Manage Anger with Self Awareness

I am foolish, I shouldn’t have lost my temper – when the anger is gone, then we criticize ourselves. Zen masters say “Awareness is in the present and criticism is about the past. You cannot undo it, you cannot redo it, it’s gone and nothing can be done about it. Thinking about it is foolish because you are wasting the present, again doing the same.”

Be in the present, be aware, because in that moment of awareness something can be transformed. If one is alert, he may not do many things; in awareness one will not be able to make the mistakes that one goes on repenting. In awareness there is no possibility of repentance, a person who is aware never repents, the masters say.

Zen masters suggest to stop feeling sorry and criticising oneself. They say it is the ego that does that because we feel that we have done something which falls below the image of our ego, our self-image is affected and in our own eyes we feel condemned. To fix it we repent, we say to ourselves ‘I know I was angry, but it was just a moment’s error, I am not a bad person’. We might even go to the person we were angry with and ask for pardon, but that too is an ego trip, it’s to start feeling good, to retain our respectability, to fix our self-image.

Buddha says, if you really feel that anger was wrong, then forget about the past, whenever anger arises remain alert. He calls that as real repentance. ‘Remain alert’, he says, ‘I’m not saying don’t ask for people’s forgiveness, ask – but not in repentance. Ask for forgiveness not for anger but for your unawareness’.

Can you see the distinction? Seek forgiveness for your unawareness, not for your anger. And remember the real problem is not anger. The real problem is unawareness.

Whether it is anger, hatred, jealousy, possessiveness or any other unwanted reaction, the real problem is one: unawareness!

(Extracted from Mind the Stupidity)