It is very rare to find a person who is free from anger. As one of the three defilements of the mind, anger is an important precursor to suffering. When we are angry, we are beset by negative feelings, our face changes to become less attractive and worst of all, we are no longer capable of acting rationally. It is important therefore, to find a way to prevent anger from having a significant influence on our lives.
When we give in to anger and act on it, not only do we need to deal with the material consequences of those actions, we have also planted a seed in the mind for anger to arise again in future. Based on this, we can see that the causes of anger are the very thoughts or actions that we took the last time we became angry. Therefore, if we don’t want to feel angry anymore, we must first learn how to divert the angry energy so that we do not end up creating more bad karma for ourselves.
If we allow our anger to subside rather than act on it, it will be possible for us to finally experience peaceful satisfaction with the way things are. Our visual appearance will improve, we will have more friends and fewer enemies and, perhaps most importantly, we will be able to make decisions rationally and clearly.
The method for working towards this kind of freedom is to train the mind not to be obsessed with the past. We simply cannot change what happened before, all we are capable of doing is determining our actions in the present moment. If we want the present moment to be good, we need to start carefully observing it and then we will see that the only taint of the present is a mind that is unaccustomed to awareness. When this kind of understanding arises, the angry feelings will reduce. Therefore, when we feel angry, the most useful thing we can do is to point ourselves towards a meditation retreat and allow the power of our anger to propel us towards happiness rather than suffering.