Anger Management in Practice

“Come on, hurry up! (Clap, clap, clap) Move your ass bro, I’m in a hurry!” I can feel my face beginning to flush and my heart rate quicken. As I feel my body prepare for a fight, I make sure to take a few moments to breathe deep and hold it long enough until it causes my heart rate to slow. As I watch the pudgy, balding man with obvious issues wave his arms around like an idiot, I can tell that my body is amping up for a confrontation. However, my mind is calm, clear, and ever so slightly bored.



I’m standing in line at the local movie theater waiting to buy tickets from a severely overworked and overloaded ticket clerk. As he’s on the phone with a caller that’s he’s put on hold several times, the clerk doesn’t even seem to notice the very upset patron. I'm still not sure if he was yelling at me or yelling at the ticket clerk, but I will tell you that he was certainly yelling in my direction. A bit of background here, I have had anger issues for as long as I can remember. I have tried very hard to make sure that I’m able to walk away or remain in control so that I don’t go off on anyone or start something that I will later regret. While it’s been a very long time since I’ve gotten that upset, it’s still a concern of mine. So, when I found myself in a hostile situation with a guy yelling at me, I was quite surprised that my mind was calm and even. While it was obvious that I should be upset, I wasn’t angry at all.

I have a few ways that I can interpret this information. Either I have mysteriously had a complete brain lapse and now just ignore my emotions, or the last 4 months of yoga have had an effect on my emotional control. Now, there’s no way I can prove that this was certainly yoga, but I’m fairly certain it’s linked. A couple of months back, I went to a workshop hosted by Zen with Sam and Lauren. In this workshop, there was a decent discussion (that we will be referring to in the future) about the 8 Limbs of Yoga. I’m not a yogic scholar, but I’m going to try and explain what I think has started here. In the 8 Limbs, it talks of Pratyahara, which is described as a “withdrawal of the senses.” Now, emotions are not necessarily sensory, but I believe that it is applicable. I'm not sure what it is spurring this on, but I can just see the results. Could it be that this withdrawal is a withdrawal of the mind (or soul?) from the body itself, including emotions? How does this work, though? I've heard that the 8 Limbs are not a "daily focus" sort of thing (where you can say "Monday I focus on Niyama.") For that matter, is Pratyahara something that you focus on in order to achieve yogic perfection? Or, based on some of what I've heard in various classes, are these things that you just keep in mind and they somehow influence you through osmosis?

This was not the first time I had noticed that my body was upset but my mind was not. The other instances were not as dramatic, but they were enough to notice. I sometimes get calls at work that can get quite heated. Usually, you just can’t help get a little upset. You act in a professional manner, don’t let your emotions show through, and redirect their energy to get them a positive result. With these, it was the same sensation of feeling my body get upset, but my mind is calm. My breath still needs work, I still need to be able to control my body more but, I am still making major milestones now. My teacher, Sam, would probably tell me that I need to stop talking about adding more meditation to my daily practice and just start doing it.