Difficult Emotions Like Anger And Pain Are Very Powerful Catalysts
If You Know How to Use Them in Creative Ways
A lot of people come to me for meditation classes and many of them are absolute beginners. Among a variety of reasons people come to me, one is not being able to carry on with life in face of difficult emotions like pain and anger. They think that these emotions consume their energy and leave them less happy and less productive. I agree with them. It is what happens with most of the people who are dealing with intense anger or pain. I myself have been there.
How to use Anger
We often label our difficult emotions as bad or evil and dealing with them makes us feel helpless. As a result, we try to get rid of them. It is true for people who come to meditate, they often come with an intention to get rid of difficult emotions. I tell them not to!
In meditation, the aim is not to destroy any difficult emotion but to transform them. These very emotions can help us to achieve great things in life, if used in a creative way. How? Can we transform these emotions into something else? If yes, what can we transform them into?
What do you transform your anger into?
What most of the people lack in order to achieve their goals is motivation. Now, motivation is a very powerful emotion that drives you to constantly move towards your goal. You can very well trasform your anger into motivation to become better, to work harder or to do anything you otherwise won’t have the motivation to do.
My Experiment with Anger
Anger is a form of energy that keeps us unproductive, unhappy, deteriorates our health, accelerates ageing. It doesn’t let us “take the high road”, “forget about it”, “move on from it”. It has to be transformed in a creative way. My experiment with angry was about transforming it into the rare emotion called “motivation”.
When I was dealing with depression, I noted down 10 reasons I was in anger and pain. Then, I did something amazing. I associated those 10 reasons with one small positive habit each. If I feel angry about X, I would do Y. For instance, one of these 10 reasons was feeling angry about an unachieved goal. I associated it with something as simple as “Drinking a glass of water”. Anytime I would get reminded of it or feel sad about it, I would drink a glass of water. I ended up drinking 10–12 glasses of water each day. It became a habit. Similarly, each time a particular emotion cropped up, I did the corresponding positive thing in return. This culminated in me developing a lot of healthy habits like waking up early, meditating daily, drinking lots of water daily, leaving sugar- all these things which only 1% people are able to do.
All these habits culminated into me becoming better and better which took me so much closer to what I call “leading a successful life”. As a result, things improved for me on personal as well as professional front. From “not having motivation to do anything and feeling depressed”, I ended with up “being confident, being more skilful, being able to take action towards my goals, not being bogged down by negative thoughts and more”.
One thing that helped me make this experiment successful was being aware of my thoughts. Being a regular meditator, I had more awareness of my thoughts and was able to identify them and take the intended action every time throughout the day.
Becoming Anti-fragile
What we read often shapes our thoughts. There is a book called Anti-fragile that I love so much. My experiment with anger might have been a result of me reading this book years back. Hence, I would recommend you to read this book.
In this book, Nassim Taleb, the author talks about Anti-fragility- the term he coined for something is opposite of fragile. Something that is fragile would crumble in face of an external shock while something that is antifragile would grow.
He gives an example of Hydra from ancient Greek mythology to explain it better. When one of Hydra’s head is cut off, it grows two back in response. It is antifragile.
Similarly, anger takes away my happiness. I use the same anger to not just take back my happiness, but to multiply it. Any time I get angry, I end up being more happy.
All those habits that I gained out of transforming my anger into motivation, made me a better version of myself. I couldn’t be more grateful for my anger. It gave me a way to become antifragile.
Read more-
