Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - What To Do When You’re Angry | Matthew Brensilver, Vinny Ferraro, Kaira Jewel Lingo

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

A deep dive on one of the thorniest and most destructive states of mind.For this episode, Executive Producer DJ Cashmere interviewed a trio of brilliant Dharma teachers to get their advice about how to handle anger. This is the first in a series of 'correspondent' episodes, in which DJ identifies a pain point in his life and meditation practice, then goes out into the world to report on the best ways to address it.Kaira Jewel Lingo is a former nun in the Plum Village tradition started by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Vinny Ferraro teaches at the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock, and also in prisons. Matthew Brensilver teaches at many of the same retreat centers, and spent many years working in the field of addiction pharmacotherapy.Related Episodes:3 Buddhist Strategies for When the News is Overwhelming | Kaira Jewel LingoHow to Keep Your Relationships On the Rails | Kaira Jewel LingoThree Buddhist Practices For Getting Your Sh*t Together | Vinny FerraroWhy Self-Hatred Makes No Sense | Matthew BrensilverHow to Actually Be Present | Matthew BrensilverThe Voice in Your Head | Ethan KrossI Just Went Through A Career Earthquake: This Is What's Next.How to Repair the Damage After a Fight | Dr. Becky KennedyGet Happier Without Losing Your Edge | Kamala MastersBest of the Archives: Making it RAIN | Tara BrachKryptonite for the Inner Critic | Kristin NeffAlso, the teachers’ sites:https://vinnyferraro.org/https://legacy.spiritrock.org/a-year-to-livehttps://www.kairajewel.com/https://www.matthewbrensilver.org/Feedback form: Let us know what you think!https://www.happierapp.com/contactSign up for Dan’s newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/DJ-Anger-1See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today we are taking a deep dive on what for me at least is one of the thorniest and most destructive states of mind available, anger. I have made many of my dumbest decisions while in the grips of anger. Anger can be tricky in all sorts of ways,

depending on your conditioning. For some people like me, it's a recurring demon that seduces you into stupidity. For other people, anger is something they've never given themselves permission to feel, and that can lead to its own whole set of problems. That is actually the situation my conversation partner today has found himself in.

He has spent many years squelching anger and now it's showing up in all sorts of unhelpful ways. Let me stop being coy and tell you who I'm talking to. DJ Kashmir is the executive producer of this show. Not only does he run this thing but he also occasionally acts as a kind of reporter or correspondent. He's like a player coach. DJ is a pretty serious meditator and student of Buddhism and when he's struggling to apply coach. DJ is a pretty serious meditator and student of Buddhism. And when he's struggling to apply his practice and learnings to his actual life, he does this smart thing where he turns it into a story he can report on.

So for this episode, DJ went out and interviewed a trio of brilliant Dharma teachers to get their advice on how to handle anger. Today, you're going to hear me talk to DJ, who then is going to play clips from his interviews with the teachers. Real quick those teachers are Kyra Joolingo, former nun in the Plum Village tradition started by the Zen master Thich Nhat Han, Vinny Ferraro who teaches at the Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock and also in prisons, and Matthew Bransilver who teaches at many of those same retreat centers and before that spent many years working in the field of addiction pharmacotherapy at UCLA. So that's what we're doing today. DJ has identified a universal problem, anger, found a Greek chorus of experts

to consult and is going to walk us through what he learned. We'll talk about whether anger is ever healthy then we'll dive into some extremely helpful strategies for navigating anger when it inevitably arrives. DJ Cashmere and our trio of Dharma maestros right after this. Before we get started, I wanna remind you of all the good stuff we're doing over at danharris.com. These days, you probably heard me announce

that we've started a new community through Substack, which includes all kinds of perks for subscribers, such as the ability to chat with me and sometimes our guests about each of the new podcast episodes, video Ask Me Anything sessions, even live meditation sessions with me. Plus you'll get a cheat sheet, which includes a full transcript and key takeaways from every episode. Recently, we had my friends, Seben A. Selassie and Jeff Warren in the chat,

and we've got plenty of other podcast guests who are gonna be hopping into the chat in the coming weeks. So stay tuned for that. We're having a lot of fun. We'd love you to join us. It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year, or free for anybody who can't afford it, no questions asked. Just head over to danharris.com, we'll see you there.

Meanwhile, I wanna give you an update on what's happening over on the Happier app. As you know, I used to be involved with that app, am not anymore, but I'm gonna continue to update you on their doings. They are very excited to announce something very cool. They have teamed up with two of the world's most renowned meditation centers,

the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock for an exclusive retreat giveaway. Two winners will receive a $1,500 credit to go on a retreat, a $600 travel credit, and a complimentary four-year membership to the Happier app. The giveaway is from October 1st to October 14th. Enter now at happierapp.com slash retreat giveaway. That's happierapp..com slash retreat giveaway.

That's happierapp.com forward slash retreat giveaway. Listening to Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Listening can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits, and ultimately your overall well-being.

Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception, along with popular podcasts and exclusive Audible Originals, all in one easy app. Enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things, household chores, exercising on the road, commuting, you name it. My wife, Bianca, and I have been listening to many audiobooks as we drive around for summer vacations. We listen to Life by Keith Richards. Keith, if you're listening, I'd love to have you on the show.

We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would also love to have you on the show. So audiobooks, yes, audible, yes, love it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca, audible.ca.

Wondery's new podcast, Even the Royals, pulls back the curtain on the darker side of royal families, past and present, from all over the world, where status comes at the expense of your freedom your privacy and sometimes even your head new episodes come out every week listen to even the royals early and ad free on wonder e plus dj cashmere welcome back to the show your show you're the producers welcome back it's good to be here, Dan.

It's always nice to talk to you in this way. You say that it's good to be here. You're always here on the show, but not always heard. Right, right, right. That's true. That's true. What are we doing today, boss? I'll give a short answer and then maybe a little longer, more personal answer. The short answer is we're running an experiment. We like to run experiments on the show. We've been trying a lot of new

things lately. And today, basically, I'm here to talk to you about some stuff that I'm struggling with, some personal stuff in my life, in my practice. I've also been talking about these challenges with some really great meditation teachers that our audience will know and love, Matthew Brentsilver, Kyra Jualingo, Vinny Ferraro. And so I'm going to share with you a little bit about where some of my stumbling blocks have been recently, and I'm going to play for you some clips from conversations I've been having with them, some kind of mindset shifts and teachings and advice they've given me in hopes that that'll be of service to the audience.

And we're going to try a small handful of episodes like this, three or four over the next couple of months. And hopefully people like them and get something out of it. And yeah, excited to hear what the audience thinks. We'll leave a link for feedback in the show notes. And maybe we'll try something like this again next year if it goes well. Yeah, I mean, so the way people can think about this, I'll put it in like anchor man terms, because I used to be a news anchor. Do you have the anchor of the show?

When in this case, that's me. Usually I'm just conducting interviews, but what we're experimenting with, and we've done this before, but now we're going to start experimenting with it in a more robust way, is that you're the reporter. You're the correspondent. You've got an issue in your own life. Today, we're going to talk about anger and you're going to go out and do a bunch of reporting, talking to incredible sources, the experts you just listed.

And we're going to talk about that. Does that comp land for you? Yeah, absolutely. I've been unofficially calling these my reported episodes just in talking to folks about them behind the scenes day to day. And that's exactly right. I've been doing the kinds of research and reading

and reporting that I was trained to do in journalism school and that I've done in the past and stories about education or politics or whatever. But my beat now on this show is mental health and mindfulness and really my life and my attempt to kind of live and actualize and operationalize the things we talk about on the show. So yeah, I'm thinking about these as reported episodes,

as correspondent episodes. In addition to making the show, I have a whole life. I'm married, I have two kids under five. I have a meditation practice that I try to keep up. And some days that looks like I'm on a formal retreat in some beautiful setting. And some days it looks like I'm sitting with a sangha on a Saturday morning. And some days it looks like I try to squeeze in, you know, two minutes of sitting meditation in bed before I turn out the light at 9.42 p.m. because that was all I could get to that day.

My life is busy right now and it can be pretty tiring. I actually asked a pretty well-respected, well-known teacher a couple years back while on retreat how deep could I expect my practice to go, given just where I am in my life and what my responsibilities are with little kids, et cetera. And he basically said, they'll turn 18 one day, they'll get out of the house, and you can come back kind of thing. And that answer just like doesn't cut it for me.

I'm much more interested in some of the kinds of guests we've had on the show, like Kamala Masters comes to mind, who said that her deepest years of practice for many years were while she was deep in cycles of care tasks and that waking up has to be available when we're walking down the hall from one kid to the other or when we're taking care of an elderly relative or washing the dishes or you, just when we're knee deep in life. Yeah, I like that. Just a quick bit of context for the audience.

DJ used a meditative or Buddhist term of art, Sangha, by he mentioned sitting with a Sangha on Saturday mornings, meaning that's just basically other people who meditate. Or community, I think, would be the direct translation of that, but overall, what you're pointing at, DJ, here, is it's like you're the executive producer of the show. You are a busy person with kids and a wife, and also you have a history as a

journalist, you're like, all right, well, I'm in a dojo right now where I can test this practice in some ways that will be pretty relatable to many of the listeners. So let's see how good I can get and let's see what I can learn. Let's see when I'm fucking up and let's see what I can learn. Let's see when I'm fucking up and hopefully the audience can learn right along with you. All right. So having established the mission here, why are we in this first episode starting with the issue of anger?

Yeah, I got to say, it's a little strange to be starting with anger. The reason we're starting with anger is because it's the most acute challenge in my practice and in my life right now. And the reason I say it feels strange to start with it is that I don't feel like a particularly angry person. I don't think I come off that way in everyday life. I'm not walking around in a rage.

I've never been told you have anger management issues. I'm not punching walls or screaming at people or something like that but I have As I've started practicing more meditating more becoming more mindful. I've started noticing that actually I get angry a lot and a lot of the suffering that happens in my day-to-, a lot of the interpersonal conflict that comes up sometimes in work, but mostly at home, you can kind of trace back the opening moments of whatever that difficult valley is usually to me getting angry. And this has been kind

of a long road for me to figure this out. I actually had this kind of funny experience last year where I was watching The Sopranos for the first time and I realized I'm like 20 years late to the party at this point, but it's a great show. And I realized like a couple of seasons in that I was relating a lot to all these super angry dudes. And that was a kind of waking up moment for me. I'm obviously not a mob boss and I wasn't around walking around whacking people, but there was something about the way that Tony Soprano would come home and just be set off by some tiny little thing and then react super unskillfully and you know part of it was it's well written and it's well acted

but I just really felt like yeah I see myself in that I see myself I see myself in all of that anger. So I started kind of trying to track this a lot more carefully and what I was noticing is that there'd just be all these moments throughout the day and it would start with something really small. Like my wife would leave some kitchen cabinets open or my daughter would not do what I asked her to do the first time I asked her to do it

or someone around me would have some big emotional response to something that I didn't feel like should have been that big of a deal. And I'd get angry, but my response to getting angry would often be to kind of immediately try to disavow it, immediately try to tamp it down, immediately try to pretend it wasn't happening. And it wasn't working.

You know, what I was noticing, Dan, is I would, with my daughter, I would maybe kind of snap at her, I'd make a face, I'd roll my eyes, I would maybe kind of snap at her. I'd make a face, I'd roll my eyes, I'd let some impatience creep into my tone. Then she would respond negatively to that and it would snowball. And with my wife, if it was similar, I'd instantly say, I'm fine, it's cool, nothing's wrong, I'm not upset. And then sure enough, a couple minutes later I'd say something passive aggressive or whatever. Basically what happened is they both started calling me out on it in different terms. My daughter would say something like, you're being mean. And my wife would say,

Hey, you know, you're having some feelings and you don't seem to know it and you're taking them out on me. So I really took that to heart and started trying to explore what this was. And it turned out, yeah, I was getting angry a lot. It's a little uncomfortable to say that out loud. It feels like a little embarrassing or something. But that's my kind of journey with this particular emotion. And one of the things that came up when I was talking to the Dharma teachers about this was that everybody's got their own very highly idiosyncratic, bespoke response when it comes to how anger shows up for them.

So I'm going to tee up a clip here. This first clip is Matthew Brensilver, and he's basically talking about the fact that anger shows up differently for everybody. And I wanted to start here because I wanted folks to hear a little bit about my story with anger, but also know if your story with anger is totally different,

the advice that's coming your way in this episode is gonna be useful to you too. Anger is, you a very deep habit of mind and roughly falls into the cluster of a version, which is going to be with us until we're very deeply free. We want to find ways of working with this and there's no algorithm for it. It's so idiosyncratic how people have to work with anger in the sense that for some people, anger invariably represents a kind of destructive force in the mind and anything they can do to let go of that is salutary

and important for them, for others. For other people, getting angry is a developmental achievement, and it's a phase in the development of their own mind. And it is the counterbalance perhaps to apathy or passivity or something along those lines. And so there's a kind of honoring the idiosyncratic nature of anger in any one person's life feels important. I know you've talked occasionally on the show about how anger shows up for you. So I'm just curious how all this is landing for you

and how this might be different from what anger looks like in your life. Well, it's interesting listening to Matthew Brent Silver. He talked about the two types of people, the latter category in which you fall of, you know, anger being a developmental achievement, even though of course you need to learn how to deal with it. Once you experience it, I'm more in the first category. I'm pissed all the time.

I have no problem accessing anger. Actually, what I've had to learn over the past couple of years is to see, and I talked about this recently in the podcast I did about all the anger I experienced during the separation from the app, from what used to be known as the 10% happier app, meditation or mindfulness helped me see like what's beneath my anger. separation from the app from what used to be known as the 10% happier app. Meditation or mindfulness helped me see like what's beneath my anger. And usually that's fear. And you don't want to act out of either anger or fear, but it's, it's good to

see like what's driving the anger and then to kind of work with it at its root. Yeah. But I'm curious, like, why did you say you're embarrassed to admit that you get angry? That's a really hard question. I think the answer is I watched anger be a pretty destructive force when I was a kid, and I think I made a decision that was probably largely a subconscious or an unconscious decision to kind of run in the opposite direction. And so, yeah, I think for a lot of my life,

my sort of baseline association has just been anger bad, right? Anger's weak, anger is a sign that I've been hurt, anger is a sign that I'm not keeping it together, anger is destructive. Yeah, so it's hard for me to say out loud, not even just out loud, it's hard for me to say in my own head, this is anger. I'm feeling angry. It feels like an admission of failure or

something. Less so now after reporting this episode, to be sure. But yeah, that's still in there. That conditioning is still in there. I mean, that's, I think, where we converge again. We may diverge on our history with anger, but definitely see it as you know, I've spoken publicly about this as anger being one of my Major demons that I've really wrestled with even in saying that it's in calling it a demon is to quite literally demonize it and yet we know and Past guests on this show. I've talked about the difference between healthy and unhealthy anger. I'm thinking specifically of a conversation I had with Kristin Neff, the great self-compassion researcher. We can drop a link to that in the show notes.

There is some value in anger in that it's clarifying, it's motivating. What say you when I make the case for anger? Yeah, I mean, this case tracks very closely with some of what I learned and discovered as I was reporting this out. You know, I consider myself a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, and I was going back to some of his writings, which I've relied on a lot in the past

when it comes to anger. And one of his core teachings is that when we get angry, it's less because some transgression outside of us has happened, and more because the seed of anger some transgression outside of us has happened and more because the seed of anger is really strong inside of us. And I love that teaching and it rings as really true to me in a lot of ways, but I've realized just in working on this episode that on some level I was still computing that teaching as anger is bad, anger is unevolved, anger is a problem. Happening because you haven't taken good enough care of your feelings, anger is unevolved, anger is a problem.

Happening because you haven't taken good enough care of your feelings, anger's happening because you're not seeing clearly. Yeah, there's actually this other really beautiful teaching that I really love, which is one of Matthew's teachings, where he talks about how when we get angry, we often fail to trace the path of causality back far enough.

He says that if we were to trace the path of causality back far enough in moments says that if we were to trace the path of causality back far enough in moments when we get angry, we would eventually discover, in his words, something worthy of love. But we don't generally do that. We get angry, we find the thing we got angry at, we pin our anger right there in the center of that thing, usually at some other person, often at someone close to us, and we're done. This kind of ends the process for us. And we don't seek to understand why they did what they did. We don't seek to understand some alternate interpretation. We don't explore why we ourselves are so quick to anger. It's

just like they messed up. We're angry at them. We have an airtight case. Boom, done. And so I love this teaching, this idea that if we trace the path of causality back, we might find something worthy of love. I think about this time a couple of months ago when I was getting ready for bed and my wife shared something that was happening in her day the very next day. And this particular thing was going to totally screw up my schedule. It was going to have impacts for who was taking the car and who was picking up and dropping off the kids and dinner time and just the whole thing. And this had been something that had been on her radar for weeks and she had just completely forgotten

to tell me until the 11th hour. And so I got angry and I felt in the moment like I had a pretty airtight case. Like you could have told me this sooner. You should have told me this sooner. This is wildly inconvenient. I'm mad. Boom, done.

And I think, you know, if you apply Matthew's teaching here, I could have looked a little closer and said, all right, she's tired, she's been going through a really tough stretch at work, she's got some other stuff happening with illness and her family. Maybe this moment is a sign of overwhelm. Maybe it's a cause for compassion.

Maybe it's an opportunity to check in and see if she's doing okay. Because it's unlike her to let me know something like that at the last minute. So yeah, that's a beautiful teaching, and I think that is a more skillful approach. And also, even as I'm thinking that through, it still feels to me like there's still this implicit thesis that like, that my anger was wrong, my anger is bad, my anger is unskillful.

I think I really have been internalizing both in my sort of non-meditative life, my pre-Dharma life, and in the way I've been hearing meditation teachers talk about this, that anger is bad, it's delusional, it's wrong, it's a sign that you're not practicing hard enough. And as I was working on this episode, something that you pushed me on and something that I felt compelled to push myself on was the possibility that maybe I was interpreting this wrong, maybe there's a different way to see it. And so I'm going to tee up another clip here from my conversation with Kyra Jewel lingo.

And at the top of this clip, you'll hear me quoting some of Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings on anger and then Kyra Jewel responding to my question about those teachings. Also, just for reference, you'll hear me use the word Thai to reference Thich Nhat Hanh. Thai means teacher in Vietnamese. That's what a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh students call him. So anyway, first you'll hear me and then you'll hear Kyra Jolingo. Here's the clip. So I want to share two very very short quotes from Thai and ask you to help me unpack them to start. One is, anger always goes together with confusion, with ignorance. And the other

is anger is born from ignorance and wrong perceptions. And I wanted to start here because I've been sitting with this strand of Thay's teaching for quite a while now. And there are times when I will watch anger arise. And I kind of hear Ty's voice in the back of my head saying something like, You're probably wrong. Or, you know, you might be partly wrong or something. And that's helpful. And then there are also times where I'm pretty sure I'm totally right. And so is this universally true that anger always has some element of ignorance or confusion or wrong perception? Is that always true?

I would say that there are skillful and unskillful ways to work with anger. Mostly because we don't train our minds. When anger arises, it takes us over and we become identified with anger. And that's what Thay is describing in those two passages. There's ignorance, there's misperception there. When we are in the grips of anger, when anger is there and we know anger is there, we have some choices about how to respond. We can track what's happening inside and what the anger is doing to us. And that's where I think anger can be a portal to something very wholesome, which is learning to see beneath the surface of what we first saw originally that may have led to the anger. But I also do think that there are certainly

situations in the world, situations of injustice, situations of clear violation of one person or one group of people's well-being rights, whatever, where there's a healthiness to the initial response of anger that actually then propels us to do something that can really be constructive. It's like you have to be super, super careful with how long that's your source of fuel. This gets to a lot of questions that we'll get into in the episodes. So how do you know when you cross the line and what do you do about it? I know we'll get to that, but I actually just want to ask you a separate question.

And it's about Matthew Brent Silver's thing about tracing back. Anger to something worthy of love. And he was talking about it, like in your wife's case, like you're angry that she's telling you literally at the 11th hour, cause I suspect it was close to 11 o'clock at night that there's some wrinkle in the schedule the next day. That's going to basically drop a bomb into your life. But you could trace it back to some source of compassion because she's overwhelmed for X or Y reason, which I completely buy.

And I think you can also turn the direction of your attention inward and trace your anger back to something healthy, which is the organism trying to protect itself, that phrase from Jack Kornfield that I really like. Anger at its root often is, you know, especially when you're angry on your own behalf, a kind of maybe warped version of self-love or an unskillful version of the desire to protect your boundaries. That can get screw you really quickly. But there is a causal investigation you can do that I think leads you to a place that stops you from demonizing your own anger.

I think that's exactly right. And it actually perfectly tees up this next clip, which is from Matthew, where he starts to go a little further in this direction of exploring, okay, what's the problem with anger? What's the value of anger? How do we start to see both of these sides a bit more clearly so that we can act a little more skillfully?

The tricky part is that anger often contains, always contains delusion, in my view, but often contains some kernel of wisdom, meaning that anger is signaling not always but often that something has been transgressed, some harm has occurred. The tricky process of actually untangling the delusion from that kernel of wisdom. That's a delicate kind of process. And the anger is sort of like wanting us to get to mobilize us to do something. It's like, do something, Matthew, do something, DJ.

We have to do something. Sometimes we actually have to reassure our mind that we will do something, that we will actually say no in a humane, clear way before we can begin to diffuse some of the intensity of the anger. If we don't have the assurance that yes, we can say no, then the anger just builds. And so sometimes I actually have to set a limit in some assertive kind of way. And it might be very simple, but it might just be like, no, I can't do that. But the anger can build some sense of imposition on one's own heart-mind can build as we are slightly paralyzed in our unwillingness to make an assertive move. And so we actually have to make some move, we have to do something, but that to act in an assertive way rather than an aggressive way or a super passive way,

there's a kind of vulnerability in it. And so it's easier actually just to stay siloed and angry and hostile in one's own mind or be aggressive and disassemble and pretend that we are invulnerable. That is anger is declaring our invulnerability. And yet, it testifies to it that we have been hurt, we can be hurt, to actually move into the realm of acting informed by that maybe just very tiny kernel of wisdom in the anger to be informed by that rather than deformed by it. That is tender kind of work. So if I had to tell you, DJ, that like I'm angry with you, I'm not, by the way. But if I had to tell you that I am, it would be a lot easier for me to be super passive and not acknowledge it and just sort of, oh, I'll just let it go or something like this.

Or maybe it would be easy for another person just to lash out in some way, right? But the finding the willingness to the vulnerability amidst an emotion that seeks to declare its invulnerability, take some kind of courage and willingness. But it's often the case that we cannot fully let go of anger until we've done something in a kind of gentle or assertive, clear, maybe forceful but not charged with hostility, with hatred. So there's just so much in that clip that has been really, really helpful for me. This idea that anger always contains delusion

and often contains a kernel of wisdom too. I love that. It feels so practical. And I've started playing with that in my own life. And in moments when I've been getting angry, I've been trying to ask myself the question, what's the kernel of wisdom, right? What's the real problem here?

What is this anger trying to point out? What does it need me to do? In my life, I've spent so many years sort of subconsciously thinking that the best way to respond is to not respond, just quote unquote, let it go. And that usually doesn't really work because I actually don't let it go. And I think what Matthew's pointing to here is there's a reason that that doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work is because letting it go is not always the skillful response. A skillful response often has to include really

examining what the anger is trying to tell you. And so, yeah, I just find that incredibly useful as a distinction. Yeah, I mean, I could speak from the other side of the equation here, which I never stuff it. I just go fucking berserk every time. I mean, that's overstating and a little unfair to me. But generally speaking, I am, I don't hesitate to express my anger and it usually. Or nearly a hundred percent of the time historically until I, you know, learn some better coping mechanisms did not go well. We're in a catch-22. Yes. Okay. So there's some wisdom in our anger right alongside the delusion or confusion.

But it's hard to see that seed when your lizard braid is online. And we know from the way the brain works that when you're enraged, the rational logical parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex goes offline. So how do we actually do what's being suggested here, given the realities of our brains? So the good news is all three teachers came through as I anticipated they would and had just a slew of practical suggestions and high level answer the thing that all three of them had in common was that they basically all gave something like the same framework for how to think about approaching anger.

This perhaps not coincidentally is the same framework that Thich Nhat Hanh teaches which is when anger arises we basically have to do three things. We have to recognize it, see that it's there, we have to embrace it which means actually let it in, and we have to look deeply at it. So recognize, embrace, look deeply. We haven't heard from Vinny Ferraro yet so I'm gonna go to a clip from Vinny Ferraro and he's gonna kind of help hammer home what's meant by these first two points of recognize and embrace. Here's Vinny. I think the first place to go is like acknowledging that it's there, right? So here's anger and then seeing a value in it. You know if

it's always something that I'm trying to get rid of, it's not actually an authentic exploration. It's connected to attachment, results, and me getting away from it. So the first part is like, okay, it's here. Is there value here? Is there value in exploring this? So that's where I start, because that's going to give me the willingness to be able to explore it. Otherwise, I'm just kind of, there's an insincerity where I'm just trying to strategize my way around it or away from it, where I'm trying to push things out of existence because they don't please me.

Coming up, DJ Cashmere talks about strategies for working with anger and how to deal with shame, which I call psychic constipation. Hey, it's Guy Raz here, and you might know me as the host of How I Built This. Well, did you know about my other show, The Great Creators? It's where I interview some of the most celebrated actors and musicians of our time about their life, their craft, and where they find their ideas. You'll hear giants like Tom Hanks.

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Two winners will receive a $1,500 credit to go on a retreat along with a $600 travel credit. To check it out, go to happierapp.com forward slash retreat giveaway. To be honest, these first two steps, recognizing and embracing anger, they're both so hard for me. In my life, the way it usually goes is anger arises, anger takes hold, and I don't recognize it or embrace it, right? Like, I might recognize something, but I'm unlikely to admit that it's anger. I'm very unlikely to kind of embrace it and let it in. Oftentimes, I'll try a quick little dodge in my mind. You know, I'll say like, oh, not a big deal. I'm not angry, I'm just frustrated. This is a little annoying, it's whatever, I'm fine.

You know, something along those lines just kind of tamping it down. Or on occasion, I'll just respond angrily right away, right, without even noticing that anger has arisen at all, without noticing anything, without having any internal dialogue, it's like thing happens, I do something out of anger, boom, done. So yeah, it's really hard for me to stop done. So yeah, it's really hard for me to stop recognize and embrace.

It's really hard for me to actually just take a beat and see that I'm angry and acknowledge that I'm angry and let that be what's happening. So these steps recognize and embrace these first two steps. This is absolutely the opposite of like everything I've done up until basically up until working on this episode, essentially. Yeah. Well, I think this is almost universally true, maybe different reasons in your case, the reason why it's hard to observe it is because you perhaps in a trauma

response, never gave yourself permission to feel the emotion for others like me who, you know, have no problem feeling it. It's just that you're so triggered. You may know you're angry. In fact, you actually could readily admit you're angry quite loudly. It's just that you're so swamped by it that you're not taking the aforementioned beat

so that you can respond wisely instead of reacting blindly. I suspect this is the point in the podcast where we're gonna hear even more about how to actually acknowledge and embrace. That's right. Yeah. So this next clip from Kyra Joule is one very specific strategy from Thich Nhat Hanh about

essentially a specific mental note, some language that we can use, or you can use some version of if this particular language doesn't work for you, that we can practice using whenever anger arises as a way to recognize and embrace it. So here's Kyra Joolingo. The beautiful approach that Thich Nhat Hanh shares of turning to our anger and saying a way of admitting, but right away accepting is to say, oh, my dear little anger, I see that you're here. Right? So rather than, oh, this horrible thing, yikes, it's this softening towards it and calling

it with an endearment, you know, my dear little anger. And that also acknowledges immediately that it's painful, which allows compassion to be there like, oh, I see that you're here. This hurts. This sucks. This is hard. This softening rather than hardening. To me, the more we swim in these waters of practice and really turning towards ourselves rather than pushing parts of ourselves away and trying to show a certain face that we've all been taught to do. The more we see that these are parts of ourselves and they can be worked with, and when we turn towards them, they're so much easier to work with than when we try to suppress them.

They have a much shorter lifespan. That's my experience when I am just honest with myself that, yeah, this is so normal. This is so natural. And it's really okay that it's here. The more I learn to to see it as just how things are, the less scary it becomes. That's the other thing. It becomes normalized, it becomes like this dear little anger, it just gives me a hold on it in a very different way than when I'm pushing it in the closet or denying it. And it's getting bigger and more unwieldy and shameful, right? As soon as shame comes in, then it's like really hard, right? Because then you're like, oh, now I'm a bad

person for having this. And then you're sort of locks everything in and makes it that much harder to work with. So the seeing it as kind of a suffering part of ourselves versus an aggressive, harmful part of ourselves that already starts to, it's like the balloon, it's the air starts to seep out of the balloon of the anger. It becomes so much more malleable. Okay. So I totally agree with that. I do not, as you might imagine, given my conditioning as a stereotypical man in many ways, I don't love the, Oh dear anger language.

It doesn't work for me. I love it for other people, but just for me, I don't love it. I believe that she's pointing at something incredibly valuable. I just re-language it to thank you. I see my anger demon emerging and when I'm on my game, I can see it happening. It's a signal, okay, take a beat. And then the second thing to do, again, in my good moments, 10% of the time I can do this. Thank you. Thank you, anger. I see that you are, this is the, as I said before, the organism trying to protect itself. There's some, not only wisdom here, but also some useful version of self-love in there. I think this is a way to counteract the

shame that I often feel when I see the anger, and I think that shame is a kind of, and I've said this before, it's a kind of psychic constipation that everything just shuts down. So if you can see it clearly for me, if I could see it clearly and then take a break and maybe even put my hand on my heart, which I think some people feel uncomfortable with, but I've gotten comfortable with and just talk to myself the way I would talk to my kid when he's angry, dude, this is cool. The anger component of your mind is struggling for salience right now, trying to achieve dominance. And there's some wisdom in that, but actually there's

a smarter way to proceed. Having just uttered all of those words, how does all of that land for you? Yeah, that makes sense to me. It's funny when I was pulling this clip, my very first thought was Dan would never say my dear little anger in a million years but yeah I thought it was important to bring it to you because like you said we can make our own

versions of these things like maybe your anger isn't dear little anger or maybe it's dude or maybe it's buddy or whatever but yeah it's like how can we find some little tricks for softening our approach for seeing the anger and softening to it in a way that works for us. I also just love what she said about shame, and I think it really rhymes with the ways that you've talked about shame on the show before. Again, and I think this is gonna come up in a couple clips from now,

but you can make some version of this. Sort of hack your own mind and your own conditioning to sort of de-condition some of the aversion that we might have to our anger and let the anger in instead. Yeah, I mean, just to say a little bit more about making it your own by choosing language that works for you. We're talking about a three-pronged approach to anger.

The first is recognizing it. The second is embracing it, which is what we're really now talking about. And the third, which we've referenced, but we're going to talk about more deeply in a second is to look deeply. So again, recognize, embrace, look deeply. So recognizes mindfulness easier said than done. Don't expect perfection, but there will be times if you're practicing with some degree of diligence where anger will arise and you'll see it before you've

as I like to say said something that's you know ruined the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever before you've bitten the hook you can see it and you'll be able to respond wisely instead of react blindly so that's the first step of recognizing embracing is what we're really in the midst talking about now and Kyra Joule recommended my dear little anger or whatever and this is the point I wanted to make in response to that whatever Language you choose just know there is evidence that talking to yourself in a supportive way Can be very effective. I know we talked about Kristin Neff or I've referenced her a couple of times, but she and others like Ethan Cross from the university of Michigan have done a bunch of research about this capacity to rewire your inner dialogue,

which I just find endlessly fascinating. And it's really useful for me. And I would recommend it to others to at least experiment with in moments of anger, to talk back to the anger in a way that is, it has some warmth to it, which isn't about capitulating to the anger. It's this radical disarmament of being cool with it and yet choosing a different path. Yeah.

Okay. So we really said a lot now about the first two steps of the three pronged approach to anger. Again, they are recognize, embrace, and then look deeply. What more is there to say about look deeply and what does that actually mean? Yeah, so there's quite a bit of great advice around what it means to look deeply at your anger. Vinny Ferraro, for example, has just a whole bunch of questions he recommends that

we ask. And these are questions you can ask in the moment, but they're also questions you can ask way after the fact. They're questions you can ask in the moment, but they're also questions you can ask way after the fact. They're questions you can ask as you're thinking about it in the car or on the meditation cushion, or when you're journaling or whatever. He suggests we ask ourselves, what are our own patterns with anger? What do our own patterns with anger tend to be?

Do we tend to think of ourselves as the peacemakers? Do we tend to think of ourselves in kind of a victim role? Do we tend to think of ourselves as more the perpetrator? Is our self-image as somebody who's quick to anger? Is our self-image as the person who never gets angry, you know, that isn't bothered by anything, et cetera? And so just having an understanding of what are our specific patterns, this gets back to something we were talking about at the top of the conversation,

but having a sense of what our patterns are is a really important step in kind of unlocking and repatterning some of those kinds of responses. There's also a whole other set of questions he recommends asking, so I'll let him give those recommendations. Here's some more of Vinnie. We also have to understand that it's generally a secondary emotion. It's not primary, right? So it's usually covering something up. It's like, okay, if I wasn't pissed off right now, what would I have to feel? Can I follow it to the root? The root, many times it's like sadness, fear, uncertainty. We know what we get mad about.

So it's like, okay, what's underneath? What's underneath? A lot of times, bro, I'm surprised. It's born out of a great care. There's something I care about here, something I care about enough to be upset about. Wow. All right. So that kind of alleviates some of my own judgment around the anger arising. So Dan, maybe I should just acknowledge that this gets back to something you

said earlier, which is that for you, underneath anger is often fear. Anger becomes kind of a signal that there's some care, there's some fear for you. Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say it's about care, because I do get angry about world events or domestic events that, but most of the time I'm angry for very local reasons, local to like my narrow self-interest and yeah of course there's care in there, care for self or whatever, but a lot of it is long-running multi-generational anxiety. Hmm I feel that. Yeah and you know to be clear really when Vinny's talking about looking at what's under the hood, whether it's fear or care or intergenerational anxiety patterns, we often can't do this on a dime.

We often can't do this in the moment. I'm going to play here a story from Vinny about this big angry reaction he had to a certain circumstance and kind of how long it took him to unpack what was happening. One of the things I found pleasing about this story was that even great meditation teachers sometimes need a little bit of space and time to get under the hood, to get under the anger. So anyway, this is a story from Vinny. You'll hear him tell his story and then you'll hear a little bit of dialogue

between him and I kind of unpacking it on the back end. Yeah, how do we not take anger personally when it's so personal? It feels so personal. I had this very strange moment with my son Valentino We were playing having a blast, you know, but it was time to go to school and I was like, alright, bro Alright, bro. Alright, bro. We gotta brush our teeth. We gotta get our socks out. Come on, bro You know the drill and he wasn't done Kind of joking with me. And you know after a half a dozen times I could feel myself getting shorter and I was like, alright dude, this is it.

We got two minutes to get out the door. And I went to go hand him his toothbrush and he just shut the door on me. And I was like, okay. And I put the toothbrush down on the floor and I just walked away and I went and laid down. Oh, you know, just go get with myself because I was having a big reaction. There was something happening to me where I was just like, I was at my end. I was in therapy a couple days later and I'm like, I don't know man, there was this big response I had.

Him just shutting the door. He opened the door a minute later to see if I was still waiting for him and I was just and he walked out Long face and you know, my wife dropped him off at school and she was she came back and she's like man. He was really Hurt man. What happened and I'm like, I don't know exactly but a couple days later I'm at therapy Yeah, my therapist said take me back to the moment. What was happening? And I'm like, well, I Don't know he had me on like pay-no-mind status And I started digging deeper. It's like, you know, like I don't matter. I Don't have the right to exist and it's like whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa, bro. Pup the brakes, dude

We're in a like a full-blown trauma response right now. This is your kid playing a joke with you with the door? All right, let's see if we can get our arms around this thing because you are not relating to that proportionately. When there's a disproportionate response, there's usually a distortion in perception. You know, I was 10 years old again and it was my dad and it was like, I wasn't even with my son anymore, right? So noticing, okay, what just happened?

So when I say not taking it personally, I was taking it very personally. In my better moments, as you've been kind of stating. I think I try to slow it all down and just go inside and see what is happening in my body, right? Can I connect with my feeling on the floor? My feet on the floor, this fundamental okayness, groundedness, nothing's coming at me. I'm not being attacked or something, at least not externally. And it's like, okay, am I actually all right? Because I'm trying to talk myself off the ledge of feeling attacked, because that's a lot of times

what will inspire anger from me is if I feel like too many things are coming at me. So it's like, okay Can I just sort of have a containment with this body with this heart with this belly and say, okay Are you actually okay and that way I'm not I'm relating to the anger and not from it if that makes sense. Yeah Relating to the anger and not from it right? There's some space between you and it. You're not fully identified. Yeah, yeah, I'm not lost in it, right? I can acknowledge that like anger's arising. I'm not anger, but anger is passing

through this being called Vinny. And I can hold it as long as I don't mistake it for who I am, right? So just that little bit of distance can serve to wake me up to that fact. And one of the ways you're getting that distance is you're literally identifying non-threat facts. Am I physically being attacked? No.

Is my body safe in this moment? Yes. Can I feel my feet on the floor? Yes. Can I feel my feet on the floor? Yes. Like these are all ways to send a signal to your brain that there is no lion chasing you. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Because what happens? What happens, DJ? Somebody does something that angers me. Part of me can't believe it. Part of me is in disbelief, because I'm not treated like that much. So there's some sort of calibration where I'm like,

oh, hold on, did that just happen? And then I just keep replaying it to make sure I got it right. Know what I mean? So it's just like some sort of inquiry. Who do they think they are? Who do they think I am? Well, I'm gonna show, you know what I mean?

And then all of a sudden it's just like, I'm being constantly attacked, but it's by my own replaying of the event, right? So I went from maybe victim to now I'm victim and perpetrator, closed loop inside the black box of my mind. So that's what I'm trying to alleviate, is the retelling of the story and then the reigniting of the anger. So I want to just kind of say all right what else is

happening? Oh I'm actually in a relatively safe place. Okay my feet are on the floor, my hands are on my belly, I'm here. Okay okay what's happening here? So that helps me just kind of calm down so I can get access back to clearer thinking. And that's how I relate to the presence of anger and not from it. Coming up, we talk about how not to take anger so personally.

And we hear where DJ landed after all of this, he's got a little acronym that helps him deal with his own anger. acronym that helps him deal with his own anger. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing, but more often than not, it comes at the expense of everything, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head.

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It's just very charming. I love when Dharma teachers and Joseph Goldstein, who I talk about a lot, does this a lot. I love when they talk about their own mistakes. Then the Dharma puzzle just becomes much clearer, much more relatable. Maybe we're gonna get to this and maybe I'm preempting you again, but there's something really onward leading around not taking it personally. This is actually, you know, a core Dharma teaching that we don't own any of this. You feel like everything that's happening in your mind

is bespoke and idiosyncratic and fully non-negotiable, yours, but actually it's just nature. That's what I was thinking about a little bit toward the end of this discussion. Am I jumping the gun or is it worth double clicking on that here? No, I appreciate you highlighting that. I mean, it reminds me of something Matthew said,

which I don't have a clip of, which is that it's generally believed that anger, hatred, that this emotion, this physiological reaction, predates love evolutionarily. That as a species, we got angry way, way before, generations or centuries or millennia before we got collaborative. And when he was talking about this, way before, generations or centuries or millennia before we got collaborative. And when he was talking about this, he said he's not totally sure that that's true, that anger predates love evolutionarily.

But just that idea, that possibility, that likelihood for me just really throws into sharp relief how deeply impersonal all of this is, right? If our species has been angry for millennia, if our species has been angry for far longer than our species has been able to love and collaborate and communicate, then it'd be a little bit absurd actually to see anger as my anger, as my own, or as my own personal failing.

Yeah, that is actually, I think, a really helpful kind of zoom out lens, you know, to contextualize and depersonalize all this. It is helpful. I think people really struggle with this idea of their anger, or anything, any emotional response, our thoughts or our emotions, our urges. I think people really struggle with the idea that it's impersonal. As one great monk said, it's a, when you claim it as your own, it's a misappropriation of public property.

You can go deep on this subject, but a really surface way to think about it is, obviously, you're a part of the universe. You may feel separate, but you're obviously a creation of nature, of the universe. So therefore everything that's happening in your head is just an expression of the universe or nature, even though it feels super personal. Again, we can go deep on that if you want from a Dharma standpoint, but on a practical level, it just helps you unhook from it. And Joseph, the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein has a linguistic hack you can use here, which is instead of saying, I am angry, you can switch it to there is anger.

And that it just becomes much more workable. And I think this is a key aspect of the Dharma when it comes to this third step of looking deeply. And so yeah, I just commend it to all the listeners. But that being said, I know we have one more Matthew Brentsilver clip on this third step of looking deeply at your anger once it arises, once you've acknowledged it and embraced it.

So this is another really practical suggestion. And one of the things that's great about the suggestion is you can employ it any time. You can employ it 30 seconds after some kind of conflict, but you can also do it that night, you could do it the next day, you could do it five years later. You can employ it anytime. You can employ it 30 seconds after some kind of conflict, but you can also do it that night. You can do it the next day. You can do it five years later.

Basically, the suggestion is meditate on your anger. Let the anger be your object, right? Instead of following the sensation of the breath in and out or instead of having the object be the sounds around you or the feeling of the body, meditate on your anger. And this is tricky. it's not super pleasant, we can't do it every time. And it can be hard to really hold anger and awareness

and to watch what's happening in your thoughts, what's happening in your body, without getting subsumed by it, without just ruminating, spinning out, kind of going down the rabbit hole, rehearsing your anger. But it's worth trying. If we can bring a bit of mindfulness to our anger on the cushion, we can start to see it more clearly.

How is it playing out in our minds, our bodies, and so on? So here's Matthew describing a little bit about what it might mean to meditate on our anger. The experience of holding anger as a phenomena in awareness will be very unpleasant. It will be very unpleasant. We will feel the pain of anger,

the way in which anger longs for a certain kind of satisfaction engaging the world, but itself is extremely unpleasant. And to be equanimous with anger is to feel the anger. To be equanimous with feeling is to feel in a conscious way. And so that will be unpleasant, but as opposed to ruminating in anger, which will tend to lead to a mind that is more brittle and has more

faith in anger at the end of the sit, for example, to be awake to anger will leave us with a deeper faith in love, not the redemptive possibilities of anger, of changing the conditions of our life. I do almost have a kind of dogmatic faith in love. It's sort of, we have to come back to the sense of, and it may be just a very simple maxim in the mind, which is something like, and we have to find this in our own way, in our own language, but it has to kind of speak directly to our heart. And maybe it's something just like, this cannot work out, or this cannot do what I want it to do. This is a dead end in some way. You find your own lone language for it,

but often we can only remember one thing. Part of why we consciously experience the agony of anger is to burn in that maxim, to really burn it in. We often think about Dharma as like putting out the fire of anger, but the Dharma is much better at preventing fires than putting them out. Sometimes we were just backed into some karmic corner

and it just, we're gonna suffer, we're gonna cause suffering. There's no dukkha free way out, it's just that way. But we consciously experience the pain of that so that we consolidate our motivation to practice in the future, to be careful, to develop deeper reverence for love so that the next time when I say to myself,

this cannot work out, this anger cannot work out, I believe it a little bit more deeply. When I say to myself, love is the path, that there is no such thing as a close-hearted happiness. I really believe that because a million times we've tried the close-hearted happiness and it has not worked once. It has not worked once. If we are to be deeply happy, it will involve love.

And that's a kind of insight that we, we have to feel in, you know, every bit as real as the sense of our own body right here. And so equanimity with anger and marinating in anger are both painful, but they're a different species of pain. And one is the pain of relinquishment of something that for whatever personal evolutionary reasons feels like important to enact. It feels important. It feels like I cannot neglect this anger. If I am to let this go, it's like neglecting a child or something like that. It needs me. I need it. All of that is really potent in the mind. And so to relinquish feels like some kind of act of self-neglect. It is not. It is not. We are accountable to the kernel of wisdom in the mind, right? But the rest really can be relinquished. But there's a pain in that. It's not a simple kind of gesture.

That pain is a different species of pain than the pain of deepening the habit of anger itself, of marinating it, of ruminating. And the awareness should feel lighter, more spacious. We should feel more confidence in love at the end of the sit where we've primarily been holding anger and awareness, awareness of the affective urgency in the body, the sense that if the body could speak, and it basically does, it speaks in the form of our narratives, but it's like if the body could speak, and it basically does, it speaks in the form of our narratives, but it's like

if the body could speak, it would say, do something, stop something, hate something. We have to deeply listen without being mesmerized in the same way that you deeply listen to your four-year-old without collapsing the metacognitive awareness that the four-year-old's reality is not the last word of capital T truth. But we have to do that listening function. Otherwise the other doesn't feel heard. And if we don't feel heard, then we will continue to cycle through the kind of angry ruminations until something very deeply is discerned. And that often involves a kind

of self-directed empathic connection at depth, at depth, to really feel oneself in that and to really accompany oneself in that. I like this. It just makes sense to me. If I can sum it up quickly, I think he's saying if you meditate on your anger, just like be mindful of your anger, you will teach the organism, you will teach your nervous system that it sucks. And that's really useful.

Even though it's not fun, it's really useful because you're disincentivizing and deconditioning anger going forward. Because hopefully you've taught it, your mind, that it's like grabbing a hot coal. Does that land for you as a TLDR for what he just said? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I've been trying this and yet it sucks and it's so wildly helpful. I've actually kind of collapsed this whole episode and all these learnings into a little acronym for myself, something to try to grab onto and kind of burn into the molecules. And it's just RED, R-E-D, which is loosely inspired by the phrase seeing red. And RED just stands for

recognize, embrace, deeply look. This is, by the way, very close to other acronyms that listeners may be familiar with, like RAIN, which was, I believe, originated by the Dharma teacher, Michelle McDonald, and popularized by Tara Brock, who talked about it on this show. We can put a like RAINN, which was, I believe, originated by the Dharma teacher, Michelle MacDonald, and popularized by Tara Brock, who talked about it on this show. We can put a link in the show notes. But anyway, yeah, lately there have just been a handful of moments where anger will arise with one of my kids or with my wife, and this acronym, RED, will pop into my head, and I'll try to really methodically, in the the moment do the R, recognize,

and the E, embrace, let it in. And then the D is for this deep looking. Yeah, there was actually this moment a few weeks ago where I actually don't even remember the details anymore to be honest, but there was some kind of miscommunication between my wife and I. It was right before bed, it was sort of right before she fell asleep

at the very end of the night. And I honestly don't even know if she fully grocked that there had been a miscommunication, but I was angry. And there was this moment where I could have like kept her awake and turned it into a whole thing. I didn't, and instead the acronym popped up and I just let her drift off. And I sat up in bed and I sort of assumed a meditative position and I tried to do this.

I tried to recognize and embrace the anger and look deeply at it for a few minutes and really meditate with anger as the object and it sucked. Like it was just, it was the worst. It feels bad in your head, it feels bad in your body, it brings up all these ancient patterns and all these stories, and yeah, I was really trying to do what Matthew's pointing to, which is just hold it in awareness

without getting sucked in by it. Yeah, even though it sucked, it was so much better than having a fight. In a few minutes of kind of embracing and looking deeply at it, the anger lost its charge. And again, the details escape me now, but what I do think I remember was that the next day I was able to kind of address what had happened

and sort it out pretty easily. And I'm not remembering to do these things every time, but in those, you know, in those rare moments where I actually do what the teacher suggests, it's really been making a huge difference. And I think just to underline one more of Matthew's points here, we do these practices not because they're always going to help us put out the fire. There's not always going to be a way out,

but they might help us avoid some fires. And I can definitely say that since I started working on this episode, there are fights that did not happen. And I'm really grateful for that. My takeaway is that you and your wife should stop talking before you go to bed. It's probably true. It's actually funny you should say that because in Plum Village, which is the practice center founded by Thich Nhat Hanh, When you go on a retreat in Plum Village, usually you can talk during the day,

talk to the people you came with, talk to new people that you're meeting, talk to the monastics. But there are periods of noble silence, and the longest one is a period of noble silence where you don't speak at all, from shortly after dinner in the evening until shortly after breakfast the next morning.

And yeah, we've actually tried this on occasion, my wife and I, having a noble silence that lasts from the end of the evening until the beginning of the morning. And yeah, it works. We don't always do it, but when we do, it works. Just to go back to Matthew Brentsilver's last clip there, because there's a lot in it. You know, he talked about love, and I do want to just respond to that. Love can be for some people, a bit of an off putting word because it's grandiose. It's also complicated. We use the same word for, you know, our romantic partners and like our feelings

about the latest Netflix show and there's a lot of cultural baggage that's that has attached to love earlier in this conversation. You DJ talked about it as like just collaboration. It's anything north of neutral, as I understand it. It's basically a hardwired human capacity to give a shit, to collaborate, to cooperate, communicate. It genuinely does apply to everything from a Netflix show to a stranger who might provoke some bit of compassion or empathy to your best friend, to your parents, to your kids, to your romantic partner, to yourself. It's a kind of omnidirectional force.

But what love is not is cosigning on something somebody did to you that's objectively unjust. It's not capitulation. It's not inviting people over for dinner. You can do the loving thing and not be carried away by your anger and still set a boundary and still speak up for yourself. So this is really a subtle art. The other thing he said that I wanted to respond to is he used the phrase dead end. And that just brought me back. I know I referenced this earlier, but, um, not long ago, I posted an episode where I

talked about some things that I learned in the wake of the separation process from what used to be the 10% happier app. And, and there was this like double pronged pair of mantras that Joseph Goldstein gave me when I got pissed. One was dead end, you know, like you've thought about this enough. There's no more rumination that's going to be helpful. And then the second one was love. No matter what love broadly understood as not cosigning on the actions of somebody else has taken that you disagree with, but doing your best to understand why they feel

that way and understanding that everybody on this planet is just acting out their stuff. And that's the only way to understand why they feel that way and understanding that everybody on this planet is just acting out their stuff and that the anger is unlikely to be an abiding strategy whereas love is a cleaner burning fuel. And then the final thing I wanted to say about all this is yeah I think red makes a lot of sense to recognize and to embrace and then to look deeply. And you're not always gonna catch it, you're going to mess up.

But you retain the option to apologize later. That I have found is a pretty cool opportunity. Yeah, it reminds me of that Becky Kennedy episode about repair. Obviously it's great not to mess up in the first place when you can, and it's great to repair quickly when you can, and sometimes you can't do either, and you know repair is quite often still on the table.

And to a point you made a minute or two ago, Dan, you know it's not always going to be clean, and it's not always going to be exactly what you want it to be, and sometimes there's really real harm, and you have to set really firm boundaries. Sometimes the person you're mad at isn't going to be a part of your life anymore. You know, so there's a whole range of really skillful responses that could all fall under the category of love and they're not all always going to feel good.

The other thing that's just coming to mind when I was, when you were talking about how love can coexist with a boundary, maybe should coexist with a boundary, like I was thinking about, you know, these moments where my daughter's misbehaving in some way or having some sort of meltdown or difficulty, and there's just always such a huge difference between when I get worked up and angry and respond from that place versus when I stay calm and mindful

and respond from a place of love. The thing that doesn't change in either of those two circumstances is there still does need to be a boundary. There often still does need to be a teaching. I still need to enforce a sense of safety and a sense of how to behave and how to treat people and all of that. So that part doesn't change, but you know, when I'm on my game, the whole thing can just be so much less painful and honestly so much shorter.

And yeah, it doesn't always go that way and that's all right too. Yep. I think about something I heard Sam Harris, my friend who is also a meditator, I think about this thing he says about anger, you know, has a half life. Most emotions a half-life of just like a few minutes, whatever, but we tend to read up if we don't do red. Red if we don't go through recognize embrace look deeply or even just recognize and then we live in that anger for days lifetimes the reduction in damage that can. is lifetimes, the reduction in damage that can happen by letting it play out in its natural half-life of a couple minutes as opposed to just acting it out blindly for so long that

pretty much incalculable. Yeah. This was a really great discussion, really helpful. We know at the very least it helped the two of us, so we'll see if it helps others. What else is coming down the pike in terms of these kind of reported episodes from you, DJ? Yeah, so we're going to do three more of these in the next couple months, essentially. And yeah, if people like them, maybe some next year, we'll see.

But the very next one will be in the feed in a couple of weeks. And it arose super organically out of making this episode, actually. The original plan was to just have this one anger episode today, but as I was reporting this out and having these conversations, it became super clear that dealing with our own anger merited its own conversation, and that was this one that you and I just had. But then there's this whole other problem of, you know,

unfortunately, other people get angry too. And that sucks. And, you know, that kind of creates its own set of problems and necessitates its own set of practices and approaches. So yeah, the next episode in this format, in this series in a few weeks, will be about what happens when other people get angry. And you'll hear more great advice from Vinny and Kyra Jewell and Matthew about that. And

then yeah a few weeks after that there will be a couple more episodes like this one and I really hope that they're landing for people and excited to hear what folks think. Oh and a quick shout out thank you to Marissa Schneiderman, our senior producer who's skillfully helping us put this little series together and is also producing a whole bunch of other brand new Dharma episodes this fall. So thank you, Marissa. Excellent.

Great job. Yes, thank you, Marissa. Thanks again to DJ. We're going to do more of these episodes going forward, as he mentioned. In the meantime, we're going to drop some links in the show notes to other DJ appearances on the show, and other appearances from the teachers you just heard from, Vinnie Ferraro, Matthew Brentsilver, and Kyra

Julingo. We'll also drop some links to episodes from Kristin Neff, who you heard me talk about, and also Ethan Cross and Dr. Becky Kennedy. Oh, and I'll drop a link to the episode where I talked about my separation from what was formally known as the 10% Happier Meditation App, all in the show notes if you want to go deeper. Speaking of going deeper, please go to danharris.com.

That's our big new push in the wake of the separation from the app. We've got a whole new community where you can connect to other people who take Training the Mind seriously and also where you can get cheat sheets for all of the episodes, including this one where we summarize the key takeaways, give you the time codes for the big highlights of the episode and also a full transcript. Thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

She worked very hard on this episode. DJ Kashmir, as you know, is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our beat. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.