Is Meditation Good for Anger?
If you are a human being on this planet, you’ve experienced anger. The feeling of anger can be overwhelming and therefore, unwelcome. You should know that these feelings are natural and not exclusive to you. If you are seeking meditation exercises for anger, congratulate yourself for seeking a solution.
We know that anger is a natural occurrence originally used for our safety and evolution. So, what’s the correlation between meditation and anger management, and how can we potentially use meditation for anger?
First, let’s get a clearer definition of anger.
WHAT IS ANGER?
According to APA.org, anger is “an emotional state that varies in intensity from mild irritation to intense fury and rage.”
Anger is often experienced with intensity, which can make it uncomfortable for us and unhelpful in our lives. Even at lower intensities, like when anger is experienced simply as frustration, it still robs us of the experiences we wish to see in our lives: those of joy, peace, and ease.
What we know is that stress is a natural adaptive response to threats; a certain amount is necessary for survival. In the past, if we were being attacked physically, it may have been required for us to respond aggressively to protect and defend our physical bodies and those of our loved ones. This is what is meant when we hear the term “fight or flight response.”
To a certain degree, anger as an adaptive response to threats and behaving aggressively can be necessary at times from the most primitive idea of fight or flight. However, in our modern lives, this primitive response is rarely required. It is rare that we are fighting an opponent for our physical survival these days. Often our anger is simply a reaction to the psychological demands of our lives.
So, this mechanism for defense that we’ve inherited has become an over-exaggerated and irrelevant reaction.
SO WHERE IS THE ANGER COMING FROM?
Most of our experience of anger is a maladaptive response to a change of expectation in our day. We live busy and demanding lives which ask a lot of us to adapt to the ever-changing need of the time. In the Vedic worldview, anger is not caused by events. It’s caused by our body not having the requisite adaptation energy to respond to a change of expectation in our life.
For this reason, anger can be seen as one expression of stress or stress accumulation. In essence, anger is simply stress being expressed in an aggressive manner.
Essentially, it’s safe to say that you aren’t mad, you’re stressed. There is nothing wrong with you. You simply haven’t had the proper technique to regularly and reliably unstress, which is triggering the anger.
Once we begin to see anger in this way, it is easier to understand the correlation between meditation and anger management.
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When looking specifically at meditation for anger, we know that when we practice Vedic Meditation regularly, it enables us to quiet down our minds and rest at a profoundly deep level.
This is how all the stresses we’ve accumulated, not only on that day but throughout our lifetime, can be released predictably and naturally from our physiology one meditation at a time. Ultimately, this allows us to release the stresses that trigger our anger response in situations when the danger was not actually present, or not present to the degree by which we had a reaction.
HOW DOES A STRESS MEMORY COME INTO PLAY?
When we do not have a regular and reliable practice for metabolizing and releasing our stress through meditation, these stresses get stored in the body. It is said that by our 30s, we’ve stored over 100,000 of them!
When our body is filled with these stresses, we are easily triggered into responses that feel out of alignment with our true nature, which is love. We often find ourselves reacting disproportionately to small stressors, as the back catalog of stress contained in our physiology convinces us there is a much larger danger at hand.
In essence, these stored stress memories can make a mountain of a molehill. We call this “premature cognitive commitment” to stress response, in this case, anger, which we will experience without the danger we believe to exist ever being present.
Often, our anger gets expressed inappropriately and is followed by shame, compounding our suffering. We can begin to mute this response through our daily practice of Vedic Meditation.
WHAT ROLE DOES HAPPINESS PLAY?
We know that a regular practice of Vedic Meditation allows the body to rest, therefore increasing our adaptation energy throughout the day. In fact, another way of looking at adaptation energy is simply by calling it rest.
The more we can nourish our bodies with deep rest, allowing our past and current stresses to be released, the more we can meet the demands of the time successfully. In this way, when we are rested and our adaptation energy is restored, we become resilient enough to interreact with demands on us rather than react to these demands.
This is how we use meditation for anger – by calming the mind and body through deep rest. This saves us from moments when we feel we have expressed ourselves in less than graceful and ultimately unhelpful ways.
But there’s a further bonus beyond rest that we achieve which helps us successfully use meditation for anger and frustration.
Deep within everyone’s awareness is a layer of pure, silent, supreme interconnectedness which brings about that unifying feeling of love, peace, harmony, joy, and connection. We are able to touch upon this state reliably and repeatedly when we have the proper technique with which to do so.
It is through this experience in our meditation we can tap into our source of happiness and fulfillment so that when we come out of meditation into our waking state, we are no longer looking for things in our world to make us happy.
WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ANGER?
Many of us, even Vedic Meditation teachers, do or did at some point, rely on the mistake of searching for happiness through other people, or events or achieving goals. Our natural tendency when this does not come to fruition is to default to getting angry.
Alternatively, if we do meet those goals for happiness and people are compliant with our demands, we get the money we desire, or we achieve recognition, what we find is that happiness is fleeting. When it predictably fades, we often notice the anger will jump in more righteously than before, attempting to convince us of our own deserving.
It is true, we deserve the best. But we cannot access this from a place of neediness. When we begin to flip our awareness and start to attune to life through the baseline of happiness, we can expect any type of emotional imbalance, which includes anger, to even out. We notice that we begin to develop accurate expectations of how the world works and we understand the laws of nature and we interact on the basis of fulfillment not the basis of neediness.
VEDIC MEDITATION CAN HELP WITH ANGER
If you are experiencing anger regularly, it is not because you are a naturally unhappy human. It is not because you are a bad or flawed person. It simply means that you have a back catalog of stored stress in your physiology causing you to be easily triggered and as a result, you’ve made the understandable mistake of seeking relief from sources outside of yourself.
This is why the practice of meditation for anger issues is so effective. Vedic Meditation allows us easily and reliably to come into our least excited state, achieve deep rest, and tap into our unlimited inner source of happiness and creativity.
If you’re curious about using meditation for anger management, the solution is simple: Sign up for an Introductory Talk and find out how this meditation practice can transform your experience of life and you can experience the ease and delight you deserve. Learn more by checking out the latest Vedic Meditation news and frequently asked questions.
