Listening to Anger

Anger can be a big trouble maker in your life if you do not know how to handle it. However, it is also possible to learn from our anger if we pay attention to it. Anger is often a very strong emotion so it will definitely get your attention and bring it to the present moment. Once this happens I have the opportunity to ask myself what is it that is making me angry and why. The answers help me to listen to my own thinking in a way that I don't usually do.

Am I being asked to do something I don't want to do? Am I being faced with a reality that flies in the face of what I had thought before. (See my post "the word 'should'"). Once I have identified the source of my anger I can reverse engineer it and decide if these thoughts make sense and if this is really a situation where anger would helpful. After this often the anger no longer makes sense and I can drop it surprisingly easily.

Tags: anger, learning, thinking, emotions