Fear becomes anger and anger becomes hate and hate becomes suffering; I know this is a Star Wars quote but actually, I found some passages in Star Wars the most practical advice in Zen I ever received. Because you get what they mean and somehow it is philosophy in a fictional format.
I learned it for myself, I loved, I got rejected or disappointed by lovers, friends, employers, or even parents.
The most traumatizing experience was definitely the divorce of my parents and everything that followed this event in my life. I still struggle with the effect of how it shattered my worldview. It took away my basic trust in everything. It took away my feeling to be secure in the world.
Also, losing loved ones and handling loss and death and mourning is a traumatizing event in which the western culture is bad at processing.
And it is true, the fear, the mistrust, and the angst of losing someone; or not being loved, lead to anger.
This anger can appear in the most subtle ways. It can also come out directly and affect all other personal and lesser personal relations to surrounding people.
These actions on the other hand will lead to more anger and eventually become hate.
Indifferent hate at the world and everything that’s connected to it and your own life. The hate can be subtle and you feel like you’re or were a lovable person once, but now you don’t know where life had led you.
And then begins the suffering. It is terrible and it all becomes a circle, a circle where you don’t find an easy way out because it all got created by you, and also it became a habit to act or react wildly, in anger, in pain, in agony.
So, how to overcome this painful downward spiral of negative feelings that are not only making you miserable and others too but in the end will make you physically ill?
I found the proclaimed meditation method of loving/kindness meditation very helpful. It’s described and adverted from Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield and others and it is very, very simple.
You sit and think of others or you even sit and observe others, maybe even strangers and you wish them a loving life and you wish for them to be happy.
Here! Listen; I think; I wish you a good and happy life, health, wealth, well being. I wish you loved ones who make you feel loved. I wish you security and the feeling to be safe in the world.
Do this, simple to your wife and your kids and everyone you love and wish to be loved and do it unconditionally. Most importantly, do it for others that mistreated you. People from who you think of that they got you wrong. Even for people that you don’t like. Even for people that you hate.
You will experience some change in your life and you will receive immediately a gift from yourself, from your body, and what we might call soul. It will feel like a cleansing. It will feel like there is a chance to let go of all negativity. It will give you hope for the day.
It will improve your day.
So, do it in the morning.
