Failures

by Friends of Godwin

If you are unable to observe anger at the time that it arises, at least later on you can start reflecting on what happened. So why did I get angry? Why did I use those words? What really made me lose my control? Our failures can become very valuable spiritual friends. And this kind of reflection has to be done in a very friendly, gentle way rather than doing it in a very hard way, beating yourself and unnecessarily experiencing guilt and remorse in relation to what has happened. And then you can forgive yourself: I’m still human, I got angry, but let me see now when I meet that person next week or whatever, how I will be relating to that person. So then you’ll be learning from such experiences, then you can experiment with such situations.

And if we need to have an ideal, the ideal should not be that we will not get angry. The more realistic ideal we can have in relation to anger is, how soon we can recover from that anger? This is the importance of practising awareness in everyday life. So that if you can practise such awareness, if you can have a connection with your breath, then as you are getting angry the breath will tell you that you are getting angry, and with awareness you can notice it and that will help you to recover from that anger.