Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 36-minute session, Ven Lobsang Namgyel continues his teaching on anger as part of a broader thought transformation practice. He begins with guidance on setting intention for meditation—starting with people you find difficult, then gradually expanding to all sentient beings. He then walks through breathing meditation as a practical daily tool for recognising and interrupting anger before it escalates, with concrete techniques like counting breaths, placing hands in meditation posture to prevent dozing, and the practical option of stepping away to the bathroom during moments of rising irritation. He defines aversion and anger precisely, showing how anger builds from exaggeration and projection rather than objective reality, and explains the karmic mathematics of anger—how a single moment of anger plants thousands of mental seeds that ripen over time. He shares an inspiring parable about nails in a fence to illustrate how angry words leave lasting psychological scars on others and ourselves. The teaching ends with practical advice on avoiding late-night emails, reducing multitasking and television consumption, and consciously building positive qualities rather than dwelling on negativity. Pitched at those with some experience in Buddhist practice who are actively working with their anger patterns.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 anger part two.mp3
UUID: b8cac313-c26f-44b8-943f-1f1cdf477ad7
Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: VenNamgyel Thought Transformation (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 35.7 minutes
Words: ~5,376
Meditation for all of you. Good morning. Good morning. We want to do this meditation not just for these few, but actually for all sentient beings. But you may find that in the beginning, you need to start with a smaller motivation.
You know? So you start with your family, friends, that one irritating person. Even just taking that one irritable or irritating person, if you just take that one, that’s incredible. Even if you didn’t take anybody else, if you could put that one person in front of you, it’s amazing because it’s not what you would normally do. Okay?
So try and always include that one. All the others, easy. The friends, the family, we don’t have any problem including them. We like them. We’re attached to them.
Right? So then you think, I’m doing this meditation on behalf of all of you, and try and include countless sentient beings. Then do the the action, the meditation, as well as you can. So try and hold your mind on the purpose of the meditation. What are you doing during that meditation?
So perhaps, if you have irritability, anger, it’s good to start with breathing meditation. I usually recommend people just start with breathing, because you probably don’t breathe very well. When you’re getting angry, you don’t breathe. Right? And you’re building your breath up.
It’s like short breaths and you’re not breathing deeply. So be very aware of your breath. This is really helpful when you realize you’re getting angry. Go back to the breath, breathing deeply down into the abdomen. So for some people, it’s helpful in the beginning to count to ten.
So you’re counting the out breaths. You know, breathing in, breathing out. As you breathe out, you count one, and then breathing in, breathing out, you count two. It gives you something to concentrate on. Because often, if you’re not used to meditating and you haven’t got something to do, the mind just goes.
You know? So start with something like counting. When the counting seems obsolete, drop it and go to the sensation of the breath. So you don’t keep counting if you don’t need it. And then you’re just concentrating on the sensation of the breath here, breathing deeply down and out.
So I think if you spend some time every morning doing that, after a while, you start to recognize what is healthy breathing and what is unhealthy breathing. This is really helpful for being angry. And like I said, once you start realizing you’re getting angry, go back to the breath. Take a few deep breaths. Right?
If you’re at work, go to the bathroom. Lock the door. Sit on the on the meditation seat. This is multitasking. Right?
So you can sit down, and you just take a few deep breaths. Nobody knows what you’re doing, but you’re gathering your energies back into patience rather than putting all your energies into anger and hatred because it uses a lot of energy. You know, you know when you’ve been angry how you feel afterwards. You feel like you need a holiday for two weeks, isn’t it? So why put all that energy into anger?
Why not put a similar amount of energy into the qualities, into patience? So go to the bathroom, sit down. You can do the same at home. If the kids are driving you up the wall and you think I’m getting really frazzled, if you’ve got a mother to call to come and help you, call somebody. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help.
Go to the bathroom, spend a couple of minutes just gathering your energies, and come back. Because particularly children can be really tiring. Relationships can be tiring. You know? Every day you come home, you can bicker, bicker, bicker.
Why didn’t you do that? Why didn’t you do that? And then they say this, and you say that. And just this low level antagonism can be really tiring. So we might not say it’s anger, but it’s low level anger, and it’s extremely exhausting.
Okay? So you need, this motivation. You need this practice. Every day I’m going to do this because this is the water dripping on the rock. We need to soften the rock of the mind.
Right? It’s become hardened into this practice of anger. So we need to soften it. Do it every single day. About ten minutes, and then you need dedication.
What are you dedicating for? So it’s really good to make the dedication personal. I dedicate for all sentient beings not to experience anger, to experience patience, to become enlightened. So you can write your own dedication, something that really suits your situation. Now how do you keep going?
His Holiness says, you need three meditations, three teachings, three meditations, and I’m not going to tell you about them today. You have to come back next Saturday. I mean, business is business. You know? Isn’t it?
Gotta get you back. Actually, we didn’t organize it that way, did we? We must tell the truth. It wasn’t organized this way, but it’s ended up this way somehow. Yeah.
That the three are precious human rebirth, impermanence, and death, which is what we organized for next Saturday. And we didn’t quite know why we were doing it at the time. I think it was just that seemed to be subjects that we should really go into. But when I was researching for this, I discovered that as His Holiness said, these are the three meditations that you really need. This is what gives you energy.
This is what gives you the joy to continue with your practice. So we’re spending the day next Saturday on that. So talking about precious human rebirth, then impermanence, change, the way change happens, and change happens to our angry mind. We do change. Right?
But particularly death. And next weekend, on Saturday, I think we’ll do the dissolution. You know, we’ll we’ll do the eight dissolution dissolution that happens at the time of death. Okay? So that’s next Saturday.
So then you’ve studied. You’ve got conviction. Conviction. You’ve got determination. You’ve got the action.
And then you’ve got the effort. I must continue. And I need enthusiasm to continue. I need urgency to continue. And so, therefore, I need the meditations on precious human rebirth, impermanence, and death.
So until next Saturday, do your breathing meditation. There’s your homework. One week of every day, get up, sit on the cushion, and do your ten minutes. If you’ve never done it before, do it now. Because if you don’t do it now, you won’t start.
So start and just sit for ten minutes. By the way, you don’t have to sit on the floor. If you can’t sit on the floor, sit in a chair. I prefer to put the hands like this. I mean, it does say in the Buddhist text, put the hands like this.
And I feel there’s a sort of quality difference between when you put your hands on the knees and when you put your hands here. I feel there’s a bit more tension, and you experiment with this yourself. You know, like Lama Yeshe says, be scientific. So put your hands there. Put your hands there.
Put your hands there. When you put your hands like this, you’re, joining the energies of the left and right sides of the body. You’re also focusing the energy below the navel so that you’re focusing the energy into the place where you need it. This is where you need to build your energy to be able to do what you need to do. The other thing is too, if you put your thumbs like this, if you’re falling asleep, you can’t hold your thumbs like that.
I don’t know if Buddha said this, but I’ll tell you. This is what I noticed. If you’re dozing off, your thumbs go, and so you wake up. You know? And then it’s not too embarrassing because it’s really embarrassing when you get into the snoring stage.
And then you snort, like and so everybody knows you were asleep. Yeah? So it’s really embarrassing when it gets to that level. So often first thing in the morning, when we have early morning meditations, that can happen. You can really slide off.
And it’s very helpful to have your thumbs like that so that they fall and they wake you up. Okay. So I’m going to read some inspiring things to you. The first one is not by His Holiness at all. It’s Śāntideva.
And Śāntideva says, it is natural for the immature to harm others. Getting angry getting angry with them is like resenting a fire for burning. Think about that. It’s natural for the immature to harm others. Getting angry with them is like resenting a fire for burning.
It’s like you go out and you’re screaming at the sun for shining or the rain for raining. I mean, this is the way it is. Right? People who haven’t developed their mind get angry. So then also, do we want to be in that category?
Do we want to be the immature? Do we want to be the ones who are losing it? So it’s good to think about. Now I’ve got a story called a bag of nails. I don’t know where it came from, but I like it.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy with a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he should hammer a nail in the fence. The first day, the boy had driven thirty seven nails into the fence. Not much. Yeah.
Only thirty seven. But gradually, the number of daily nails dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence. You could try this with your children. They probably end up with bandages all over their fingers.
Finally, the first day came when the boy didn’t lose his temper at all. He proudly told his father about it, and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he able to hold his temper. The days passed, and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. You’ve done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence.
The fence will never be the same again. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out. It won’t matter how many times you say, I’m sorry, the wound is still there. Right?
This is what’s important. Because often when we’re angry, we’re being angry, there’s a sense of satisfaction about it. And then afterwards, we justify it and say, well, you know, that person deserved it or, you know, I was right or whatever. But we forget about the scarring, the wounds that we’re making in that other person’s mind. But what about the wounds and the scarring that we’re making in our own mind?
We’re not just hammering nails in them. We’re hammering nails in ourselves. Yeah? So it it goes both ways. So the definition of aversion is an exaggerated wanting to be separated from someone or something.
So what’s attachment? It’s an exaggerated wanting to be with somebody. Now aversion, which leads to anger, hatred, an exaggerated wanting to be separated from someone or something. Because the label of unpleasant is very relative and based upon limited information, aversion includes an an aspect of exaggeration or projection. Okay?
So you have to have some projection, some exaggeration in there in order to have that sense of aversion. And then the definition of anger is being unable to bear the object or the intention to cause harm to the object. Anger is defined as aversion with stronger exaggeration. So we start with aversion, something we don’t like, and then we go on from there, even stronger exaggeration, and then it becomes anger. Can you say this again? Being unable to bear the object?
The definition of anger. It’s being unable to bear the object or the intention to cause harm to the object. And then anger is defined as aversion with stronger exaggeration. Then you start to understand where it’s coming from because we don’t start with anger. It comes from further back from that, isn’t it?
It’s this feeling of I don’t like the aversion that we start to develop. We start to exaggerate it, and we project it more and more onto what we don’t like. And then one day, we get angry, and we don’t recognize where the anger came from, all the steps that led to the strong anger. So then the basic problem according to Buddhism is that emotions like anger and hatred are based on projections and exaggeration, not on objectivity or wisdom, and thus are basically incorrect. Incorrect.
So there’s very little need to explain from a karmic point of view why it’s dangerous for us to be angry. Right? If you understand about karma, then you understand that whatever you’re putting out is what you’re going to get back and not the same, but exaggerated. Why? Because from the moment you plant a karmic imprint, it starts to grow.
It develops and it grows. Given the right conditions and the lives that we lead are the right conditions for anger to grow, then we plant a seed, just one seed. We can think, oh, just one seed. I was only angry once. Right?
Today, I was only angry once. Well, here’s the frightening part. You can do the mathematics. In one second, there are sixty five moments, which means sixty five seeds. Okay?
So in one second, you have sixty five seeds of anger. That means in one minute, you multiply sixty by sixty five. I think it’s three thousand nine hundred. So that means in one minute, you have planted three thousand nine hundred seeds of anger in your mind stream. One minute.
Who’s angry for only a minute? It’s not much time, is it? Now one hour, multiply again by sixty, I think it comes to something like two hundred and forty five thousand. Nearly a quarter of a million seeds in one hour. Now do you want to defend your anger?
Do you want to hold on to it? Because the teachings on karma say every seed that’s planted, given the right conditions, is going to grow and produce fruit, which will grow into more seeds, more trees, more fruit. So why does it get more difficult as we get older? Because of all these imprints ripening and producing more results, more more, propensity, more, ability or habituation to be able to do similar actions again. Isn’t it?
If you think about it logically from a karmic point of view, that’s why it becomes more and more difficult. Because I can remember as a child being angry, and I used to say for only three days. You know? And when I became Buddhist and I started doing the maths, I thought I’m doomed. You know?
It’s the Avicii hells or somewhere terrible for me. Because when you’re a kid, and your mother says, you’re not I I can remember what I really wanted to do. My life’s ambition was to go to the Beatles concert. And I don’t know, I think I was eight, seven or eight or something. And they were playing in a big hall, and it was just when they became famous around that time.
And I said to my mother, it wasn’t I want to go, it was I’m going. So I said, I’m going to the Beatles concert. And anyway, I had a part time job. I used to deliver newspapers, I could afford to pay for it myself. But she said, you’re not going.
And I said, I’m going. And she said, no, you’re not. And I said, I’ve got my own money. She said, you’re still not going. And so that was the cause of this mood that went on for three days.
I was so angry. Anyway, they played the concert. And during that concert, people went completely berserk. They ripped the chairs out of the floor. They had the chairs were, like, studded into the floor.
They ripped the chairs out of the floor, and they were throwing these chairs around. And the I remember the front page newspaper picture saying, so much violence at this concert. And then my mother said, you see, you would have been there. And then I thought she was right. Right?
So at the time, you get really angry, and you think you’re right. And even when we grow up, it’s the same. We think we’re right. Now we have Buddha telling us what to do. You know?
Before, we had mummy and daddy. And now and now we have a partner, and then we have somebody else, and so And now we have Buddha telling us what to do. So we always seem to have somebody telling us what to do, you know? And we can have resentment and anger towards that. But you have to develop a faith and a respect because you can see what Buddha’s achieved, and then you can see what the practitioners of Buddhism have achieved.
That’s how you get that sort of aspiration. I really want to be like that. You know? Not anger, resentful, hatred, but I really want to be like that. So patient, so persevering.
You know? So we need to think about the law of karma. Oi. Think think about the law of karma and how that misery that we put out to others is going to come back on ourselves. Is that what we want to do?
Is that what we want to experience? Right? Then nobody wants suffering. So then we think about the methods which not only reduce, but eliminate anger and hatred from our minds. And then in order to eliminate these negative emotions from our mind, we need to think this is going to be a lengthy psychological process.
It’s not going to happen in a day. It’s not going to happen in a week. It could happen in two weeks. You may think miracles don’t happen, but they happen. There was one lady that I gave this teaching to about healing anger.
And during the teaching, because she heard it from me two or three times, during one teaching, she said, it suddenly clicked that you were talking about me. Because she was angry every day, all day. And she said, it something clicked. Oh, this is me. You know, it’s amazing how you you always think of talking about somebody else when you know you’re angry, but, oh, talking about somebody else.
So she said, I personalized it, and I said, oh, he’s talking about me. I must do something about my anger. And from that day, she wasn’t angry for three months. She wrote to me and she said, it’s now two months. I’m starting to get worried because I haven’t been angry since that day.
Anyway, recently, got angry. And then, again, she sort of gathered herself, you know, my principle is patience, went back to it again. I’m okay. I can continue with this. But the nice thing was that each day she was just reaffirming, I don’t want to get angry.
I want to be patient. My value is patience. And so she was doing this on a daily basis. So the day that she got angry, she didn’t feel she’d lost everything. And that’s the important part, isn’t it?
To not feel that you’ve made a lifetime vow, you’ll never get angry again, and then you do get angry, and so you’ve lost everything. Because it’s only on a daily basis, it allows some flexibility in there. So she got angry, and then she regretted it, and then she hasn’t been angry since. And I think now we’re about another month along along the line. It really does work.
And she really was very angry. You know, she’s got a a very passionate this sense of what’s right. And we can think the environment. And we can get really angry about the environment or the whales or, you know, whatever it is, we can get sort of self righteous about it. But also, do we want that sort of anger?
Because it’s still anger. You know? If it disturbs your heart and it disturbs your body, it’s still anger. Okay. You’re focusing on the environment and stuff like that.
But is it about something that’s inside? Is it about something that you haven’t dealt with? And now you’re just projecting it outwards, that you’re tying yourself to a tree, or lying down across the road and, you know, doing sort of stuff like that. Is it any deeper than that? So to begin with, meditation is an ideal method to review the situation in which you became angry.
So this is thinking about meditation in the way of reviewing when you’ve been angry, rather than the breathing meditation. When you’ve got the habit of the breathing meditation, you can now move to this next meditation, which is you go back to the time you were angry and review it. What was happening? The advantage of this is you’re not in the actual situation. Because when you’re actually angry, you can’t have any control, can you?
So you have to wait until you can calmly look back. What happened? What did they say? How did they say it? What was the point you started getting angry?
What triggered you? Okay? So you want to get some insight into what is the trigger point within the situation. And you could find that it’s to do with you getting tired. I think we get very tired these days because we multitask.
We don’t spend, our concentration on one thing. We’re constantly phone, TV, this, this, multitasking, which we can’t do. Actually, you know, even if you have good concentration, you can only hold your mind on one object at one time. But we’re trying to do SMSs, emails, something else, something else, something else. It’s no wonder we’re getting tired.
So allow yourself the freedom to cut down on all this multitasking. Don’t think you have to multitask. Concentrate on one task. Switch your phone off. You know, there’s an incredible device called the off button.
It’s really amazing. Try pushing it. Right? So push off, and you don’t have to leave the phone on. You know, we leave the phone on twenty four hours a day.
Why’d you do this to yourself? What are you afraid of? Who’s gonna call you? You know? The boyfriend that you’ve always been waiting for.
You know? The girlfriend that, you know, is gonna turn up out of the blue. I mean, come off it. You’ve got voicemail and all the rest of it. They can leave a message, isn’t it?
We’ve got answering machines. They can leave a message. And if it’s important, they’ll ring back. Who taught me about the telephone? Well, first of all, what taught me was India because we never had phones.
Never had phones. Right? So we didn’t have emails and stuff like that. Communication was very difficult when I lived in in India. Now I’m starting to wonder about communication because it’s so fast.
Somebody writes an irritable email, straight back, I’m I’m there, you know, right? Send. And then you think, oh, that was terrible. You know? Now you wish you you could take it back, but you can’t.
It’s gone. Used to be we wrote a letter. Right? And if it was a nasty letter, you’d post it to somebody. And by the time you got the reply, you couldn’t even remember what the whole thing was about.
You know, it was like three weeks there, three weeks back, all forgotten. You know, it doesn’t matter. But nowadays, it’s all too fast. So if somebody’s a bit irritable, and they write in a slightly irritable way, you pick up on it because you can’t remember that person and how they look and how they speak. And so then you respond in a similar way, and then it builds this negative energy.
And the same with SMSs. So my advice with emails is put in the in the draft box. If you’re going to write a crabby letter, write it. You know? If it has to be nasty, angry, whatever, don’t suppress it.
Write it. Put it in the draft box, and then leave it for a day. Then go back to it and read it. You’ll be shocked. You know?
You won’t think, oh, whoopee. That was great. You’ll be shocked at how nasty it is, and then you delete it. Let it go. You know?
So the draft box is a wonderful invention. I’ve discovered that I can put things there and then leave it there for a while and reread the email that has upset you and go back to it and reread it and reread it. And you’ll often find after reading it two or three times, it reads in a different way than you first thought. The way you first thought is because you were tired. Don’t do emails at eleven o’clock at night.
I mean, it seems silly. It’s like common sense. Don’t do emails late at night. But these days, people do. They get home tired from work.
They cook their dinner, they watch TV, which is supposed to be relaxing, but you’ve got people chasing each other with guns and stabbing, you know, and you’re sort of like this, and you know, I think I need a drink. It’s also stressful, you know? But you don’t know where the stress is coming from. It’s coming from the TV. The TV doesn’t relax you.
Right? And then you get to, like, ten o’clock or something, and you say, I really must do my emails now. And so with the TV on, you’ve got the computer here, and you’re half between the TV and the computer, and then writing SMSs. It’s no wonder. We get really tired.
You know? And then with all of that, you go to bed sort of really late. You collapse into bed, and then you can’t sleep properly. Then you drag yourself out of bed in the morning. You think meditation.
You know? So we need a better routine. First one is switch the TV off. You know? Don’t spend so much time on TV.
It doesn’t relax you. This tense, irritating TV is about making you into a consumer. Look at the newspapers. Look at the magazines. Look at television.
It’s making you into a consumer. It says, eat this. Buy this. It doesn’t say peace, happiness. It says, if you want peace and happiness, buy chocolate.
If you want peace and happiness, buy this wine. You know? And it used to be, if you want peace and happiness, smoke this cigarette. Right? That was what all the advertising was.
It was offering you the dream of something that you wanted. But you don’t get peace and happiness through it. I mean, if you’re sitting there thinking, wow, I’m so balanced. I’m so peaceful. You don’t think I need something.
You’re okay. You’re fulfilled. Right? So they need to disturb you in order to create consumers. So think about what the input is, The television, the radio, whatever it is, think about it.
Is it doing you good? Because your mind is an accumulation of all of that information. All the books you’ve read, all the magazines, the television, the films, everything is in your mind. And it’s like you put it in the attic. You know, we don’t have an attic in this room, but it’s like we put everything in the attic.
You know, you shove it up there, and you keep putting it up rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. And one day, the ceiling is bending. You know? And you think, oh my goodness. I guess I should get up there.
And it’s full of dirt and dust, and this is our mind. The beginning is the dirt, the dust cluttered such a mess. Who would have ever thought this is me? You know? And so you take one piece out, and you think, space?
Just because one small piece has been removed. Oh, space. Actually, not so much space, but in comparison, space. And then you start to get some enthusiasm for a bit more. I must do something about that.
Must do something about that. Start to dust that off. Move this back. So it’s the beginning. It’s not the end.
It’s just the beginning. And then to enjoy the journey from the beginning, because we’ve got to start, not thinking about the destination. You know? The destination is in the future patience. But the journey is something that we just enjoy, something that we are developing because in order to become enlightened, we need to develop the qualities of recognizing the negativity, regretting it, purifying it, and accumulating positive actions.
That’s what you do until you become enlightened. And, you know, whatever you think of as enlightenment, enlightenment is all qualities, no negativities. Right? That’s what it means. You’ve got everything, and you’re missing nothing.
And you don’t have any problems in the way of problems coming from your mind. There’s no anger. There’s no hatred. There’s no no negativities. So that’s enlightenment.
It’s like the light bulb went on. You know? Thousand watt light bulb, it went on, and it’s not gonna go off. So that’s what you get, but it’s already in there. That is the nature of your mind.
The potential of your mind is all that, and it’s all there, but you’ve got to start encouraging it. We were talking yesterday about the the eleven factors, the eleven positive states of mind. And if you weren’t here, you can ask her. So we have these eleven positive states of mind, but we’ve got a lot more than that. We don’t normally see it.
We don’t usually have an awareness of those positive states of mind. We’re aware more of the negative states of mind because they’re so explosive. They’re so negative. But the positive states of mind, we don’t even focus on them. You know?
The kindness. We’ve had incredibly kind people coming in the last few days and saying, here’s some fruit, here’s some a cake, here’s some incense. Some incredibly kind, without us asking or anything. People just turn up. Here’s a flower.
Here’s this. You know? And do you go home and think that was a really nice action? That was something really good that I did today? And then you rejoice and rejoice and rejoice, increasing the power of that positive action.
So we don’t do that so much. In fact, we can feel embarrassed about it if we say, so and so did this. And, know, don’t tell anybody who it is. And but the bad action, we go into it, and we think about it, and we go over it, and over, and over, and over, and we increase the power of it. Right?
So we need to change that. We need to change the dynamic of it. So we’re late. So I think we’ll have a break now. I think we’ll go to twenty to twelve, a ten minute break, and then we’re going to finish with a meditation.
I think it’s nice before lunch that we finish with a meditation and some, good feeling, positive feeling. So have a ten minute break. Have a cup of tea. Relax. And I’ll see you after the break.