Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. This guided meditation led by Thubten Chodron teaches five practical approaches to dissolving anger by shifting perspective. Rather than suppressing anger, she guides listeners to examine whether criticism is valid by checking content alone; assess whether a situation can be changed through action; trace the roots of conflict back to one’s own behaviour and karmic causes; take responsibility instead of blaming others; and most powerfully, step into the other person’s viewpoint to recognize their suffering and needs. Throughout, she emphasizes that understanding how our own confusion and self-centeredness created harmful karmic imprints allows us to let go of resentment without blame, habituate ourselves to a wiser lens, and genuinely learn from difficult life situations. Suited to anyone working with anger and seeking Buddhist tools for emotional transformation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 42 GM.mp3
UUID: a9138429-0388-4e7e-ae9e-33e8b29466bd
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~1,161
Now we’ll meditate on a few different ways to think in order to generate patience. So remember that being patient doesn’t mean that we are passive because we can be patient inside and then externally be very active or externally be very peaceful. But the patience is a very calm and clear state of mind. And so as we apply the antidote to our anger, we’re not trying to suppress the anger. What we’re trying to do is look at the situation in a different way so that our anger dissolves, so that there’s no anger to repress or express.
So first, think of a situation in which you got criticized and got angry as a result of it. Now if somebody tells us that we have a nose on our face, we don’t get angry because we know it’s true. And if somebody tells us we have a horn growing out of our head, we also don’t get angry because we know that it’s not true. So thinking back on the situation when you got criticized, check if the criticism was valid or not. Don’t pay so much attention to how the person said it, their vocabulary, or their tone of voice.
Just think of the content. Was the criticism valid? Did you make a mistake or not? So if the criticism the other person gave us was valid, it’s like them saying that we have a nose on our face. What they said was true.
There’s no reason to be angry about it. On the other hand, if they criticized us for something we didn’t do, it’s like them saying that we had a horn on our head. And, again, we know that’s not true, so there’s no reason to be angry because we know that the person’s misinformed. So try and apply that way of thinking to your own situation so that you can let go of the anger after having been criticized. Now think of another situation in which you got angry, maybe because something didn’t work out the way you wanted it to.
And then ask yourself, can I do something about this? If we can do something to change the situation, then there’s no reason to get angry because we can act and change it. On the other hand, if we cannot change the situation and there’s nothing that could be done, it’s completely useless to get angry. So look at that specific incident in your life and try that way of thinking. If I can do something, no reason to be angry.
If I can’t do anything to change it, also no reason to be angry. It’s useless. Might as well accept the situation and learn to work with it. Now think of yet another situation in which you got angry. It’s very helpful to take things out of the closet that we haven’t really resolved yet and practice these techniques on them in our meditation.
So as you think of that situation in the past when you got angry, observe what actions did you do that prompted that disagreement or that got you involved in that situation. So just look at what you said or did immediately preceding are the causes in this life that you can see led you to get involved in the situation. And the purpose of doing this is that sometimes we can see that it’s our own attachment that got us involved in the situation to start with. Or sometimes we can see that it was our own behavior that caused the misunderstanding or the other person’s upset. And when we see that we are one player in the conflict, then automatically, we stop blaming the other person as being responsible for the whole thing.
Also, look a little deeper and recognize that anytime we’re in a situation that is unpleasant or where we’re harmed, it’s due to actions that we’ve done ourselves, usually in a previous life, that have been harmful to others. So if we had not acted negatively in the past, we would not have left that karmic imprint on our mind, which ripened into the present situation of suffering. And so by understanding how our own misconstrued or deluded action is the principal source of the suffering and pain that we’re experiencing now, then see that that action we did in the past was motivated by our own self centered ness and our own confusion and blame those mental factors. So don’t blame the other person. Don’t blame yourself.
But instead, seeing that our own confusion and self centeredness were the cause of the negative karmic actions that make us experience suffering now, then make a strong determination to eliminate those attitudes from our mind and to stop the negative behavior that creates the karmic imprint that brings the suffering. And so when we think like this, that’s when we actually learn from our life. Thinking like this really gives us a sense that we can change our life. We can change our experience and that there’s absolutely no purpose in blaming others for what happens to us. And then think of another situation in which you got angry, where there was conflict with another person or another group of people.
And instead of looking at the situation through your own perspective and view, step around and completely assume the other person’s viewpoint. And think if I grew up at the time when they grew up in their family and had their experiences and were on their side of the conflict, how would the situation look to me? If I were that person, what would my needs and concerns be in this situation? Sometimes when we do this, we realize that we don’t really know how the situation appears to the other person, that we don’t know what their needs and concerns are. And that indicates that we need to go ask them, that we need to understand where they’re coming from and not just project motivations onto them that we’re not really sure they have at all.
And other times when we are able to understand the other person’s viewpoint, then we see that they’re miserable or they’re unhappy. And since we ourselves know what that’s like, becomes much easier to have compassion for them instead of being angry at them because we can see that their actions are simply motivated by a wish to be happy and be free of suffering. And so in that way, we also are able to let go of the anger. It’s very helpful to do these kinds of reflections repeatedly, always relating them to situations in our own life. And if we do that, we can clear up a lot of backlog of resentment or frustration that we’ve stored up.
And we can habituate ourselves with a new way of looking at things so that we don’t lose our temper quite so easily in the future.