AngerWise

Photo courtesy of maloja

According to Buddhist and other spiritual teachings, basic human nature is fundamentally good. In Buddhism this is known as “basic goodness.” The idea is that at our most absolute core, rock bottom level, there is really no problem, and in fact we are brilliant, awake, and sane people.

Basic goodness isn’t some kind of utopian fantasy where everything is nicy nice, and we don’t have pain, confusion, and ugly parts. It’s not that everything is sugar coated and we should pretend we don’t have suffering, or we should ignore all our various problems. Rather, basic goodness is that regardless of how difficult or confused our situation in life – or the situation of anyone else for that matter – we can never give up and say it’s a bad deal.

Basic goodness means that nothing is fundamentally screwed up and flawed: there is some workability and sanity buried in even the most confused and degraded situations. We can always wake up, see our confusion, and we can move forward.

In other words, there is no garbage bin where we throw all the trash, because there is no trash. All people are fundamentally awake, and when we act otherwise it is simply because we have lost touch with our basic nature.

Now of course, often times we stray very far from our nature. Indeed we human beings get lost in dark and deeply destructive states of mind, often for whole lifetimes, and sometimes in systematic grand scale ways such as we see in imperial conquests and genocidal movements of all kinds.

But according to the teachings of basic goodness, even then, even when we are that far gone, given the right circumstances, we can wake up from our destructive and violent patterns, discover our nature of goodness, and it’s always possible for us to walk a path back home.

This is because deep inside nobody wants to suffer, and nobody wants to see others suffer. Deep inside we all want to be happy, and even though our disconnection often causes us to think otherwise, naturally we we also want others to be happy as well.

This nature of basic goodness teaches that for any of us, no matter how angry or screwed up we might think ourselves to be, for each and every one of us, we are fundamentally worthy and good people. For each of us, it’s possible to find our way back to the heart of the matter, it’s possible for us to make our way back to our awake and sane nature of goodness.

To help us understand how our anger patterns develop we’re going to take a brief tour of developmental psychology. This is the first in a series of posts, and the posts are all linked, each one connecting to the following one etc.

Picking up where we left off, when a child is nurtured in a loving environment for the a sufficient time do consolidate their trust in their mother’s love, they are all that much more likely to grow into an adult …

Love is a powerful force, and its presence or lack thereof can dramatically alter an individual’s state of well-being. Psychology studies and other scientific research have shown that those raised with sufficient love have stronger immune systems, lead healthier emotional lives…

We left off last time having just experienced the traumatic feelings of our mother not always being there, which is very confusing for us. This is a shock for us, however as soon as our mother’s love returns, we usually feel safe and taken care of once again…

At this stage, the developmental story becomes more complex, and due to space limitations and in order to stay on our topic, we’ll have to leave many levels of detail behind. But the stage is now set for our exploration of how anger develops…

Another dynamic that happens when we are cut off from our mother’s love too soon is that we develop patterns of dissociation. The pain and confusion of being abandoned by our life source is more than our unformed self can process…

The story of early childhood wounding is a glimpse into a tragic and painful dimension of being human. Even though our nature is made of goodness and love, due to our ignorance of that very nature, we perpetuate suffering for …

As a youth, Noah Levine, author of Dharma Punx, lived a life of anger, drugs, and alcohol. With the help of Buddhist meditation, he eventually channeled the energy of his anger and dissatisfaction into a desire to be of help.

Pema offers good anger management advice and explains how we all get caught in the same way. We get trapped because we are always running from what we feel inside. And yet we all have the capacity to open and …