Isn’t it amazing how the universe provides us with the very lessons we need at the very moment we need them? Take the chapter we’re studying this month in The Wise Heart—“Beyond Hatred to a Non-Contentious Heart.” Recently, I have been the recipient of a great deal of hatred from another person. It has been a shocking and disturbing experience, on many levels. But thanks to my practice and to the instruction I’m getting on Buddhist psychology, I am able to watch this outpouring of anger from a friend with amazing equanimity. The reason is what Kornfield teaches us in this chapter: “Aversion and anger almost always arise as a direct reaction to a threatening or painful situation. . . . A fearful situation turns to anger when we can’t admit we are afraid.”
So I look at this person who is so deeply angry and frustrated with me and know that he is resisting experience, i.e., his own fear. He is resorting to deeply conditioned reactive behavior that he adopted when he first encountered fear, anxiety, or insecurity. And that behavior allows him to believe that the cause of his unhappiness is outside of himself. He is assuming that “I” am the reason things have gone wrong for him, when in fact “I” am the reason things have gone wrong (or right) only for myself. The experience he has with me is only a drama designed to direct him to the drama within himself, a message to help him heal himself, his fear, his sense of abandonment, his loss of security. I see him so angry, so fuming with disappointment, so willing to cast all goodness aside. I see this, of course, because I, too, have fumed in the same way. But no longer. Kornfield quotes a famous Zen saying: “If you understand—tings are just as they are. If you do not understand—things are just as they are.” Ha!
The practice for such delusional behavior will sound familiar by now. When we become triggered by an event or a person, first we “recognize in our bodies the rigidity of aggression, the pain of rage, the contraction of fear. We become intimate with our frustration, anger, and blame.” Then, “we learn the difference between reaction and response.” This, of course, is the tricky part—learning the difference between reaction and response. But that’s what the practice is all about. Mindfulness offers us that wee bit of space that occurs between the event and the reaction to the event. It gives us a way to remember the spaciousness we have access to always. It reconnects us to our authentic selves and to right action. I wish in my last interaction with my angry friend I could have paused, taken a deep breath, pulled from my deep resource of wisdom. I cannot change the way he reacts, but I can change the way I respond to pain of the world.
The Buddha said, “If others speak against you, do not be angry, for that will prevent your own inner freedom. Learn to bear their harsh words patiently until they cease.” This is my practice. Along with compassion for all of us who suffer because we’ve killed the messenger and failed to get the message.
