Emotional pain is expressed in many ways, in the physical or psychological sphere. And among the range of human emotions, it is inner anger that causes the most damage. Unexpressed anger builds up in the body and over time causes real distress, sometimes even trauma. If you are reading this article, you have taken the time to look for and find out what was causing you problems. You are in fact halfway there. With that good news out of the way, the second half remains, and here are Yogilab’s tips.

Sun Tzu repeatedly said in his manual The Art of War that knowing your enemy is the first step towards victory. Anger is one of the four fundamental emotions, along with fear, joy, and sadness. It triggers our primitive instincts to react to an attack, an injustice, or in response to frustration.

Anger is the result of the amygdala’s driving force and causes the reaction to be impulsive, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. In an ideal world, anger could be expressed in a healthy, non-violent communication way. Unfortunately, in real life, few people know how to handle their emotions and deal with these situations in a healing way. Anger is triggered, but it cannot be expressed. Or rather, it is expressed, but not always in the right way or after the fact.

What are the effects of anger on your body?

The whole body reacts to anger. The muscles tense up and the heart beats faster to increase the oxygenation of the muscles to allow them to be in optimal conditions to fight. Also, heat invades the whole body and gives the impression that you are boiling inside. Frustration, irritation, dissatisfaction, rage, fury, bitterness, resentment, humiliation, indignation, resentment will make us feel even angrier. In such cases, we use anger to discharge the explosive energy that all these feelings provoke in us. In a way, it is a way of protecting ourselves.

According to various studies, it takes an average of twenty minutes to recover from a tantrum. Except that when anger is not expressed, in which case it lasts forever.

What is the risk of ignoring repressed anger?

Many people think that it is better to keep their anger to themselves. They don’t allow themselves to express their anger and they keep it all inside, and this is called repressed anger. Controlling one’s anger means forcing a raging fire to remain trapped inside. It causes this anger to remain alive, to grow, and become even more explosive which can potentially trigger subsequent symptoms and illnesses in the long run. Chinese medicine recognizes that pent-up, unexpressed anger will have an important effect on the functioning of the liver, causing various problems such as:

• A feeling of oppression
• Bloating
• Digestive problems
• Fatigue
• Depression
• Blood-related problems

It is therefore important to let one’s anger be expressed, but not as a means of attacking others. The Buddha expressed himself on this subject: “To remain angry is like seizing a burning coal with the intention of throwing it at someone else, but it is you who are burning yourself”.

Meditation helps release emotions

To understand meditation, we must conceive of emotion as energy that runs through us and of which we are only the vector. It is then up to us to hold it or release it back to our external environment. This energy is a chemical charge that is the result of how we respond to our environment and consequently the sensations that arise in our body.

Meditation does not mean disconnecting from reality, but rather allowing us to engage with our inner patterns and the life energy inside and around us so that we can become fully conscious of what’s really going on. In the Vipassana meditation technique, the explicit aim is to see reality as it is. This approach makes us more aware and teaches us to see life in a whole new light. Remove the haze to let clarity emerge.

How do you do this? Yogilab offers free online retreats every month to help you understand and experience this technique to its fullest.

Vipassana is the most powerful anger medicine

Vipassana is one of the oldest meditation techniques. This method requires an attentive presence of the body’s sensations and conscious breathing. It allows the mind to clear and calm itself, and to free itself from repressed anger by understanding its patterns. It is a logical process of mental cleansing through self-observation.

We all experience stress, agitation, frustration, and disharmony. When we suffer, we do not limit our suffering to ourselves. We keep spreading it around. This is certainly not a good way to live life. Vipassana teaches us to observe the reality within ourselves so that we can better navigate our lifestyles. It is about letting thoughts arise without forcing or holding them back. Without condemning or approving them, but recognizing them as a recurring pattern that our mind has created as an unconscious response to certain sensations.

The meditator simply observes the thoughts that appear like images in a film, appearing and disappearing. Sadness, anger, and fear are thus welcome as they are. Through this impartial observation, we gain access to the causes of our agitation or dissatisfaction.

This meditation helps us to dissolve tensions, untie internal knots and lead a more positive, balanced life. People with depressive or angry tendencies have been able to end these easily through this practice.

Learn from your anger

Buddhism often teaches us to do the exact opposite of what we normally do. When we are angry with someone, we have the urge to take revenge, and then we end up even more miserable than before. This may look like the opposite of what our intuition tells us, but doing the opposite leads to happiness.

It sounds crazy but think about taking the object of our anger as your teacher. If we want to become better – that is, more patient, more loving, more kind, and happier people – then we need to practice. We all know very well that it takes time and effort to become a world-class footballer or pianist, so why should it be any different with exercising the mind? If we are always surrounded by people who do and agree with everything we want, we will never have any challenges.

In this way, the person we are angry with becomes incredibly precious, giving us the opportunity to truly practice patience. It changes our perspective – from what that person has done to us, to how we can grow from this.

Become comfortable with death

We are all going to die one day. So when a person we simply can’t stand does something that truly pisses us off, let’s stop and think, “When I’m on my deathbed, will I care?”. The answer will most likely be a resounding no. This little hint is very simple, and yet it helps relieve a lot of the minor tribulations in life. We often see death as some abstract, distant idea that happens to other people – the old, the sick, those involved in freak accidents. But this is not true. Young people die before the old and the healthy before the sick each and every day.

When we focus on our inevitable future death that can happen anytime, a lot of things that would normally move us will stop being such a trigger and won’t be creating fear anymore. It is not that they no longer irritate us, but we recognize that there is no point in wasting our precious time, breath, or energy on them. It’s hard for people to understand, but when we start to reflect on this, our perspective changes radically.