Channeling anger and hatred into a force for good

What would you have done if you were in Will Smith’s place?

Judging from the online furor that came in the wake of Smith’s “unacceptable and inexcusable” behavior, I suspect I am not the only parent who posed this question to his children.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s creative reimagining of Buddhism, we would find an insight that could prove instructive should we find ourselves in a similar situation. Our feelings, wrote Hanh or Thay (i.e., teacher to his students), are like a river “in which every drop of water is a different feeling. To observe our feelings, we just sit on the riverbank and identify each feeling as it flows by and disappears.” The key, he points out, is to recognize each feeling whether it is pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. By breathing in and out when we experience a strong feeling, we can identify the feeling and thereby prevent it from holding us hostage.

Looking at the science explaining anger would bear out what Thay is saying, it only takes 0.25 of a second for a careless remark to activate our amygdala and cue our adrenal glands to produce adrenaline. While our prefrontal cortex tries to balance the firing of the amygdala, the adrenaline primes our body to prepare for a fight or flight reaction. But if our self-awareness is strong enough to recognize the feeling of anger, one can transform it into something more constructive than Smith’s reaction. Then again, if it only takes 0.25 of a second to trigger a reaction like Smith’s, how can one breathe in and out in time to recognize the feeling of anger?

I think this is why Engaged Buddhists undertake the daily practice of mindfulness—the most basic of which is to sit with one’s breath for five minutes. The strategic value of this practice can be traced back to Thay’s 1975 classic, “The Miracle of Mindfulness,” which was originally a long letter to the members of the School of Youth for Social Service during the Vietnam War. Noticing how its members, mostly young people, had been tirelessly working to “rebuild bombed villages, teach children, set up medical stations, and organize agricultural cooperatives.” Thay “wished to remind them of the essential discipline of following one’s breath to nourish and maintain calm mindfulness even in the midst of the most difficult circumstances.” To operationalize this, he advocated a Day of Mindfulness on weekends for his followers to engage in walking and sitting meditation and chant mantras.

Interestingly, the practice of chanting mantras historically preceded the practice of praying the rosary. In fact, the Filipino Buddhist scholar Alfredo Co notes that although the Buddhists pioneered “the chanting of mantras using prayer beads … The Catholics and the Muslims use the rosary as a form of mantra, a means of keeping the consciousness in a state of recollection … so that one becomes absorbed into the Absolute.”

Viewed this way, there is a sense in which praying the rosary can be regarded as a mindfulness practice. More importantly, Co’s insight reminds us that despite the online and offline stimuli from all sides of the political spectrum, which can easily provoke anger and hatred, there is a God we can turn to in prayer and who can transform anger and hatred into a force for good. It’s a thought worth remembering regardless of the outcome of May 9, 2022.

VON KATINDOY
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