The phrase “anger meditation” may seem like an oxymoron for many people.  Our stereotype of someone who meditates is that he is peaceful and calm, certainly not angry.  

In Buddhism, anger is one of the “three poisons” – so presumably it is something that meditation—the primary practice of Buddhism—is designed to extract or to remedy.  Indeed, many people take up meditation explicitly in order to become calmer and less angry. And the Dalai Lama has said that he no longer experiences anger … which makes him either a wonderful role model or an impossible one.

The relationship between meditation and anger is quite complicated, however. Trying to avoid anger tends to backfire.  Repressed anger can be quite toxic, for both the angry person and everyone around him.  And unfortunately, many Westerners have some problems around anger.

I don’t know if Westerners are more prone to anger, or have just been raised in an angrier, more stressful, society. I suspect that we live in a society that is needier and greedier, and so we have more issues about having our needs met, which can lead to anger.

Whatever the causes, it seems that in the West, many people do unconsciously try to use meditation as an escape from feeling their anger, hoping to get into a spiritual state that they believe is free of anger.  The ideal of being a blissed-out monk is just so attractive for someone who has anger issues.

In spiritual communities, there can even be a kind of social stigma against anger, which goes something like this:  if you’re angry, you mustn’t be enlightened, so therefore it’s best to avoid or downplay or try to circumvent your anger. Any system that seems to value “loving kindness” so much is in danger of subtly discouraging anger. So the suppression of anger—for people who already had a problem with anger—becomes even stronger.

I don’t want one-moment meditation, or any kind of meditation, to be used as an escape from the truth of our lives, even if that truth is an angry one. Anger has value. An upsurge of anger can be thought of as a very important message, but one that is delivered by a very challenging messenger. Anger contains energy and insight that can be extremely useful, and it often protects an important aspect of our personality. Peacefulness is of course a goal of meditation, and does seem to result from practicing meditation, but it mustn’t be a “detached” peacefulness.  It must have vitality. 

In my years working as a psychotherapist, for example, I observed that many people recovering from depression needed, as a first step, to reclaim their ability to get angry. Long ago, they had put a lid on their anger, and in closing that lid, had shut out all their other feelings as well. Without the ability to experience anger, they had no ability to experience joy, enthusiasm, or passion.

Some therapeutic traditions encourage people to express their anger fully, even exaggerating it, in a safe and contained space, as a way to discover, explore, release, and move beyond it.  Many anger management techniques advise actually learning to separate from anger, to step back from it, or to put it aside.  And of course meditation—which is a quiet, inward way of working with oneself—does tend to help people become more inherently peaceful. 

The Anger Meditation combines elements of all these approaches. Instead of venting your anger, or expressing it therapeutically, or dumping it on someone, you work on it internally, as you might in meditation. But to make sure that you are not separating from it, or “trying to become peaceful,” or running away from the anger, or rejecting it as “unspritual,” you embrace it—quite consciously—as valuable.