To transform our anger, we must apply these techniques to actual situations. During our meditation or reflection times, we can recall our painful experiences and consider them in light of these techniques. We all have a reservoir of grudges that we still hold against others. Instead of suppressing them, we can draw them out and re-frame them. In this way, we’ll be able to let go of lingering hurt and resentment. If we don’t do this, we will hold grudges for years, and sometimes die with them. We make ourselves miserable by carefully guarding these memories, never forgetting the harm we received.
Holding grudges serves no productive purpose. It eats at us like mental cancer. The other person harmed us once or twice—a fixed number of times—in the past. Yet each day, when we remember the harm and become hurt or angry about it, we harm ourselves again. In this way, holding grudges becomes an excellent form of self-torture.
In addition, holding grudges can result in our taking revenge on others. If we do succeed in retaliating and causing someone pain in return, we have difficulty respecting ourselves later. We don’t feel our dignity as human beings when we delight in deliberately harming others.
It may take a while to free our minds from grudges that we have held for years. Replacing habitual resentment with habitual patience takes time and consistent effort. Of course, prevention is the best medicine. Rather than having to let go of anger built up over time, it’s wiser to calm our own mind and communicate with the other person early on and thus stop the proliferation of misunderstandings. If we do allow our anger to build up over time, how can we blame our being angry on the other person? We have some responsibility to deal with our anger effectively right away.
Families, as well as people in tightly knit communities, excel at holding grudges. I know an extended family that purchased two houses for summer holidays on one piece of property. One day, the relatives in one house quarreled with those in the other, and their families— including those who were not yet born at the time of the initial quarrel—haven’t spoken to each other since. Yet, they go to the houses in the summer to “relax and enjoy.” If we asked these people if they wanted their children to be harmonious after they, the parents, passed away, I’m sure they would say yes. Yet, their behavior with their own siblings has provided a model for the opposite to occur. By holding grudges against one another, these people have sent the message to their children that this attitude and behavior is acceptable. As a result, within each successive generation, siblings have quarreled and stopped speaking to each other.
Let’s look at the grudges we have held for years: a small incident happened—someone didn’t attend a wedding or funeral, or someone embarrassed us in front of others—and we vowed never to speak to or be civil to that person again. We keep such vows perfectly, whereas we renegotiate our vows to avoid stealing and lying when it suits our self-interest.
Similarly, specific grudges and the acceptability of ostracizing those to whom we’re close are passed from generation to generation within ethnic groups and nations. A joke is told about a Mother Superior who sent her postulates out to raise funds for the nunnery. When they returned, the most successful one was asked by the Abbess how she did it. She said, “Mother, I must confess. I became a prostitute.” Hearing this, the Abbess fainted. When she regain consciousness, she said, “What did you become?” to which the younger nun said, “A prostitute.” The Abbess sighed with relief and said, “Whew! I thought you said a Protestant!” Fortunately, the animosity between Catholics and Protestants is less these days, but the joke illustrates a grudge that has affected Western Civilization for centuries.
No one doing the killing in recent years in the former Yugoslavia was alive at the time the various parties initially quarreled several centuries ago. The deaths of massive numbers of people have occurred due to grudges passed down from parent to child for generations. Reflecting on their own lives, parents must think carefully, “What do I want to pass on to my children?” Then they should check their own attitudes and actions to see if they are modeling what they truly want their children to learn.
When people harm us, instead of holding a grudge or seeking revenge, we must understand that they harm us because they want to be happy and to avoid pain. They may use confused methods to actualize this, but in the context of their own suffering and confusion, they are simply seeking a way to be happy. Examining our own lives, we see that we have acted similarly. That is, wishing happiness but feeling pain, we have used unproductive means that have harmed others in an attempt to be happy. We all have made cruel remarks to others directly as well as behind their backs, and we have even lied in our misinformed attempt to be happy Looking back on those situations, we can have compassion for the person we were when we did that, because we know how much we were hurting at the time. We can then bring the same degree of understanding and compassion to all those who have harmed us.
People harm others only when they are unhappy. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I feel so great today! I think I’ll go out and harm someone!” When we can allow ourselves to know the depth of the pain and confusion felt by those who have harmed us, compassion—the wish that they be free from such suffering—can easily arise. Thinking in this way does not mean whitewashing or denying harm that was done. Rather, we acknowledge it, but go beyond amassing resentment, because we know that grudges help neither ourselves nor others.
Many of our grudges involve major episodes in our lives, such as abuse, battering, divorce, breach of trust, or financial deception. They may also involve being the recipient of racial, ethnic, religious, gender, homophobic, or class prejudice. These wrongs exist; we have to deal with them. We also have to see how we perpetrate them upon others. I have found that we are always extraordinarily aware of others’ unfair biases about us and equally blind to our prejudices against them. If compassion doesn’t move us to relinquish our preconceptions, understanding the functioning of karma and its effect will enable us to see that every time we harm others mentally, verbally, or physically, we are in fact bringing misery to ourselves.
Not all of our resentment concerns such major issues, however. Much of it relates to more minor events that we concretize and hold onto. As we reflect more and become more aware of what goes on in our mind and heart, we detect subtler levels of resentment. I had to laugh when, on a retreat, I realized I was still unhappy with my second grade teacher because she wouldn’t let me be in the class play!
We may not realize that we are harboring a grudge until we notice that something inside of us recoils when we hear a particular person praised or know that we’ll see him today. Generally, our mind sees such responses as justified because we’ve decided that the person really isn’t such a reliable, trustworthy, or capable person anyway, and we don’t look into it further. We simply tell ourselves, “I just don’t like that person!” However, even such small grudges contract our heart and make us miserable. Think about it—we may have many good reasons for not liking someone and many people may agree with us—-but does that make us happy?
We needn’t like everyone; people have different dispositions and personalities and we may have more shared interests with some or feel closer to them than to others. However, we need to explore why we block some people out of our heart, feeling distaste, jealousy, or unease around them, all the while attributing it to the way they are, as if it had nothing to do with us and how we view them.
When we look inside, we may find many more opinions and prejudices than we would care to admit. We don’t have to agree with or like whatever others do, but being judgmental or hostile helps neither ourselves nor them. When others don’t do things I like, I remind myself that “sentient beings do sentient being things.” In other words, here are beings who want happiness, don’t want misery, and are confused about how to achieve this, just like me. Just as I cut myself some slack, I should similarly be patient with them.
Remembering that everyone without exception wants happiness and seeks to be free of suffering enables us to care about others whether we like them or not. When we look into others’ hearts with this awareness, the petty dislikes and prejudices disappear. Instead, we feel an important common bond with them, for we understand something essential about them.
In addition, by remembering that our happiness depends on the kindness of others, our petty grievances evaporate. More than any other time in human history, we are dependent on others for everything we use and all that we know. We are not independent, isolated units, but live in relationship to everyone on the planet. For this reason, affection for others, simply because they are part of the world that sustains us is appropriate.
As long as we hold onto our resentment, we can never forgive others, and our lack of forgiveness hurts no one but ourselves. To heal from our pain, there’s no other alternative but to let go of our anger and forgive others. Forgiving simply means that we stop tying up our life’s energy in being angry at a person. It does not mean saying their behavior was acceptable. We can still deem certain behavior to be wrong, injurious, or inappropriate. Forgiving also doesn’t mean being naive, letting others manipulate us, or ignoring problems. We can forgive an alcoholic for being drunk, but that does not mean we expect him to remain sober from now on. We can forgive a person for lying to us, but in the future, it would be prudent to check her words. We can forgive a spouse for having an extra-marital affair, but we shouldn’t ignore the problems that prompted this behavior.
Often we find it difficult to forgive others’ mistakes. But we too have made mistakes. Looking at our own behavior, we notice that sometimes we were overcome by disturbing attitudes and acted in ways that we later regretted. We want others to understand and forgive our mistakes—why, then, not let ourselves forgive theirs?
Telling ourselves we should forgive others does no good: we must actively apply an antidote. To do this, we must take out our old grudges and consider their pain, but without rerunning any self-pitying videos in our mind. We should then look at the old situations from a fresh perspective by employing the various techniques for dissolving anger already described. In this way, we’ll release hostility that we’ve carried in our hearts for years.
When others offer an apology, we should accept it and avoid dwelling on the wrong they did. If we continue to hold a grudge after someone has apologized, we torment ourselves, and if we retaliate, we harm them. What use is either of these? Vengefully inflicting misery on others cannot undo the past. This doesn’t mean that accepting another’s apology will instantly free us from all of the ramifications of his or her behavior. However, it can release us from bitterness and hostility.
I met a eighty-year-old woman who, by a fluke, came to know that her husband had been cheating on her for years when their children were young. She told him of her finding and her pain at discovering his infidelity decades later, and he admitted his wrongdoing. She told me, “Initially it was hard to forgive him; but we’ve been married for sixty years, and I don’t want him to die with my hatred on his back, and I don’t want to die with it in my heart.” She released her hurt and anger, he let go of his shame, and they continued to live together peacefully.