Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance All the Rage (Paperback) - Common

by Andrea Miller

Leading psychologists and meditation teachers explain how mindfulness can help us work with our anger--and ultimately transform it into compassion. Anger. For all of us, it's a familiar feeling--jaw clenching, face flushing, hands shaking. We feel it for rational and irrational reasons, on a personal and on a global level. If we know how to handle our anger skillfully, it is an effective tool for helping us recognize that a situation needs to change and for providing the energy to create that change. Yet more often anger is destructive--and in its grip we hurt ourselves and those around us. In recent years scientists have discovered that mindfulness practice can reduce stress, improve mood, and enhance our sense of well-being. It also offers us a way of dealing with strong emotions, like anger. This anthology offers a Buddhist perspective on how we can better work with anger and ultimately transform it into compassion, with insight and practices from a variety of contributors, Thich Nhat Hanh on how anger grows in us because we feed it through certain habits Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche on while there is always something to complain about, blaming others will never bring about peace or happiness Sylvia Boorstein on how there are no human enemies, only confused people needing help. Pema Chödrön on how when something goes wrong and we want to blame someone or someone else, we could instead take responsibility for our own tendency to blame. Tara Bennett-Goleman on how the first step in dealing with our anger is to compassionately accept ourselves and how we're feeling Pat Enkyo O'Hara on how there will always be a potential energy within us. How we use this energy is the key to how we affect our own life and the lives of others Jules Shuzen Harris on how meditation practice can help us find some space between what triggers our anger and our reaction Christina Feldman on how it is difficult to release our anger, yet it's a much greater hardship to hold on to it Mark Epstein on moving beyond doer and done to Ezra Bayda on how there is no solid "self"--there is no "self" forgiving another "self." Waking from this illusion, we step into the universal heart, the essential fact of our basic connectedness. We discover that forgiveness is our true nature. Judith Toy on her struggle to make sense of the murder of three family members and how she found Zen and forgiveness along the way Stan Goldberg on how life doesn't last forever. If we've done something to hurt others or if others have hurt us, now is the time to ask for forgiveness.

Genres: Buddhism, Nonfiction, Self Help

Unknown Binding

First published October 7, 2014

Reviews

[Ben Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of essays dealing with anger, blame and forgiveness. There are a whole lot of different authors coming from a whole bunch of different angles. Not all of them are saying the same thing, but the overall tendency is toward letting go, accepting the world and other people instead of trying to make them who we want them to be. Within that, there is a lot of variety in these essays. My favourite pieces were from Norman Fischer, Toni Bernhard, Karen Maezen Miller, B. Allan Wallace, Brian Haycock and Judy Lief. But pretty much every essay in here is worth reading.

[yiming · Rating 1 out of 5]

content note: mention of violent, misogynistic language + imagery
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well...this is an anthology edited by a white lady USian Buddhist...i read the essays by Thích Nhất Hạnh and Chân Không, since I've read their writing in the past and deeply appreciated it. I did enjoy their essays in this book as well...that was the only thing this book had going for it. While paging through the bios of the other contributors, it quickly became clear that the book mostly consisted of essays by rich white people. So I was grossed out by the typical white-washing present in most mainstream "American" Buddhism. I came across a bio that I guess was supposed to be funny but really was just violent and scary to me. After reading that bio, I was completely disgusted and turned off and done with this book.

I sent this message to Shambhala to pass along to the anthology's editor: "This message is for Andrea Miller, the editor of All the Rage. I recently read the book and felt disappointed and upset to read the bio for Jack Haubner which says that "he likes walks on the moonlit beach where he has buried most of his victims." I'm just wondering...does Shambhala find murder and violence amusing? Is it a joke? Or is it something to glorify? There must have been so many opportunities for someone to catch this and to pause and say...hmm, maybe this isn't a good idea. It's amazing to me that an organization dedicated to spreading mindfulness could do something as mindless as this.

To me, this seems to be making a joke about killing people and burying their bodies and then walking in that same area on a moonlit night...sort of like the person is savoring the feeling of getting away with murder? Like being a killer is somehow a fun, funny and even romantic thing? This is especially chilling to me since many people, especially women, are killed by men often in a "fit of rage"---or at least that's what people say, however this disgusting image evoked in the bio speaks to the fact that many such murders are actually premeditated and the killer rationales it and even thinks it's okay afterwards. Most of the time when I've heard about someone's body being found on the news, it's been of a woman, either a cis or trans woman, most often a woman of color. I've experienced a lot of violence in my life, as have most of my loved ones. This is disgusting, not funny---and simply unacceptable. I would expect better from an organisation which aims to spread the dharma, which I've learned is about lovingkindness, compassion, equanimity, and reducing suffering from all beings. It's completely beyond me how this disgusting glorification and trivialization of extreme violence is in keeping with the dharma. I'm extremely disappointed and I hope you do better. This is chilling and scary to me-- and yet it's not even just about the individual who wrote this. It's about all the people who went into publishing this book who didn't say anything and let it go published as is. It's about a larger culture that thinks this is ok. If you share this feedback with the author who wrote it, I do not want anything identifying shared with them. I do not trust someone as callous as that as to how they would respond to receiving feedback.

Please do better."

[Thashaa]

"The question comes down to where we focus our attention. If you focus on the negative, that's all you're going to see. If you focus on the positive, you see things very differently."

Just one out of the uncountable amount of advices and wisdom this book contains. This book will be by my side forever

[Darya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adored this foray into anger, sorrow, pain, and forgiveness. Incredibly moving, incredibly affecting. I moved a lot of energy while reading this book and following its exercises.