to be a victim of them. We learn not to inhabit them or let them take over. And this idea of becoming big, it's a way of inhabiting our experience with a fullness. Inhabiting it without these ideas of other, but also these ideas that we carry about ourselves that diminish us. That make us feel like we're less than, or inadequate, or wrong. Or even the ideas that "I'm right" is a kind of narrowing and limiting of who we are.

And as we sit in mindfulness, sit and practice and breathe, and learn to recognize these thoughts of other, these thoughts about oneself that limit us, that box us in, that put us into a becoming, being someone. And it isn't that we need to become no one and nobody, but we don't want to be limited by these ideas. And so to learn to shed the limiting ideas is part of the advantage of letting go of thoughts and coming back to here and inhabiting here so that there is a fullness here.

So to feel careful with the posture you take, or caring about the posture you assume for meditation. That it's a posture that maybe in some kind of way would allow you to inhabit your largeness, your fullness. Not a posture that there's even the slightest tendency to collapse or shrink, but more of an uprising. Especially for sitting upright, really inhabiting that uprightness. Sometimes if you're sitting with a backrest it's helpful to readjust a little bit so that you're sitting a little bit straighter.

To gently close the eyes. And entering into the fullness of ourselves can be helped by this deep breathing at the beginning of this meditation. Not forcefully, not a way of activating ourselves so much as inhabiting a fullness of being. Taking a deep breath in which expands the chest and lifts the shoulders, maybe expands the belly, so physically we become a little larger. But to use that largeness to become more embodied here.

And on the exhale, long, relaxed letting go. To let go of thoughts, to let go of ideas, opinions. And some of your thoughts and ideas maybe are just fine, but it's so easy to have self-limiting thoughts. And so for a few moments, just let go of all thoughts so that even the self-limiting ones fall away or calm down.

So feeling a fullness of being as you inhale, and letting go of limitations as you exhale.

And then letting your breathing return to normal. And spend a few moments roaming around in your body. Feeling the fullness of your body, the three-dimensionality of your body. The substance of your body. The vitality of your body. A broad awareness of your body that supports breaking free from limited ideas of self.

Self as inadequate or self as a victim. Self as troubled. Self as angry or resentful. All those things might be there, but you can be bigger than it. You encompass so much more in your body, your heart, and your mind. And to sit quietly breathing in the expansiveness of your being.

Maybe with each inhale, feeling the movements of breathing in throughout the body, or at least the torso that expands and fills you. And on the exhale, letting go of your thoughts, calming the thinking mind. Preoccupation with thoughts interferes with feeling or sensing the fullness, the largeness of our being.

That is sometimes experienced better with the eyes closed, because it frees us from the thoughts and ideas we might have about who we are. And we allow ourselves to feel our being from the inside out. Expansive, open, unlimited. With every inhale, being quiet and still to really feel the fullness. And then on the exhale, to let the thinking mind become quiet, soft, gentle.

Coming back into the fullness of your being that is lost when you're involved in thinking. The fullness of being that might reveal to you what is lost when you're preoccupied in thought.

And as you meditate, if you can find within a sense of confidence. Or maybe finding the place in your body that you most associate with confidence. Maybe infinitesimally adjusting your posture so the posture expresses confidence. And then breathe with the confidence. Breathe through the place that confidence lives in you.

Perhaps allowing your thinking mind to be quiet, or not taken away by taking a few moments to assume that it's okay for you to sit quietly with a quiet sense of confidence in the fullness of your being.

And imagining that any resentments you have slide off your fullness of being, slide off your confidence like drops of water slide off a lotus leaf. Not holding on to any resentments, not holding on to any anger. Not denying its presence, but not inhabiting the resentment. Letting it be like drops running off the sides of a leaf.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting. To appreciate that this practice that we do can help us to be free, or unstuck, unlimited by anger or resentments. That it can give us a very different relationship where we're not living in the anger or living in the resentments. And perhaps we can even let go of them. And in doing so, become someone who is safer for the world. Someone for whom others do not need to fear because of their anger, resentment.

And in this way, this is one way that we can benefit the world from our meditation practice. So that we don't impose, assert our anger onto others, our hostility. And may it be that our practice is for the welfare and happiness of others. May it be that we consider how this practice and how we grow and develop in the meditation, how it can live in the world to make the world a better place. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Patience (4 of 6) Forgiveness

So that guided meditation was meant to support the topic I'll talk about now. Another aspect of patience, or this Pali word khanti^[1], and that is forgiveness. Forgiveness of insult. And forgiveness is held up as being a great ideal, a wonderful thing to be able to do, and of course it's not easy. And there can be protests of all kinds. And there can even be some ways of practicing forgiveness which are not so healthy, not appropriate.

Even so, in the Buddhist sense of forgiveness, forgiveness involves two primary things. It involves letting go of resentment, letting go of anger towards someone, or that hostility for others. That's the first thing. And the second thing it involves opening up our goodwill to others, opening our hearts, becoming friendly or well-wishing for others in a genuine way.

And we don't have to be loving. That's why maybe loving-kindness can seem like a little bit too high of an ideal. You know, it's hard to love everyone. But it's possible to open our hearts and have goodwill, to wish people well, maybe from a distance. And those two movements—letting go of anger and then opening up the heart to include, to let other people be in our heart, to be a heart open to them—that is goodwill.

And the first one, letting go of anger. One of the reasons to do it is for your own sake, so that you don't harm yourself. Resentment is a simmering suffering. It's a simmering injury that we do to ourselves. And anger towards someone, anger because someone has done something to us that maybe is long past the actual event, is a kind of injuring yourself.

There's a story that Jack Kornfield^[2] tells of two former prisoners. And one of them says to the other, "Have you forgiven your captors?" And the second one says, "No, never. They did horrible things to me." And then the first one says, "Well then, they still have you in prison."

So to be trapped in anger and resentment is a kind of prison, and it limits ourselves. And I've known people who've had resentment for years until they realized that the person they're resenting had gone on with their life, and maybe even forgotten who they were. And so the only one who was being harmed by the resentment was themselves. And they said, "Wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense to live this way. In some ways, I'm doing my enemy a favor by continuing to put salt in the wound." So learning to let go of anger, or at least put it aside. Learning to let go of being a victim, or at least not being the victim, not inhabiting it, making that our identity, where the whole definition of who we are becomes built around the injury that we received.

And so this idea of meditating as a way of reclaiming a fullness of being, reclaiming a largeness. We discover in meditation how much our thoughts, ideas, concepts, and judgments that we have make us smaller, limit us, keep us in check, keep us bounded, keep us caught sometimes even in a kind of prison. And so to learn to let go of thoughts, learn to see thoughts and let them move aside, or learning to become more embodied, more fully alive, fully inhabiting our life.

So that maybe we still have resentments and angers, but they get pushed a little bit to the side. They are appendages to who we are, not who we are. They become maybe like a jacket we wear. It still has a role and is present, and we can't deny that it's there. But we are not our jacket; we are so much more. And so to begin to shift our relationship to anger, to resentment, so that we're not caught by it.

And this, of course, is a slow process; it is not done automatically or quickly. But even the idea, even the wish, the dedication to no longer be caught by anger, resentment, to work with it and find a way through it, is the beginning of becoming larger. It's the beginning of becoming free. And to appreciate that out there, there's some freedom, there's some taking agency, there's a stepping away from it and becoming more.

So this ability to let go of anger and resentment, and there might be all kinds of othering thoughts that keep us trapped in the anger. Like, "I can't do the person who hurt me a favor," or "I can't condone them," or "I can't let them get off the hook for what they've done." And all those might be true in some ways, but it doesn't mean that we have to close our heart to them. It doesn't mean we have to stay with our anger. Our wisdom, our understanding, our memory of what happened might lead us to behave a certain way around the person. Like saying, "Well, if you continue that kind of behavior, I can't be with you," or "I have to be cautious with you because I was hurt before." Who knows, all kinds of things have to happen in the world. But we don't have to be trapped in the anger. So forgiveness then, in Buddhism, is letting go of our resentment and anger.

And the word forgiveness kind of implies we're giving something to someone else. And that makes it a little more complicated, considering the social relationships and the nature of the injury and what happened. And maybe we're not ready to give anything to people, but we can let go for our own sake, let go of the anger.

The second step is this loving-kindness, this goodwill. It's because if we keep our hearts closed to other people, we're also in some ways limiting ourselves. We're injuring ourselves. And to really appreciate that gives us a reason to have goodwill. That's not an argument about whether they deserve to have our goodwill or they don't deserve it. Independent of whether they deserve it or not, which is maybe a silly topic, you deserve not to be limited by your thoughts, by your contractions, by how you are limited. And so for you to open up the heart works so much better when there's goodwill; it's freer, it breathes easier. So to find that, it's not easy to do this, but this is a practice to find, "Okay, where can I have the goodwill?"

And if those two things can be done—letting go of anger and having goodwill—in shorthand we can call that forgiveness. And then the forgiveness practice of Buddhism maybe is more accessible. Sometimes we forgive others for how they've harmed us, and some people will do that in meditation practice and even have words they say that classically would be something like, "For whatever harm others have done me, intentionally or unintentionally, I now forgive them." And now when you hear that word forgive, you understand it to be letting go of anger and opening your goodwill.

It also can be a beautiful thing to request forgiveness. Often we have to be large enough, big enough to let go of our conceit, let go of a certain kind of negative pride, to ask for forgiveness. And so it's a beautiful thing sometimes: "For whatever ways that I have harmed you intentionally or unintentionally, please forgive me." And the person we're asking, maybe they can understand what it means is: "Please don't hold your anger against me. It isn't that you have to approve what I've done or get me off the hook entirely for what I've done that might have hurt you. There might be consequences. But it's kind of like asking, please, could you accept me again without your anger, and offer some level of goodwill as we find our way forward with the challenges we have?"

And then also towards oneself: "For whatever ways that I have harmed myself, knowingly and unknowingly, may I forgive myself." And for some people, this is the most difficult one. But the "I" that does the forgiving is the "I" that is beginning to discover how not to be limited, small, being the victim, but actually begins to breathe freely and openly and holds everything. It makes space for all of who we are. It's coming from a place of strength and largeness, of great capacity to be present for our experience without being caught in it.

And so as we practice mindfulness, we are slowly over time developing a greater capacity, greater strength, greater sense of unlimited quality and confidence here. That all the things that detract from that, they don't necessarily go away, but they become smaller. They become appendages. They become something which we take into account, we're wise about, we're caring about, we're compassionate about, but we're not defined by it.

And to not be defined by the things that limit us is a fantastic thing. And maybe it helps us to live a life where we're ready to forgive, ready to let go, to not live in the anger, not live with resentment, and to open to goodwill for the world. And what a great thing to become someone who's safe for others. They don't have to be afraid of our resentment, but they know they live with our goodwill.

May we live in this world offering goodwill to all that we meet. Thank you.