Pema Chödrön, Don’t Bite the Hook Part 1 of 6 : Anger
November 5, 2009 by dr. lam · 8 Comments
Pema Chödrön, formerly Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, is a Tibetan Buddhist nun, who was alluded to in the book Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser, which we covered a few months ago. I was fascinated enough with the introduction to her thoughts that I wrote a cursory blog on it and now found myself exploring more of her teachings and thoughts. Her seminar/audiobook, Don’t Bite the Hook, references what happens when a fish gets tempted to be ensnared by the bait and gets carried away to an undesirable place. The subtitle for this seminar is Finding Freedom from Anger, Resentment, and Other Destructive Emotions perhaps describes the intent more directly than the metaphoric main title.
The Tibetan Buddhist concept of a “hook” is known as shempa, which describes a thought or an idea that gets buried further and further into our heart, mind, and soul so that we cannot let go of it. The shempa gets hooked into us and we get carried away like an unsuspecting fish by a hook. This seminar focuses on how to recognize and let go of our shempas.
She opens the book with how the power of anger can be such an emotion that shatters all that is good up until the point that it occurs. We may be happily going our way until something provokes us, then we “cycle down” from anger shattering everything that came before. Is anger ever justified? Well perhaps. However, most oftentimes it only leads to regret that we engaged in it and it blankets all good emotions from that point forward. When we engage in anger we cause mutual destruction and lower all energies downward.
We must also begin to believe that anger is almost never or never justified. When we start to see it all around us as a righteous response to a situation, we will then enlist it in such a way that it will become more ingrained in us as a character response. When we start to see the emotion as an alien one we will begin to disengage from it as an unhealthy response so that when times come that we would say that it would be justified, we actually find that was a rationalization so that we could behave in that fashion. Like everything in life, it takes practice, over days, months, and years. Tomorrow we will talk about ways to release anger among other negative forces that can pervade our life.