When Anger Turns to Courage
FOR MOST PEOPLE, SIMPLY GETTING through an ordinary day comes with challenges. We manage routine obligations, filter new input, navigate emotions we’re only partially connected to, and absorb the rituals of casual encounters. We power through, but on autopilot—our energy is sapped, our reserves are tapped out. We are somewhat asleep, half-conscious, distracted.
What jolts us awake?
Sometimes it’s an encounter with the unexpected, such as an abrupt change or the shock of suffering, whether that’s our own suffering or that of others. There is violence in our hometown. A devastating hurricane destroys a city. A friend struggles with addiction, and his family can’t afford treatment. A cousin reveals a recent experience of domestic violence, and yet her ex is able to procure a gun. Those shocks snap us out of our hermetic dream state, prompting us to look more deeply within ourselves and at the world around us. It may take something compelling to wake us up, to turn us away from that half-asleep state and away from the easy answers society offers us about how best to live: consume more, compete more, move faster, get ahead of change.
When we are shaken awake by events, the energy that’s often released first is anger. In activist circles, there’s an old adage that declares, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” As free speech activist and writer Soraya Chemaly has said, “Anger … is actually a signal emotion: It warns us of indignity, threat, insult, and harm.” When an interaction, person, or experience makes us angry, our bodies and minds are effectively having an emotional “immune” response. We are telling ourselves to self-protect, the same way blood rushes to the site of an insect bite. It is often anger that turns our heart-thudding distress into action, that pushes us to actively protect someone’s right to be happy, to be healthy, to be whole.
If somebody violates our bodies or our space or our work, pushing past a point of acceptable infringement, anger is what reestablishes our boundaries, clarifies our integrity, and insists, “Get back.” If we ourselves are humiliated, it’s often anger that has us stand up and say, “That’s not who I am.” If another’s words or actions are attempting to define us, it’s often anger that demands we reclaim our own narratives, that we pay attention. If we are trivialized, or lied to, or overlooked, anger asserts, “I am worth more than that!”
The late farmworker activist Cesar Chavez believed that moral outrage could produce change, according to Marshall Ganz, who worked with Chavez as a labor organizer for sixteen years. “You can’t organize a group of victims,” Ganz said in an interview for The Atlantic magazine. “If people only see themselves that way, there’s no sense of agency, no sense of power. But when you tell them that we’re fighting an injustice or an offense to their dignity, they become angry and involved.”
When we see that someone is being excluded, threatened, or victimized, anger gives us a voice. “They are worth more than that!” we shout. I am still in touch with my friend who was the little girl in the previous chapter, the one whose mother’s arm was broken by her own brother, who was living with them. Now all grown up, she’s still angry that her mother was not supported in her effort to change households, and she channels that into her advocacy for children. When she was a child herself, no one asked if she was afraid, if she could sleep, if she felt okay being left alone with her uncle. Her anger is her assertion of self-worth: “I am someone worth listening to. Even way back then, I should have had a voice.”
Anger helps us buck social niceties and point out problems, sometimes leaving us the only ones willing to do so—everyone else in the room may be pointedly looking the other way. That tendency to see and name what’s wrong also contains an aspect of the introspective experience that shows up in many meditation practices: moving past the superficial level of perception, being ready to look deeper than others are inclined to and being willing to honestly recognize what is unpleasant or unwelcome. It’s commonly the angry person in a group, for example, who points out the flaw or mistake or problem that everyone else is studiously avoiding.
The energy of anger can be useful, but how hard it can be to contain! I first met Mallika Dutt when we sat on a conference panel together. She is the founder of Inter-Connected, an initiative that uplifts the interdependent nature of self, community, and planet to advance collective well-being. Mallika was born in India but has lived in the United States for many years. She has dedicated her life to creating a world where love and compassion rule, but at the same time, she’s based much of her work on outrage. It was outrage she felt more than twenty years ago while visiting a friend in an Indian hospital. The friend had had an accident, and the hospital’s only available bed was in its burn unit. On her way in, Mallika passed other patients, women who had been doused in kerosene and set aflame by husbands and in-laws. “Bride burning” was a known practice in some regions of India, an unofficially sanctioned form of retaliation for unpaid dowries or suspected infidelities. Mallika’s outrage at this rampant, often deadly, form of domestic violence and gender discrimination led her to found Breakthrough, an organization that uses popular culture media and community engagement to advance gender equality and social justice. Breakthrough has made a huge impact in India and beyond since its founding in 2000. Mallika has proved to be an amazing and tireless advocate for ending violence against women.
But even righteous anger can exact a cost.
After describing to our conference audience the violence she had borne witness to and the anger that arose as catapults to forging her life’s work, Mallika said, “I don’t know how to turn the anger off. I need to learn to dial it down. And not just me. It is manifest in my organization, in my relationships. I need to be able to develop a different relationship to it.”
Mallika’s comment reminded me that while the energy of anger might propel us to action, it also can be so entwined with fear or tunnel vision that it’s ultimately destructive. There is a well-known quotation: “Anger is like swallowing poison hoping it kills the other guy.” I thought Mahatma Gandhi had said it, but when I googled it, I saw it variously attributed to several others, including the Buddha, Nelson Mandela, Mark Twain, Carrie Fisher, Malachy McCourt, and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I guess it’s just universal wisdom.
I do know it was the Buddha who said, “Anger, with its poisoned source and fevered climax, is murderously sweet.” Most of us are familiar with the strangely addictive quality of anger—the rush of energy that pushes us to protest, to point out unpalatable truths, to draw a line. If we know that quality, we have likely also experienced how anger can become our default response, limiting our full range of perception. Anger can take over, as Mallika said. And it has the ability to cast away all self-doubt; after all, if we are on the side of righteousness, then how could we possibly fall into narrow or circumscribed thinking?
But we often do.
We may lash out from our anger or be paralyzed by it, and neither of those states is known for being a great source of problem-solving. When we dwell in a baseline feeling of anger, we tend to feel separate, alienated, and it’s hard to think in constructive and open-minded ways. Look at any week’s news—deaths far away, deaths close to home, cruelty, exploitation, inequality—how easy it is to move from outrage to anger to fixedness. I can certainly see that arc unfold in myself at times. One of the issues with chronic anger is the narrowed vision it fosters. Can we recognize the best way forward when we are so enraged?
In fact, in Buddhist psychology, anger is likened to a forest fire that burns up its own support. That means the anger can destroy the host, which is us. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a social psychologist and researcher based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in a study of college student responses to crisis, found that “anger, fear, and anxiety … arouse people’s autonomic nervous systems, producing increases in heart rate, vasoconstriction, and blood pressure, among other changes.”
And like a forest fire, anger can burn wild, ending up in a place far from where it started and with devastating consequences. Who among us can look back at our lives—perhaps when we were relating to our children at times we felt under great stress; or when dealing with a parent unable or unwilling to face the reality of their aging; or after working hard at a project only to see it complicated or knocked down by the arrogance of a colleague—and not recall an instance of being so swept up by anger that we said or did something we now deeply regret?
Susan Davis has worked with various organizations within the international women’s movement. Returning to the United States after doing productive work in Bangladesh, she was shocked to discover infighting between local organizations. “It was disillusioning,” she said, especially to see that the leaders of those organizations were creating the culture of competition. “I think it was around scarcity mentality, around power and resources, those things. There could be different philosophies or ideologies at play. But there was basically a lot of unhealed stuff that would play out in room after room. For example, if people haven’t dealt with their own sexual abuse and trauma, stuff they’re working on, and they’re trying to stop violence against women, it just spills out all over the room—the anger and the desire for revenge. And so all the blaming and shaming plays out.”
Getting lost in anger can indeed leave us very far from where we want to be. That sarcastic comment we end an office discussion with soon becomes a point of offense among a broader sweep of our colleagues. An intemperate, scolding email undermines an alliance and threatens trust. For days on end we seem to notice only what’s wrong, everywhere—the tiny burn mark on the carpet, the elevator music, the disgruntled expression on a commuter’s face. Or we rigidly and rapidly categorize someone we disagree with and shift from seeing them as an adversary to seeing them as an enemy.
So often, the outcomes and behaviors born of being lost in anger are not pretty. Alcoholics Anonymous recognizes that resentment, anger’s simmering cousin, is toxic to our inner lives. The case is plainly stated in the 12 Step group’s core text, known as the Big Book, which first came out in 1939: “Resentment is the number one offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.” It’s revealing to look at the word itself. Resentment is close to re-sentiment—sentiment meaning “feeling” and re meaning “again.” So resentment is literally “feeling again.” This gets to the heart of resentment: we cycle through old negative feelings or revisit old wrongs done to us by others. And do it again. And again.
It’s as if each offending incident is captured on a video that loops in our minds. Resentment, in effect, is mentally replaying the scene countless times. As we do so, substantial wrongs grow overwhelming, and wrongs that are slight grow to huge proportions. This mental habit extracts tremendous costs. After all, resentment does nothing to change the person we resent. Nor does it resolve conflict. Instead of freeing us from the wrongs of others, resentment invites those people and incidents to dominate our thinking—a kind of emotional bondage.
And as friends of mine in AA have learned, if we are caught up in such cycles of resentment, what reserve of energy is left to focus on our own recovery?
HOW DO WE move beyond the fire of anger and resentment? In Tibetan Buddhism, they say anger is what we reach for when we feel weak, because we think it will make us strong. So it functions to cover over a sense of helplessness, which for many of us is a nearly unbearable feeling. We want to do, we want to fix, we want results … we want control. The feeling of anger, in contrast to the disappointment and sorrow contained in helplessness, can convey, at least for a while, a sense of power, agency, pride, and righteousness.
Yet eventually, as James Baldwin said, “most people discover that when hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.” In an interview for the Harvard Divinity School’s newsletter, Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens echoed Baldwin when he said, “Anger is always the bodyguard of our woundedness. There’s the trauma, there’s the anger, there’s the rage, but healing is about moving through that. Not distancing, not distracting, but moving through it to that really fundamental sadness and hurt that’s beneath the anger.” Sooner or later, it becomes crucial to directly face that helplessness and pain: it is only when we can see them more as feelings born of circumstances in the moment than unassailable truths that we can start to genuinely move beyond them.
If we learn to not get so lost in anger but rather to mine its energy, we begin to act less out of a desperate need to assume control. We are able to act out of a determined, courageous marshaling of our resources to try to make a difference. As the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi—a tireless advocate for the rights of enslaved children for over three decades—said in his 2015 TED talk, “If we are confined in the narrow shells of egos and the circles of selfishness, then the anger will turn out to be hatred, violence, revenge, destruction. But if we are able to break the circles, then the same anger could turn into a great power. We can break the circles by using our inherent compassion and connect with the world through compassion to make this world better.”
In my lifetime, one of the most powerful shifts I’ve seen of moving from helplessness into courageous action has been in the evolution of the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) crisis in the United States. What first came to attention in the early 1980s as mysterious clusters of rare and devastating medical conditions prompted powerful grassroots community responses across the nation, which then prompted epidemiological discoveries and the birth of sustained and widespread activism. At first, though, people—primarily gay men and intravenous drug users—were getting sick and no one knew why. Fear of the unknown led to isolation and rejection of those who’d been infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), and many of those suffering its outcomes were abandoned by family and by baffled medical workers. But there were also people who responded to this frightening, confusing epidemic with their humanity, who rerouted the course of their lives to care for loved ones, friends, and, sometimes, strangers.
I’m touched by the story of Ruth Coker Burks, an Arkansas woman who cared for hundreds of men as they died of AIDS in the 1980s. Back then, Burks was a twenty-five-year-old new mom and, as was true for Mallika Dutt, was visiting a friend in the hospital. Burks noticed one room had a warning sign on it and that nurses were drawing straws to see who would go in and check on the patient inside. Burks snuck into the room and found an emaciated man, close to death, asking to see his mother. No one was going to come see him, the nurses later told Burks, just as no one had come to see him in the six weeks he’d been in the hospital. That chance encounter propelled Burks into years of caring for men in similar situations, dying and alone. When no one else would, she stockpiled medications for them, tended them, and buried them. In the early days, she went to as many as three funerals a day.
Asked in interviews what propelled her to act, Burks credited God. She also identified a feeling of inevitability once she witnessed the suffering. “How could I not?” she said in a 2017 interview with Arts & Understanding magazine. “I feel people’s suffering; animals, too. Sometimes it is hard to not reach out to everyone and to mind my own business. I had a rough childhood. My mom had TB and was in the hospital for a long time. My daddy took care of me during that time until he died. I was five. My mother wasn’t equipped to be a mother, so I was on my own from an early age. I learned to just treat people like I wished someone had treated me.”
Many, if not most, of those who stood up to this crisis were doing so from inside the afflicted communities. And they worked to counter helplessness with love. Burks recalled a scene she witnessed again and again. “I watched these men take care of their companions and watch them die,” she said. “I’ve seen them go in and hold them up in the shower. They would hold them while I washed them. They would carry them back to the bed. We would dry them off and put lotion on them. They did that until the very end, knowing that they were going to be that person before long. Now, you tell me that’s not love and devotion?”
Another considerable portion of the movement beyond helplessness was accomplished through anger-fueled protest, through insistence that the government change its policies, through screaming, “We count, too!” The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) is one of the best-known direct-action grassroots groups in this realm. Founded in Manhattan in the late 1980s, members of the group demonstrated for medical research, safe-sex education, and needle-exchange programs, and against denial of health insurance for people with HIV diagnoses and pharmaceutical company profiteering. I remember seeing the demonstrations, the sit-ins, all manner of civil disobedience in the late ’80s. I remember the fierce intensity and determination emanating from the protestors. Anger and outrage spilled into the streets. AIDS is a case where silence really does mean death, the protestors asserted, and they refused to be silent.
TO MY MIND, a counterproductive response to another person’s anger would be to tell them to calm down. I would never try to make someone believe their anger is illegitimate. We feel what we feel. And the more we disparage the anger we feel, the more we try to tamp it down with shame or humiliation, the stronger it gets. I can’t imagine talking to some of the people I talk to—a teacher whose student has been killed; a worker cheated out of hard-earned wages; someone whose right to walk down the street, or shop, or worship in safety is subverted; an elder whose intelligence and longing and innate dignity are routinely denied; the parent whose child has trouble breathing in an increasingly polluted world—and suggesting that person should push away their anger. The challenge lies in honoring the message of the anger without letting it consume us. Not because it is wrong to feel anger but because it might well burn us up.
Of course, there is no simple remedy for the outrages we face and the outrage we feel. But it’s possible to forge a new relationship with our anger, relying on its conveyance of strength rather than its reactive quality. The strength is generated in a firm conviction about the innate dignity of all beings and the rightness of our universal wish to be happy. It’s like a dialectic—we don’t want to be lost in a fiery world that never lets us know peace, and we also don’t want to be meek and afraid to take a stand. As the poet and novelist Maya Angelou said, “A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.”
Anger and outrage. It’s in wrestling through these states that we may find the next foothold on the path to personal and global healing.
If we can be mindful with our anger, we can learn to use the energy and intelligence of it without getting lost in the tunnel vision it tends to foster. We’re conditioned to turn away from anger or guilt, blame, jealousy, and so on. Feeling angry—at ourselves, at others, at experiences that come upon us—is undoubtedly intense, and we might fear that intensity will be all-consuming. So to avoid the rabbit hole of anger, our culture teaches us to find safety in repression. But there is a profound difference between recognizing anger for what it is and becoming lost in it.
In Buddhist psychology, they talk about transforming anger into discerning wisdom. Discerning wisdom is clarity, the willingness to let go of our assumptions and agendas to see more truthfully. It is the willingness to relinquish certain habits, like being a people pleaser or a perpetually defiant rebel, to have a more open, honest perception of a situation. Our habit of not wanting to rock the boat, for example, might lead us to hurriedly assert, “There’s no problem here,” while a more truthful view might state, “Big problem!” But in that transformation to discerning wisdom, we learn we can state a different view without the burning.
The founders of the Holistic Life Foundation (HLF), a Baltimore-based non-profit, have looked squarely at anger since they launched in 2001. HLF nurtures the wellness of children and adults in underserved communities by teaching yoga, mindfulness, and self-care. Its three founders are brothers Ali and Atman Smith, and Andrés González, whom the brothers met while all three attended the University of Maryland as undergrads. Since 2001, their work has spread to more than forty-two Baltimore-area schools, serving ten thousand people each week. While HLF’s mission is to promote and spread love, they also acknowledge that anger plays a role.
“A lot of times anger gets a bad rap,” Ali says. “We understand that you’re not supposed to identify with that anger, but anger sometimes can be used to fuel people, you know? It doesn’t have to be wrong that you’re upset about something. There’s a lot of things going on in the world that aren’t cool, and that you get angry about. That’s not a bad thing.” The key, Ali says, is to not let it overwhelm you or stew in you so that you start lashing out; instead, he advocates using the anger to incite change.
“If people didn’t get angry about a lot of things that occurred in the past, the world would be a much more screwed-up place right now than it already is. People got angry, they stood up for what they believed in, they made a stand, and they changed stuff. I think the problem is that some people go to screaming and yelling instead of understanding that you can use anger in a positive manner to make changes that are necessary in this world.”
THE GREAT IRONY is that the mere act of paying attention to anger through mindfulness can actually dissolve its toxicity and reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed by it. This idea is radically at odds with how we’re taught to think about engaging with feelings like anger: either we think of anger as a fearful thing that needs to be repressed or as our only source of strength. Simply paying attention to it can be a difficult concept to grasp.
In my own teaching, students have often asked me if “paying attention to anger” involves trying to be cold, indifferent.
Absolutely not!
When you practice mindfulness of anger—when you feel it in your body, feel the complexity of it, the changing nature of it—you are working toward engaging with anger, and all the emotions and thoughts that arise, with presence and compassion. Then you can recognize the anger, capture the energy of it, and not fall into the fixation, bitterness, and greater hopelessness it can foster.
And so this week, in fact each and every week, I remind myself to breathe.
Rather than repeatedly resisting the anger, we can open up to the idea of practicing generosity with ourselves; we can simply allow the feeling to be there. By creating an environment of permission within, we release the expectation that painful states of mind like anger or depression or fear will consume us. They can arise, and we can let them go. It’s a practice—of not holding on, of choosing not to identify, not to think, This is who I am. This is who I will always be. When we realize that these states are ever-changing, we can direct the forceful energy of anger in ways that are cleaner and stronger.
It takes profound willingness to shift this dynamic. When we do, we free ourselves from the habitual mind-set of meeting anger with a tight fist. We develop critical wisdom about our anger. We are no longer stuck in the idea that we have to meet hatred with hatred, that unthinking revenge is our only option, and instead, we realize the profound freedom we have to make a choice.
HEATHER YOUNTZ IS a Boston lawyer who focuses mainly on immigration cases and has had to deal with immigrant children being incarcerated separately from their parents. The legal world is a highly stressful arena, an adversarial system where anger can be a real challenge, but most lawyers seem to regard anger as an essential emotion in the fight for justice. Heather told us that when she was younger,
My anger scared me. I didn’t know how to harness it, and it would become something that would often start one way and then end up out of control. With experience, though, I have found that anger is a focusing emotion for me, and I can use it well to make my points in rapid succession. If I’m in court and I’m angry about what’s happening, I find I’m sharper in some ways. Anger is like holding a hose that’s running on full blast. If you’re able to hold on to it, you’re doing great. But the second you loosen your grip, it just goes all over the place.
When anger has taken me over, I can have a problem sleeping, especially in the last few years, when my work has become even more intense. When my three-year-old daughter woke me up recently at three o’clock in the morning, she went right back to sleep, but then as I crawled back in my own bed, I had this image of one of the children we’d been working with who was separated from her parents, and she was woken up in the middle of the night by a customs and border protection officer yanking on her braid, her ponytail, screaming, “It’s time to take a shower!” That image just flashed, and that was it. I could not get back to sleep. That’s an example of the anger having power over me in a way that makes life difficult. But I have to find ways to work with it, and one of the best for me is exercise. I have an elliptical machine in my house, and sometimes I’m so frustrated with my job when I get home, I go straight upstairs and get on the elliptical and put on dance music and just bang it out. I’m also very careful with drinking and anger. That can be a slippery slope. If I’m about to have a drink, I ask myself if I’m doing it because I’m feeling frustrated with my life right now or for enjoyment? I have found that there is definitely a difference.
What I’ve seen in my own experience and in the experience of others is that there are powerful and important elements in anger that can be extracted to serve rather than rule us. When you strip away the fear/aggression/territoriality/destructiveness/domination from anger, you have insight (clearly seeing, for example, that something is very wrong or that someone has been deeply wronged or harmed) and energy, which together take the form of courage. You can act and stand your ground, skillfully, since neither is based on the polarity of trying to obliterate someone else. The sense of discerning right and wrong remains, the sense of urgency may remain, but it is all laced through with compassion—for ourselves as well as others.
AUTHOR, ACTIVIST, AND political strategist Marc Solomon came out of the closet as a gay man in the late 1990s. He was, he told me, dealing with a barrage of emotions at the time. A little while later, he came to a lovingkindness retreat I led, still feeling emotional turmoil. He said:
After coming out, I was just feeling so much rage. The retreat was a groundbreaking experience for me. It felt like it was the first time I saw that I really had the ability to direct love and to feel love toward myself and toward others in a bold and honest way, and it really changed my life. That’s when I decided I was going [to] leave graduate school, throw all my stuff in storage, and take a year off. I backpacked across the West and meditated for a year. Soon after that, I started my activism work on marriage equality.
Picking up Marc’s story at the end of his year of self-exploration, it’s impressive to see how those challenging feelings of rage that he could have drowned in alcohol, he instead alchemized into something powerfully action-oriented:
Eventually, I could see more clearly through the cobwebs, and what shined most brightly was how passionate I was about making the world better for LGBTQ kids. I found deep compassion for LGBTQ young people … and for myself as a young person. I didn’t want young people to have to struggle with their sexuality in the ways that I did. A deep sense of connectedness and purpose was one of the things I got from meditation—and continue to get from meditation. We are not alone, we all are looking to be happy and fulfilled, and there’s lots of compassion to go around.
The mechanics of casting anger into an appropriate, productive role can be challenging to master, but fortunately, there are people in the world dedicated to breaking open this sometimes-mysterious process. I’m inspired by those, like all whom I’ve mentioned, who work to harness the energy of anger instead of succumbing to it. This is not a casual or leisurely task. I’ve found it demands vision and a strong commitment to not simply yield to the immediate satisfaction of raging at what is so manifestly unjust or cruel.
Another person who exemplifies this ability to reframe anger is Roshi Francisco “Paco” Genkoji Luagoviña. Paco is an unstoppable community organizer, activist, and ordained Buddhist priest (among other things). Now in his eighties, Paco gladly tells people that he’s never completely flushed away his anger … and he doesn’t expect to anytime soon. He is a man who recognizes his own outrage. He tells me:
I still got anger in me. I’m angry about the injustices. I’m angry about the injustice and disrespect dealt to Puerto Rico for many years. I really get pissed off. I say, “I’ll be angry until I die.” But I also say, “I don’t define myself as an angry man.” It’s an emotion in me. I’ll say, “Okay, let’s see what we can do. Oh, anger! There you are. There you are, let’s have some coffee. Let’s see what we can do: Why don’t we start some demonstrations at Ralph Bunche Plaza in the UN? Let’s get a couple of people.” So we’ve been going to Ralph Bunche Plaza every two weeks, and the first time, it was just three of us. The second time, it was seven of us. And next Saturday, there will probably be a hundred of us. That’s how I use anger.
TO MEET AND work through our anger calls for discernment and compassion, yes, but it also calls for a broadened perspective.
How do we get perspective?
How do we experience anger in a bigger, even immense, framework?
How do we transmute it to a more steadfast, courageous energy?
For some, it is awareness of death itself that brings perspective. As we connect to the inevitable end of life, tabulating wins and losses often doesn’t seem the point. Instead, we tend to reflect on whether we have been wholehearted or not, fully present for our lives and our efforts or not. Paco talks about the radical openness he learned by sitting at people’s deathbeds:
I take lessons from the people who work with death and dying, which has always been a fascination for me even before I became a Zen Buddhist priest—the holy show of life and death. When you’re at somebody’s deathbed and they’re still conscious and they still talk, you’ve got to sit there being present, with no expectations. Because every death, every person, every situation is so absolutely different, if you go with preconceived notions about anything, you miss the point. You need to hold somebody’s hand and just be there. And whatever emerges is whatever it is.
I always find it helpful to realize and remember that we can only do what we can do, even if we won’t be around to see the outcome of our efforts—what Lin-Manuel Miranda calls “planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” I remember standing at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, where the anguish of the Holocaust—the deaths, the destruction, the cruelty—is so clearly evidenced. All I could think was, Some things are more than a one-generation fix. Now, as I bring to mind that thought, something inside me relaxes—not into indolence or complacency but into a steadier effort that isn’t in an impossible hurry.
Sometimes we find ourselves confronting a seemingly intractable problem. We’re overwhelmed and don’t know what to do to make it all okay … until, after a time, we realize we need to do the one small thing that’s in front of us, or nothing will ever change. We sit and remember we are worth something—that all of us are—and we use that realization to give us courage and determination.
The understanding of some things likely being more than a one-generation fix resurfaced for me vividly when I was talking to a friend who lives in Paris. A white man born in France, he was dismayed by his encounter that day with a group of young people. They seemed to be ethnically North African, and he knew that many people that age, in that demographic, were born or brought up in France. They were hanging out on the streets, taunting him and cursing his parents as he walked by. He was both frightened and contemptuous. Later, as we were having the conversation, he mused a bit and then put the interaction into a larger context. “Many of them probably have parents who translated for the French in countries like Algeria,” my friend supposed. “Those parents were promised the earth were they to come to France, but then they came to France and were given nothing, often treated very poorly.” The wrongs of colonialism weren’t going to disappear overnight or in one generation, he commented. As we finished speaking, he said that it felt important for him to try to remember that larger perspective and to respond to situations in a way that included it.
When we are forced to acknowledge that some things are not a one-generation fix, we could easily end up at apathy or hopelessness. Instead, I’ve found that it’s possible for the perspective this realization affords to allow me to more fully honor the complexity, intricacy, and poignancy of the pain I witness. It doesn’t oversimplify it or compartmentalize it. It’s an honest view, and it fortifies my determination to keep working toward a better world.
Marc Solomon shared with me that in his experience over a long career of activism including fifteen years on marriage equality, “the people who get big things done are people with staying power.” He added that
Jumping into a cause and focusing on it for a couple of years isn’t enough, because if you’re trying to do something big, it’s going to take time to figure out how to do it, and figure out how to make the case. And then it still might take a long time before you see any concrete change. My mentor, Evan Wolfson, wrote his thesis at Harvard Law School in 1983 on why gay people should be able to marry, and he didn’t see any gay person get married in the U.S. for more than twenty years after that. You’re going to have losses and setbacks along the way, so it’s important to have a clear vision of what you’re trying to create, one that syncs up with your deepest priorities and aspirations. It also helps to relish smaller victories even while keeping your eyes on the prize. My job working for marriage equality was to put points on the board every single day in some positive way. That could mean getting a good editorial in The New York Times or The Boston Globe, or getting a new unexpected person who supports the cause to speak about it publicly. Those were important building blocks to getting a statewide marriage equality law passed while also giving us the affirmation that we were moving in the right direction.
It would be easy for someone like Marc, working on a slow and multigenerational effort to change the world, to succumb to hopelessness and powerlessness, leading to an anger that festers. It would be easy for any of us with our daily struggle to bring about change in some way. And yet, as we saw with so many people in this chapter, when you investigate anger with curiosity and love, when you actually listen and pay attention—not getting embroiled in either the burning energy or the fighting—you can ask, “Is there something in here? Is there something in this situation that is good or useful even though it’s not all breaking the way I would like?”
When we simply listen to anger or outrage, it has the potential to become a source of enormous energy. When we feel the anger directly, learn it in our bodies, look at the pain at the heart of it, get some space around it through perspective-building and openness, and steadily leaven it with compassion for ourselves and others, then we can mine its energy and use that as courage. The kind of courage that makes it possible to act in the face of no immediate visible outcome. The kind of courage that lets you sit with not knowing what to do, that frees you to do the small thing that’s in front of you. Remember that you are worth something. Remember that we all are. Use that knowledge as your North Star.
WE CAN PRACTICE being with difficult emotions and thoughts, even intense ones, in an open, allowing, and accepting way. For many of us, this is the opposite of the more automatic mode of pushing away uncomfortable feelings out of fear or annoyance, or doing everything we can to avoid painful experiences, at whatever cost.
Very commonly when something unpleasant happens, we project it into a seemingly unchanging future: This is going to last forever. This is never going to change. Things will always be this way.
Or we might have the habit of creating a whole self-image around it: I’m a bad person. I’m a bad mother because this unwelcome thought is happening in my mind right now.
What we’re doing in this meditation practice is looking at the difference between what is actually happening in the moment, even if it’s difficult, and what we add to it in terms of future projection, or unfairly blaming ourselves, or feeling we should be in control of what arises in our minds, or creating a solid self-image out of something that is actually impermanent—all of which can add to the stress and challenge we experience. In our practice, we look for these add-ons and see if we can let them go.
We can’t stop a thought or emotion from arising. No one can. But we can be empowered by our ability to relate to thoughts and emotions in a whole new way—learning not to buy into them while at the same time not unfairly blaming ourselves for what no one at all can keep from arising.
We can have a whole new sense of space and also some kindness toward ourselves when these difficult things arise.
You can begin this practice by bringing to mind a difficult or troubling thought or situation—some situation that carries for you intense emotion, such as sadness, fear, shame, or anger.
See where you feel it in your body. What does it feel like? Where do you feel sensations arising? How are these sensations changing? Can you experience them fully in the present moment without getting highjacked by them or without immediately or anxiously working to make them go away?
If you see those kinds of reactions in your mind, settle back, come back into your body, feel the different sensations being born of that emotion in this moment.
If you find you are adding judgment, condemnation, future projection—anything like that—practice letting go of those reactions, as best you can, almost as though they were birds flying out of your hands into the air. Then return to the simple sensations of the emotion, absent the add-ons.
Bring your focus of awareness to the part of the body where those sensations are the strongest. Once your attention has moved to the bodily sensations, perhaps say to yourself, It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay. I can feel this without pushing it away or getting caught up in it. Staying with the awareness of the bodily sensations and your relationship to them, accepting them, letting them be, softening and opening to them.
Often, the emotion is not just one thing. It may be moments of sadness, moments of fear, moments of frustration, moments of helplessness. Just watch them rise and pass away. None of these states is permanent, unchanging. They’re moving, changing, shifting.
No matter what story or add-on arises, come back to your direct experience in the moment: “What am I feeling right now? What’s its nature?”
It may be that the painful situation is coming mostly in the form of thoughts. As a habit, certain thought patterns arise that we tend to get lost in, overcome by, defined by, even as we resent or fear them. We can retrain our whole mental attitude by first learning to recognize these patterns, and perhaps even calmly naming them: “Oh, here is the pattern of thinking, Everything is wrong, the pattern of thinking, I’m a failure, the pattern of thinking, Nothing will ever change.” Once we recognize them, we can remind ourselves these are just visiting, they are not essentially who we are, we couldn’t stop them from visiting, but we can let them go.
After you finish this formal session of practice, you can explore bringing into your everyday life this consideration: “What am I feeling right now? Am I pushing away or being carried off by emotion or thought?” Return again and again to this moment.