Taking care of our anger

After this week’s election news, many of us are holding some pretty heavy emotions—whether it be grief, anxiety, anger, powerlessness or even numbness.

And based on the writing of all the progressive organizers and leftists I follow, it seems like we need to take care of these strong emotions if we want to redirect our actions to help build power in the coming months and years ahead.

Josh Hill and Kelly Hayes, two leftist organizers that I respect enormously, separately wrote this morning about the amount of people they’re seeing on social and mainstream media playing the blame game in this vulnerable political hour.

Hayes reminds us that “Determined, organized people have toppled dictators, ended oppressive institutions, including chattel slavery, and freed each other from the clutches of carceral systems. In dark times, people have always found ways to make their own light. That work is now upon us. To undertake it, many of us must face feelings we’d rather avoid.”

What are these feelings? Outrage and despair.

Hayes goes on to say: “People who cannot self-regulate emotionally or engage in principled disagreement will not create stable, sustainable movements.”

Hayes says she isn’t asking folks to suppress their anger or hold it inside. Processing and venting anger is good—but to an extent. We must not become addicted to our rage.

The reality is while anger might feel good in the moment and sustain our activism for bursts of time, it is ultimately corrosive to our heart and worldview, and weakens our capacity to act, bring people in, and build the movement that is needed.

Another thing is going on—for many of us who identify as activists, our anger is usually a signal we rely on to tell us we are witnessing injustice. We also often rely on anger for spurts of courage. And we must have humility to know that anger can both clarify and cloud our perception, especially if we don’t have a strong relationship to taking care of it.

Let me be clear—taking care of our anger does not mean we pacify ourselves into indifference and inaction. Or that we do not hold principled moral convictions. 

We don’t take care of our anger to prioritize others' comforts. 

We take care of our anger so we can end oppression.

So we don’t organize from an emotion that will run us into the ground and inevitably exhaust us. 

We take care of our hearts so we can act with buoyancy, a life-giving force that no person, institution, or administration can hinder.

Mindfulness and Western Buddhist institutions have gotten a lot of well deserved flack this past year for their silence against genocide. For their inability to hold the rightful rage of so many practitioners who see the clear inconsistency between a tradition whose first ethical precept is “to not kill,” but an inability to speak boldly against the slaughter of Palestinians.

Many practitioners have been silenced, ignored, or punished by these institutions. Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of the most well respected Buddhist scholars of our time, did not have an essay published by Lion’s Roar and Tricycle—two of the most prominent Western Buddhist magazines—for his call for a ceasefire last October. 

Beyond these institutional ethical failures, we cannot forget what the dharma (the teachings of the Buddha, again not institutions or teachers) can offer us in our existential despair, and how that ultimately emboldens our inner and outer capacity for activism and organizing. 

What do I mean by that?

The Buddha gave very detailed and specific teachings on how anger is a defilement. Along with grasping outcomes and ignoring reality—it is one of three kleshas or poisons that hinder our capacity to cultivate spiritual liberation. 

Buddhism offers two methods to work with these defilements: 

First, it offers the practice of meditation to take care of these habits of mind, to notice the way they manifest in our body, shape our perceptions, and inform our actions. For many, what is under anger is grief. And when grief is not tended to it hardens into disillusionment, nihilism, and depression. 

Second, it offers ethical training—to not kill, steal, lie, gossip, speak harshly, or consume what is intoxicating—as behavioral guidelines to not manifest the defilements in our daily life. Sitting down and meditating is the easy part. Maintaining the continuity of mindfulness, discipline, and brutal honesty required to apply the precepts in your daily life is what transforms your life and activism.

Western Buddhism has often overemphasized the first method and its importance—and so not enough meditators and dharma-informed activists take the precepts seriously. 

The precepts are not meant to moralize behavior—they are meant to dissolve the ego which justifies rage and righteousness over the much more difficult work of facing the emotions we want to avoid. Our ego loves the satisfaction of being right, the game of praise and blame. It loves purity, excommunication, and punishment.

If we are to take the failures of Democratic party and the progressive left—and what is at stake to heart—we must take care of our anger and communicate in a way that empowers one another to take action. The reality is—we need a life-giving force more powerful than anger to build, organize, and win. 

As Josh Hill recommends, find a political home, mutual aid group, or some form of organization where you can develop your understanding of power and do the explicit work in and outside electoral politics. 

And take a nonviolent communication class, go on a meditation retreat, read a dharma book, speak to your therapist, take a bath, hug a friend and weep. 

Please take care of yourself and each other.

With love,
Adriana

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