The Answer to Anger and Aggression Is Patience

The teachings tell us that patience is the antidote to anger and aggression. When we feel aggression in all its forms, resentment, bitterness, being overly critical, complaining and so on, we can apply the different practices we've received and all the good advice we've heard and given to other people. But often this doesn't seem to help us. That's why this teaching on patience caught my attention a few years ago, because it's very difficult to know what to do when someone feels anger and aggression.

I thought, if patience is the antidote to aggression, maybe I'll try that. In the process, I learned a lot about what patience is and what it isn't. I'd like to share with you what I've learned to encourage you to discover for yourselves how patience works against aggression.

To begin with, I learned about patience and the cessation of suffering. It's said that patience is a way to diminish aggression. I'm thinking here of aggression as synonymous with pain. When we feel aggressive, and in a sense this applies to any strong feeling, there's an enormous fertile quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved.

So what do we usually do? We do exactly what will escalate the aggression and the suffering. We attack; we hit back. Something hurts our feelings, and initially there's some softness there. If you're quick, you can notice it, but usually you don't even perceive that there's any softness. You find yourself in the middle of a hot, loud, pulsating state of mind, wanting to get even with someone. There's a very heavy quality there. With your words or your actions, in order to escape the pain of aggression, you create more aggressiveness and pain.

At this point, patience means staying sharp: you stop and wait. You also have to keep quiet, because if you say anything, it will be aggressive, even if you say, "I love you".

Once, when I got very angry with a colleague of mine, I called him on the phone. I don't even remember now what I was angry about, but at the time I couldn't sleep because I was so furious. I tried to meditate with my anger and work with it and practice with it, but nothing helped, so I just got up in the middle of the night and called him. When he answered the phone, all I said was, "Hi, Yeshe". But he immediately asked, "Did I do something wrong?" I thought I would very gently cover up what I was really feeling and say something nice about the bad things he had done, whatever they were. But just from the tone of my greeting to him, he knew. That's how it is with aggression: you can't even speak, because everyone will feel the vibrations. No matter what's coming out of your mouth, it's as if you're sitting on top of a barrel of dynamite and it's vibrating.

Patience has a lot to do with staying sharp at that point and just waiting: not speaking or doing anything. On the other hand, it also means being completely and totally honest with yourself about the fact that you're furious. You're not suppressing anything. Patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle and honest relationship with yourself. If you wait and don't feed your discursive thinking, you can be sincere about the fact that you're angry. But at the same time, you can keep abandoning the inner dialogue. In that dialogue you're blaming and criticizing, and then probably feeling guilty and beating yourself up about it. It's torturous, because you feel bad about being so angry while at the same time you really get very angry and can't let go. It's painful to experience such terrible confusion. Still, you just wait and remain patient with your confusion and with the pain that comes with it.

Patience has a quality of enormous honesty, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don't react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just remain there.

This suggests the fearlessness that accompanies patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to de-escalating aggression and to the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really come to know anger and how it generates violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting. When you practice patience, you're not suppressing anger, you're just sitting there with it, being cool with the aggression. As a result, you really know the energy of anger and also find out where it leads, even without going there. You've expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, gossip, slander, complain, just somehow get rid of that aggression, is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don't get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So you stay patient, patient with yourself.

Developing patience and fearlessness means learning to stay still with the nervousness of the energy. It's like sitting on a wild horse or a wild tiger that could eat you. There's a story to that effect: "There was a young lady from Niger, who smiled as she rode a tiger. They returned from the ride with the lady inside and the smile on the tiger's face." Feeling your discomfort seems like riding that tiger, because it's very scary.

When we examine this process, we learn something very interesting: there is no resolution. The resolution that human beings seek comes from a tremendous misunderstanding. We think we can resolve everything! When we, human beings, feel a powerful energy, we tend to get extremely uncomfortable until things are resolved in some safe and comforting way, either on the yes side or the no side. Either the right side or the wrong side. Or the side of anything we can grab onto.

But the practice we're doing doesn't give us anything to hold onto. In fact, the teachings themselves don't give us anything to hold onto. By working with patience and fearlessness, we learn to be patient with the fact that we are human beings, that everyone who is born and dies from the beginning of time to the end of time will naturally want some kind of resolution for this irritated and grumpy energy. And there is none. The only resolution is temporary and only causes more suffering. We discover that, in fact, joy and happiness, peace, harmony, and being at home with yourself and your world come from staying still with the moodiness of the energy until it lifts, stabilizes, and disappears. The energy never resolves into something solid.

So all the time, we stay in the middle of the energy. The way of touching the inherent softness of the genuine heart is to stay still and be patient with this kind of energy. We don't have to criticize ourselves when we fail, even if for a moment, because we're just completely typical human beings; the only thing that's unique about us is that we're brave enough to go into these things more deeply and explore beyond our surface reaction of trying to get a solid ground under our feet.

Patience is an extremely wonderful and supportive practice and even magical. It's a way of completely changing the fundamental human habit of trying to resolve things by going to the right or to the left, doing things right or calling things wrong. It's the path to developing courage, the way to discover what life really is.

Patience is also not ignoring. In fact, patience and curiosity go together. You ask yourself: who am I? Who am I at the level of my neurotic patterns? Who am I at the level beyond birth and death? If you want to investigate the nature of your own being, you need to be curious. The path is a journey of investigation, beginning to look more deeply at what's happening. The teachings give us many suggestions about what we can look for, and the practices give us many suggestions about how to look. Patience is an extremely useful suggestion. Aggression, on the other hand, prevents us from looking: it puts a tight lid on our curiosity. Aggression is an energy that is determined to resolve the situation in a rigid, solid, and fixed pattern, in which someone wins and someone loses.

When you begin to investigate, you realize, on one hand, that whenever there is pain of any kind, pain from aggression, grief, loss, irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain, if you really look at it, you can discover for yourself that behind the pain there is always something we are attached to. There is always something we are holding onto.

I say this with such confidence, but you have to discover for yourself whether this is really true. You can read about it: the first thing the Buddha taught was the truth that suffering comes from attachment. It's in the texts. But when you yourself discover it, it goes a little deeper right away.

As soon as you discover that behind your pain is something you are holding onto, you are in a place that you will often experience on the spiritual path. After a while, it seems that almost every moment of your life you are there, to the point of realizing that you really do have a choice. You have the choice to open or close, hold or let go, harden or soften.

This choice is presented to you again and again and again. For example, you're feeling pain, you look deeply at it and realize that there's something very difficult that you are holding onto. And then you have a choice: you can let go, which basically means that you connect with the softness behind all that hardness. Perhaps each of us has made the discovery that behind all the hardness of resistance, stress, aggressiveness, and jealousy, there is an enormous softness that we are trying to cover. Aggression usually begins when someone hurts our feelings. The first response is very soft, but before we even realize what we're doing, we harden. So we can soften and connect with that softness, or we can keep holding ourselves tight, which means that the suffering will continue.

It takes enormous patience to even be curious enough to look, to investigate. And then, when you realize that you have a choice, and that there really is something you are attached to, it takes a lot of patience to keep going in. Because you're going to want to go into denial, shut down. You're going to tell yourself, "I don't want to see this". You'll be afraid, because even though you're starting to approach it, the thought of letting go is usually very scary. You might feel that you're going to die or that something is going to die. And you'll be right. If you let go, something will die. But it's something that needs to die and you will benefit greatly from that death.

On the other hand, sometimes it's easy to let go. If you make that journey to see if there's anything you are holding onto, often it will be just a small thing. Once, when I was stuck on something huge, Trungpa Rinpoche gave me some advice. He said, "This is too big; you can't give up yet, so practice with the small things. Just start to notice all the little things you hold onto when it's really very easy and just get the hang of letting go."

That was extremely good advice. You don't have to do the big one, because usually you can't. It's too threatening. It might even be very hard to let go right there in that moment. But even with small things, you can, maybe just intellectually, start to see that letting go can bring a sense of enormous relief, relaxation, and connection with the softness and tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.

You can also see that holding on increases the pain, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to give up, because there's a lot at stake. What's at stake is your whole sense of who you are, your whole identity. You're starting to move into the territory of egolessness, the insubstantial nature of yourself, and of everything, for that matter. Theoretical, philosophical teachings that sound distant can become very real when you start to get a sense of what they're really talking about.

It takes a lot of patience not to beat yourself up for being a failure at letting go. But if you apply patience to the fact that you can't let go, somehow that helps you do it. Patience with the fact that you can't let go helps you get to the point of letting go gradually, at a very sensible and loving pace, at the speed that your basic wisdom allows you to move. It's a big moment to get to the point where you realize you have a choice. Patience is what you need at that moment to just wait and soften, to sit with the restlessness, nervousness, and discomfort of the energy.

I've discovered that patience has a lot of humor and fun to it. It's a misunderstanding to think of it as resistance, as "just smile and bear it". Resistance involves some kind of suppression or trying to live up to someone else's standards of perfection. Instead, you find that you need to be quite patient with what you see as your own imperfections. Patience is a kind of synonym for loving-kindness, because the pace of loving-kindness can be extremely slow. You're developing patience and kindness toward your own imperfections, toward your own limitations, toward not living up to your own high ideals. There's a slogan that once came up that I like: "Lower your standards and relax into how things are." That's patience.

One of the slogans from the Indian teacher Atisha says, "Whichever of the two occurs, be patient." This means that if a painful situation occurs, be patient, and if a pleasant situation occurs, be patient. This is an interesting point in terms of patience and the cessation of suffering, patience and fearlessness, patience and curiosity. We're jumping all the time: whether pain or pleasure, we want resolution. So if we're really happy and something is great, we can also be patient, in terms of not just filling the space by going a million miles an hour, impulse buying, impulse talking, impulse acting.

I'd like to emphasize that one of the things you most need to have patience with is: "Oops, I did it again!" There's a slogan that says, "One at the beginning and another at the end". This means that when you wake up in the morning, you make a resolution, and at the end of the day you review, with a caring and gentle attitude, how you did. Our normal resolution is to say something like "I'm going to be patient today", or some other kind of scheme (as someone said, we plan our next failure). Instead of setting yourself up, you can say, "Today I'm going to try my best to be patient". And then, in the evening, you can look back over the whole day with kindness and not beat yourself up. You're patient with the fact that when you review your day, or even the last forty minutes, you discover, "I talked and filled all the space, just like I've done my whole life, as far as I can remember. I was aggressive in the same style of aggression I've used since I can remember. I got worked up with irritation in exactly the same way as last time..." If you're twenty years old, you've been doing it that way for twenty years; if you're seventy-five, you've been doing it that way for seventy-five years. You see this and say, "Give me a break!"

The path of developing loving-kindness and compassion is to be patient with the fact that you're human and that you make these mistakes. This is more important than getting it right. It seems to work only if you want to give yourself a break, relax, while practicing the development of patience and other qualities, like generosity, discipline, and insight. As with the rest of the teachings, you can't win and you can't lose. You can't just say, "Well, since I'm never able to do this, I won't try." You're never able to do it and you still try. And, curiously, this adds up to something; it adds kindness to yourself and to others. You look in their eyes and see yourself wherever you go. You see all these people who are struggling, just like you. So you see all these people who catch themselves and give you the gift of fearlessness. You say, "Oh, wow, how brave, he or she caught themselves". You start to appreciate even the smallest gesture of bravery on the part of others because you know it's not easy, and that inspires you tremendously. That's how we can help each other.

Originally published at Lions Roar