Let go of your anger like you'd let go of a hot coal

"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."

I came across this quote from Buddha today and it got me thinking...as many of his quotes tend to do. How often does something happen that makes us so angry that we carry our anger with us throughout the rest of the day?

Someone says something to you at work that's snide or snotty, or someone is rude to you in line at the grocery store or post office. Or you're at a meeting and someone just won't stop getting on your nerves with a narrow point of view. A family member or friend does something or says something that causes you to just outright stop speaking to them until, years later, you find it hard to remember the exact thing said that made you so angry to begin with.

What can you do?

No one is saying to just rollover and become a human punching bag. However, the next time one of these things start to light a fire in you of anger, I challenge you to take a small moment and ask yourself this very simple question - "where will my anger get me in this situation?"

You might feel that your anger will accomplish something, but I'm hard-pressed to believe it, especially for trivial things like people's personality flaws.

If you keep that anger burning inside of you throughout the day, the week, the months?

Just as bad. That anger becomes bitterness, and does nothing more than eat away at the good person you are inside, affecting every part of being - your demeanor, your thought process, your heart, your ability for love, your capacity for good - all eaten away by your anger like a plague.

You often hear people say "don't sweat the small stuff." They're right. Grasping on to your anger, never letting go of the things that irk you, or something someone said this morning, yesterday, last week, last year, or ten years ago...does nothing more than to burn you from the inside out.

Let go of the hot coals, let go of your anger, and find one more way to set yourself free.

Fighting hate with hate only fuels more hate

This caught my eye today...

"Hatred does not cease through hatred at any time. Hatred ceases through love."

It's a quote from Buddha that makes me think about negativity.

There are countless times where something makes us so angry that it seems the only way we can react to it, and the easiest way to react to it, is to lash out back with just as hateful a thought or word as was thrown at us.

But let's stop for a minute and think about it. When I react to hate with more hate, what have I accomplished? Have I put out the fire and resolved the issue at hand?

Absolutely not.

More times than not, all I'll have ended up doing was feeding the fire, the fire of hate, making it larger, full of even more bad potential.

It's kind of like that saying - "two wrongs don't make a right." Just because someone hates me or hates something I do, is the situation then alleviated by my return of that hate? Nope. It just keeps that wheel turning.

I thought of a recent statement that a friend who's going through a very painful divorce said regarding the situation - "It's very sad when people become consumed by revenge." In this particular case, one person was so upset, and so hateful about the split, that they have become all-consumed by their need for revenge and their need to create as much hurt as they can.

They do so because THEY are hurt. But it certainly has not helped the process, nor the hurt inside of them. My friend understood this, and has been doing their best not to react the same way...not to meet that revenge with more anger, but with an understanding of the pain the other party is going through.

What Buddha tells us to do is to stop for a moment before we react in anger, before we return the hate, and calmly ask ourselves what the right thing to do in the situation is.

If we love, if we forgive, if we show compassion, instead of returning hate with hate, only then can we start to douse the fires of hate that come into our lives.