Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Thubten Chodron offers a guided meditation on the third far-reaching attitude: patience, the antidote to anger in all its forms—irritation, judgment, hostility. She begins by examining whether anger is actually useful, asking practitioners to reflect honestly on their own experience: Does anger make you happy? Does it improve your communication with others? What are the consequences of your actions when you’re angry? Through concrete questions about emotional states, interpersonal effects, and long-term regret, she walks practitioners toward recognizing that while anger arises naturally, it fails to deliver happiness for anyone. She concludes by encouraging a strong determination to understand your own anger and apply antidotes to dissolve it. Accessible to practitioners at any level of experience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 41 GM.mp3
UUID: 85056f7f-f8f8-4a8b-b99e-43b24a612bbe
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~630
The third far-reaching attitude is the far-reaching attitude of patience, And this is the one that enables us to remain calm in the face of suffering or conflict. So patience is the antidote to anger, And anger here is a generic term, which includes being irritated, annoyed, critical, judgmental, self righteous, belligerent, hostile, and so on. And anger arises because we exaggerate the negative qualities of a person or an object or a situation or we superimpose negative qualities that aren’t there. And then we want to harm the source of our unhappiness or get away from it. So anger here is talking about our internal feeling.
It’s not really talking about our external behavior. As we can be angry and be very aggressive, but we can also be angry and be extremely passive. So in all these situations, we’re not thinking of how we’re acting, but how we’re feeling and trying to calm the anger that’s within. So first, it’s helpful to examine whether anger is useful or not in our life. Because if one part of our mind thinks that we need to get angry or we have to get angry, then it’ll be very difficult to really meditate on patience.
So first examine, are you happy when you’re angry? How do you feel when you’re angry? Does it bring your mind pleasure? Does it make your mind miserable? If being angry makes us unhappy, what benefit is the anger?
And how do you communicate with other people when you’re angry? Is your communication effective or not? Because remember, communication doesn’t just mean saying things. It means thinking about how the other person can hear what you’re saying and explaining it appropriately for their mentality. Do we take the time to think like that when we’re angry, or do we simply communicate loudly or communicate by totally withdrawing?
So is our communication effective when we’re overwhelmed by anger? And then how do you act when you’re angry? Some people act aggressively. Some people pour out verbal abuse. Some people clam up and refuse to communicate.
Some people get physically violent. So how do you act when you’re angry, and what’s the effect of your actions on others? So when we’re angry, we’re usually trying to communicate something or get a certain reaction. Does our anger actually get what we’re wanting? Because we’re wanting happiness.
So do the actions that we do under the influence of anger influence others in such a way that it promotes their happiness and ours? What’s the effect of our anger? And then later on when you’re calm, do you feel good about what you said and did when you were angry? Or instead, is there a sense of shame or remorse? How much does our anger contribute to our feelings of guilt or low self esteem?
What’s the interplay there? And how do you appear in other people’s eyes when you’re angry? Are other people going to be inclined to help you after you’ve lashed out at them? Does the anger promote mutual respect and harmony and friendship, or does the anger destroy trust that it’s taken a long time to build up before? So just by making examples and looking in your own life, reflect and see if your own internal emotion of anger has benefited you or caused you problems.
So I come to the conclusion that although it’s very natural for anger to arise in the mind, It’s not something that really benefits us. Doesn’t make us happy, and it doesn’t enable us to do things that make other people happy. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. And so develop a strong determination to understand your own anger and then to apply the antidotes so that you can dissolve it.