On Freeing Yourself from Anger

Anger is a dangerous emotion. It can drive you to say hurtful things to others, physically harm others, or even commit murder. It is certainly not an emotion befitting a magician, yet repressing it will just make things worse in the long run. Fortunately, instead of repressing anger, there is also the option of eliminating it by destroying its roots.

Many Bardonists are taught that impatience is the root of anger. Therefore, they spend a lot of time and effort destroying this root by cultivating patience. More often than not, the Bardonists who do this are in fact successful in freeing themselves from anger. 

Sometimes, however, cultivating patience isn't enough to free yourself from anger. This is because anger can have more than one root. In fact, I was actually taught that anger has three roots – impatience, cruelty, and arrogance/pride. For this reason, I was told that in order to completely free myself from anger, I should cultivate the opposites of all three of these roots; namely patience, compassion, and humility. This is the approach I took, and it worked very well for me. Those Bardonists who are only experiencing partial success freeing themselves from anger by trying to cultivate patience alone should also consider cultivating compassion and humility. That should do the trick.

There are several good books out there on freeing yourself from anger. The one I found most helpful was Thubten Chodron’s Working with Anger. If you can't afford to buy the book, there's no need to worry. Thubten Chodron has been generous enough to put a free PDF version on her website.