Anger or Wrath is one of the seven deadly sins listed by Pope Gregory way back in the 6th century. Simply, anger is an emotion wherein a person is irritated and has lost his cool, has distorted facial expressions and an awkward body language. Starting from a one year old child to a man on his death bed, all get angry. Only the intensity varies amongst these! Anger arises when someone says or does something unpleasant. So there are two persons involved, the one who provokes and the one who is provoked. Nine times out of ten, the provoker loses nothing but the provoked person who gets angry, loses a lot. Very recently Harbhajan showed his anger, by slapping Sreesanth just because he was wished “Hard luck”. Poor one, it has cost Bhajji the whole tournament - real hard luck for him.
I get angry very often; anything that someone does which displeases me, angers me. Why I get angry more often is because the gamut of that anything is very wide. I am a Scorpion – by zodiac – and all Scorpions seem to have high levels of anger, so they fume up for petty things; so claims one astrology-buff friend of mine. If I feel that someone is raising their voice against me, my anger neurons activate; I try to dominate their dominating voice, swear on them, and even worse, damage any article around me. It’s like a moral victory at that point; I have won over my aggressor, that’s it, this is my day. But this momentous madness costs many a thing – it makes you say things that you’d never have wanted to say and do those which you shouldn’t. When I cool down and replay the happenings, I feel ashamed. But then, knowingly why am I doing this? Why am I unable to hold my nerve for a few seconds, rather than burst out like a volcano? Somehow I feel that the brain refuses to function if the anger virus is active. Anger is a huge beast, but it sure can be tamed. At least, that’s what I have heard.
I joined few anger subduing courses, on friends’ and family’s request. And I tried too many. Some of them were meditation classes; the instructor, after a discourse on How to lead a good life, plays light soulful music and asks us to concentrate on one particular object – be it the symbolic Om, or some God’s idol, or anything unobjectionable. This course was for a week and the first 5 days of my class went searching for the object I should concentrate on. On the last day – maybe because it is the last day – I decided to stick to Om as my object. As should happen, I couldn’t concentrate! I started chanting “Om, Om, Om” to gain focus, but was intercepted by hushes and glares from fellows around. Important rule in meditation: Never open your mouth while doing meditation. . The class got over, nothing worked; end result, I got angry that my money got wasted.
Thankfully, my desire to squash my anger never came down. Just like my anger. So I took another style of anger management class. This one promised to teach how to have control over all the emotions, not alone anger. That sounded good; spend once, bring down all the bad qualities. Glee! Okay, no meditation, no concentration in this one – half the tough syllabus removed. The controller here is breath – yup, my own breath. Some rhythmic breathing was taught, and I was asked to continue this exercise. Wait, why would this rhythmic breathing cycle help me not get angry? If someone slaps me, should I sit in front of him and do this exercise? The tutor had an answer; whenever you have a surge in emotions breathe out loud, breathe out huge volumes of air, breath out from the bottom corner of the lung. This is the mantra that, supposedly, is a panacea for all bad emotions. I didn’t have to wait too long to test this, for, I had a duel with my room mate and my anger shot up; I decided to use the technique I started huffing and puffing deeply, standing right in front of him, just like an enraged bull on seeing red. That fella thought I was preparing myself to land blows on his face, so, to be safe, made the first move. Thenceforth, I never used that mantra. I was only incensed by the fact that I spent much money in learning a mantra, which didn’t help bringing down my anger but further landed me in trouble. All the while, I paid money to learn how to get angrier.
One buddy of mine suggested that I should count numbers when I get angry; I started that and never stopped counting. Close your eyes and think of some beautiful moments in your life, drink lots of water immediately, leave the place and sit in isolation – oh dear, nothing worked. I decided to do something on my own, so I came upon an idea to restrain myself from getting angry, by not getting angry. Confusing exercise. For one whole month, I never reacted to or at anyone who have hurt me. Deep within me, I was burning like a furnace, but still did well by smiling. That’s good work dude. I waited and waited, never flared up on any of my aggressors, waited and waited and waited, till the set timeline of one month got over. I applauded myself for the "big achievement". Now that the test is over, I was back to my bad ways. Blame it on the avenging instinct of a Scorpion, I went back to all the people who have infuriated me during this one month and did some harm or the other to them. Only then did the furnace cool off and I felt relieved.
I have been touchy ever since my childhood; at that time, I felt that this was a way to get things in my way. Yeah, I took hot and spicy slaps from my dad whenever I showed my anger, but no effect. When I entered my college, I was still the same. But because of my irascible temper, I kept losing good friends. People always put the bad done to them in permanent storage and the good in temp memory. Friends have come, gone, but I never changed. I am known more for my anger than my stupendous performances in my office. My boss has warned me many a time to be under control. One fine day, he gave a fine warning – to show me the door. Ever since then, I have tightened the grip on my emotions, not completely though, and began the search to conquer them. Unfortunately, I am still hunting.
Disclaimer: The meditation and breath exercises written above may have been successfully implemented by many people. I have only written my experiences and I really feel unfortunate that they didn’t work for me. This is not an attempt to denigrate those invaluable practices or to take a dig at the people preaching them, but just to share my experience with them and I hope you see the lighter side of it. Any resemblance to any person or character living or dead is purely coincidental and unintentional.
