Click on the image to listen to the Meditation

When you set your mind on a mission, it finds a way of making things happen…this often takes the form of keeping an openess to ideas even as the mind is consciously otherwise preoccupied…:-)

What am I really saying?  I ’stumbled’ upon a way of getting the meditation audio uploaded!  Have a listen.  Tell me what you think.  Did you find it useful?  What worked or did not work for you…etc.

Blessings!

Lucy Lopez

Awakening to Happiness!

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As promised, a guided visualization on anger in 2 parts.  I have not been able to upload the meditation and am in the process of finding out why but I will have it up at some point.  In the meantime, I hope you find the visualization exercise useful:-)  As always, feel free to share your comments and ask your questions.

Visualization on managing Anger Part 1

Visualization on managing Anger Part 2

Also, may I invite you to share these links with others who may benefit from them!

Before I go, a reminder:  Have you signed up for my free meditation course sent to you by email?  It runs everyday for a week and is probably one of the easiest ways of helping you maintain peace and joy throughout your day:-)

Lucy Lopez

Awakening to Happiness!

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I have had a few clients who have suffered terribly from their inability to manage their anger effectively confirming what the Buddha had accurately observed:

You are not punished for your anger, you are punished by it.

In other words, our anger, and not the people or things we are angry with, causes our own suffering.

Aside from my clients’ experiences, I have enough experience of my own to realize how much our happiness is blocked by anger!  Put simply, you cannot possibly feel angry and happy at the same time!  And, if you do not know how to effectively deal with anger, it will remain a barrier to your happiness even without your being aware of it.  This latter is particularly important to bear in mind because its effects, short and long term can be particularly damaging.

I had a friend, a Catholic priest, who, in his late forties, suffered a stroke which severely reduced the mobility and strength of his left limbs.  He was fortunate that apart from that, he was able to recover fully from a temporary lapse of memory and speech impediment.  When I went to visit him shortly after hearing about his stroke, he shared his experience:

“There was XX (the name of a religious colleague) who had been at loggerheads with me for some time.  He just could not grasp my intention about YYY (some initiative that my friend had proposed) and he was determined to thwart my effort in getting this approved by the community of priests and laity.

On Wednesday night, after he left from our meeting, I found myself seething with rage.  The next thing I remember, I was trying to call YY (a mutual friend) to get him to take me to the hospital because I was not able to see or speak clearly and I had lost movement of my left arm and leg.

A few days later, when I was recovering in the hospital and able to speak properly, I noticed him approaching my bed from a distance.  I could feel my heart pounding and because they had me hooked up to the ECG machine and I could hear the change in the beeps and see the peaks on the screen, I knew I was not imagining things.  I knew I was letting him get to me and I realized then that I had to do something about it”.

There have been many studies done on the correlation between anger and heart disease, strokes and cancer but perhaps one of the more well-known ones is that done by Dr Dean Ornish (author of Love and Survival) in 1998.  One of the outcomes of that study was the recommendation that lifestyle changes together with psychosocial interventions could retard, if not reverse, the build-up to heart and other related diseases.  Some of these interventions include visualization and anger management.

So, why do we get angry?  On the surface, the reason is simple:  Things (including people) are not the way we want them to be.  On a deeper level, the reason is one of self-preservation in which we believe that our ability to control things around us is threatened.  When we believe we are losing control, we respond in anger, whether overtly or covertly.  In other words, anger has its roots in fear.

If you had suggested to my priest friend before he had the stroke that he had suppressed anger and that he was not dealing with it, he would have dismissed it.  After all, he was never angry with any of us!  Besides, our general impression of anger is one of explosive rage – raised voice, violence and other behaviors such as slamming doors and throwing objects.  But there is a less noticeable form of anger that continues to eat away at us even when we do not appear visibly angry and it can do as much, if not more damage than the other.

I have known several people who have claimed that they never get angry!  (I don’t think that even the Buddha or Jesus would have ever made that claim! ) And yet, I have seen how quickly their mood can turn, in some cases violently and in others, more covertly through sullenness, withdrawal or snide remarks.  Often, people will deny that they are angry or capable of getting angry because, to them, that would be an admission of losing control.

This brings me to one of the first things we must do if we want to be able to handle our anger effectively – we must acknowledge it when we feel it.  I would also suggest that we learn to acknowledge it even to those around us, should we be asked.  To acknowledge something is to face it and that in itself has a powerful effect in helping to bring it under control.

Acknowledging our anger does not at all mean admitting weakness.  On the contrary, it is a demonstration of strength!  You are strong enough to admit the truth!  Neither does acknowledging your anger make you weak or weaker.  Again, it actually evokes greater strength and confidence, the energy of which would otherwise be directed into covering up your anger and/or excusing your behavior and/or breaking out in angry behavior!

Next, understanding that anger is just one of many states that arise in our mental continuum is important.  Like sadness or guilt or jealousy, anger is just another state that arises in our mindstream and if dealt with appropriately, will dissipate.  It is no worse or better than any other.  It is when we hold on to our anger and allow it to consume us that we energize it!

Thirdly, understanding why we feel angry  is important.  Understanding and accepting that our way of seeing the world is not the only valid way is critical.  Understanding that our happiness does not depend on the world being just the way we want it to be is equally critical.  And finally, reflecting on how our anger hurts us and impacts on others WITHOUT allowing ourselves to plunge into guilt and self-chastisement is also necessary.

You will notice that the three things I’ve mentioned i.e.

Acknowledging and admitting our anger

Understanding the nature of our anger and our beliefs about ourselves and others and

Reflecting on the impact of our anger without self-chastisement and self-judgment

are things we do mentally.  Does this mean that there is nothing else that can be done, especially behaviorally?  Not at all.  But making behavioral changes without changing deep-seated beliefs and attitudes will not bring about long-lasting change.

In my next post, I shall discuss some of these behavioral changes.

In the meantime, I invite you to share your insights and experience with managing your anger :-)

Lucy Lopez

Awakening to Happiness!

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I realize that some people feel uneasy when I talk or write about allowing our feelings to guide and inform our thinking, words and actions. Surely this is dangerous, they say.

It is an understandable response. After all, is it really wise to allow my anger to guide my thoughts, words and actions? I could easily say or do something hurtful to someone and I may regret it for the rest of my life!

Or, should I let my fear stop me from going for the job I really want? Or my impatience to cause me to give up on someone who is learning a lot more slowly than I would like them to? Or my craving for sex to direct me to getting it anywhere and any way I can?

Surely, they ask, you are not encouraging us to trade wisdom for hedonism?

Well, let me tackle that last question first. No. I am certainly not campaigning for hedonism for the simple reason that hedonistic behavior is not informed by feelings but controlled by them. And therein, folks, lies the big difference.

Let your feelings inform, not control you. This applies to any feeling – good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant.

Let’s take the feeling of anger which is a feeling that almost all of us experience. To follow the feeling of anger means to allow ourselves to go where it takes us. Now contrary to what most of us believe, the feeling of anger firstly takes us to thoughts of angry responses, thoughts which we are often not aware of. So rehearsed and automatic are our anger-driven thoughts and behaviors that we aren’t even aware of them until it is too late i.e. after the damaging event!

But, consider for a moment, what might happen if we slowed the entire process down, something which you can do by using your powers of imagination when you are not feeling angry. During such time, you can play an entire scene in your mind wherein the feeling of anger is aroused.

As you allow yourself to imagine feeling angry in this slow-motion movie that playing in your mind, you will become aware of the thoughts that arise as a result of the feeling of anger. Thoughts such as:

I hate X. What a nerve he’s got. How dare he say that about me! What about that time when he did such and such. What a hypocrite! As if he knows better. I’m not going to put up with this. I’m going to b—–y tell him where to go…

Now, as you encounter these thoughts, you have the opportunity of questioning them. You have the opportunity to ask yourself questions such as these:

* Why do I hate X?
* If I feel that it’s wrong for him to have judged me and acted the way he did, does that justify my judging him and acting in the way I am thinking of acting?
* What benefit will my proposed action have for me in the short term? In the long term?
* Do I want a good relationship with X? Or do I want to get back at him?
* If I do want a good relationship with X, what are the ways I can make that happen?

And of course, you could continue in this vein of thinking. In fact, I would encourage you to continue until you come to a point where you are feeling good, rather than angry so that you can then allow your good feelings to guide and inform your words and actions.

In this way, you have allowed your feelings of anger, in the first instance, to guide and inform you about some of your beliefs; beliefs which, in this case, are working against you, rather than for you. You have further allowed your anger to show you, in a clear and objective way, what you truly desire, which is always to feel good.

Now, most people are likely to say: Well, did I really need to go through that process to come to that conclusion? I mean, don’t we all know that we want to feel good? Duh!!!

Well, if you really did know that, why then did you not let that knowledge guide you in the first place?

That brings me to a key point: Knowing something in your head i.e. intellectually is no different to knowing any other kind of information, for example, that the population of Brisbane is 5 million or that sushi is made with rice and raw fish or that the water in the ocean is really cold in winter.

That’s all it is – information. I don’t call that ‘knowing’. Knowing is experiencing. It is really feeling through something, sensing it on all levels of your being. It is not retrieving information that you have gathered from a secondary source. Rather, it is experience that you have personally had. And that kind of experience, of knowing, is irrefutable.

It is this knowing that is most powerful in its ability to guide and inform you in a way that has a deep and lasting impact on you. Nothing else has such power and influence. Why? Because it is not just head knowledge – information that is gathered from an external/secondary source. Rather it is information that comes from a primary source i.e. you. It is experienced on every level of your being, especially the level of feelings and sensations. That is when you truly ‘know’.

And when you make changes with respect to what you truly ‘know’ rather than what you believe to be true or have speculated on, you make meaningful and lasting change. Any other kind of change is superficial and unconvincing. Sooner or later, it will cease to be effective.

So, yes, you do need to go through the process of feeling and recognizing the thoughts associated with your feelings in order to make meaningful and lasting change. That it may lead you to the same conclusions that you might have intellectually preempted is not reason to avoid going through the process. On the contrary, it allows you to state with confidence and conviction that what you had previously only held as information/belief is something that you personally know to be true. This is what wisdom is – not belief, not speculation but the fruit of knowing!

For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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