Unmasking Anger

Many people believe that anger is "unspiritual," a damaging misconception that often causes us to stuff it inside. Spiritual traditions such as yoga and Buddhism can teach us how to react skillfully to anger without repressing it.

By Alan Reder

Chodron disagrees with all these notions. She says anger can be an unreliable barometer of wrongdoing: Sometimes our wants are frustrated or others disagree with our values or ideas, and we resentfully brand our reaction as something nobler, like moral outrage. On competition, she reminds us that former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who led his teams to more championships than any other coach in college history, never pushed his athletes to win. Instead, he urged them always to give their best effort; winning was the after-effect.

Chodron also thinks that compassion is a far better approach to social action than anger. A compassionate mind looks at a situation more broadly, seeking a solution that's acceptable to everybody.

Michael Nagler, a noted scholar and author on nonviolence, observes that Mahatma Gandhi's effectiveness against the British in India came largely from his ability to convert the raw power of anger into something more creative and positive, like turning heat into light. Gandhi developed the ability, Nagler says, from a pivotal insight he had as a young attorney in South Africa in 1893. While traveling on a train, he was thrown out of a first-class compartment after a European passenger complained about letting a "coolie" travel in the first-class coach. Rather than take the offense personally or direct his rage at the individuals involved, Gandhi decided—after an epic inner battle—to dedicate himself to changing the social conditions that gave rise to the incident.

Gandhi found no problem with feeling anger, only with how it was expressed. That is a crucial distinction that many spiritual practitioners miss. Many people believe anger is "unspiritual," a damaging misconception that leads them to stuff the emotion, trapping it inside themselves, says Cope. Sylvia Boorstein says that those who think their own spiritual practice will erase anger are terribly mistaken: "I'm continually telling people, we don't get to be different people—we have the same neurology and physiology and, actually, the same neuroses all of our lives—but we do get to be wiser about how we put them out in the world."

Mastery over Anger
If we're stuck with our anger, what's the trick to mastering it? The ancient yogis didn't have access to the sophisticated knowledge of anger's biochemistry that researchers do today. But their mind-body-energy concepts are a fairly good analogue for the model that researchers apply to anger now; that partly explains why yoga is such an effective approach to dealing with it.

In yogic theory, asanas, pranayama, and meditation comprise a comprehensive toolkit for freeing up blockages at the mental, physical, or energetic level.

In fact, with a growing body of research backing yoga's effectiveness as an anger "de-fuser," physiologist Ralph LaForge regularly advises physicians to recommend yoga to their hostility-prone cardiac patients. LaForge is managing director of the Lipid Disorder Training Program at Duke University Medical Center's Endocrine Division in Durham, North Carolina, where groundbreaking research has taken place on "hot reactive" personality types—that is, people who react to anger more explosively than most. When these same people have cardiac risk factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol problems, and central weight gain, to which they are statistically prone, an angry episode could trigger a catastrophic heart attack or other life-threatening coronary event. Yoga, particularly therapeutic forms like restorative yoga, says LaForge, has proven to be a valuable method of cooling hot-reactives down.

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