We can all choose otherwise. We can always regain our freedom to choose otherwise. When we find ways of making awareness and conscious choices as natural as possible, we make all of our attempts at keeping balance within our whole being and with the world all the stronger. As we discussed before, the less we let anger into us, come out of us, the less we need to manage the anger we feel. We can choose otherwise.
We left off with the idea of counting to ten, and that idea may have some merits, but it has its possible drawbacks. Besides, it doesn't really help us to do anything but control how we feel. Counting does nothing to help us make another choice in response to any stimulus to anger, to choose to experience our sense of personal hurt which we translate as insult and assault and into anger. When we can relatively easily choose a non-violent or compassionate response to the one motivating our response, we will find an enormous freedom and a wonderful and refreshing maintenance and increase in our sense of personal power.
Many say that when we can feel compassion and forgiveness for the one we perceive as causing our hurt, the person we see as an enemy, the vector or the carrier of anger to us, we will escape our anger and loss of power. That's easier said than done. It's easy for some wise person or expert to tell us to do something like feel compassion, but that instruction doesn't give us any idea of how to enact that feeling or action. My first attempts at feeling compassion worked reasonably well in that I could ask myself to feel compassion and worked at doing so. I could ask myself to forgive, and in the asking itself, I gained some ground in both compassion and forgiveness. My students and I talked about both of these, and it seemed to help in that when we could conceive of feeling and doing compassion and forgiveness. It began to make them real to us. It helped when we discovered that forgiveness of the person did not mean forgiveness for the action. The action happened, and we could not change it, nothing can do that. If it was a heinous act, it remains that even as we forgive the actor for the crime. It also remains part of the actor no matter how much we forgive. The actor will know what happened and live with it and with its results. Actually, it becomes easier generally to reach to compassion and forgiveness if we can find in ourselves the empathy we need to sense the nature of the other person's internal struggles and pain.
One of the ideas that has helped me feel compassion universally and unconditionally came when I recognized that anyone who does anything unpleasant to me engages in that sort of behavior and much worse within that person. It came to me as an anodyne, a relief, for anger and hurt. One New Year's morning, Silvia and I were walking. I and we say hello to people we see in the street. That morning, I or we said "Happy New Year." It's a cliché, and partly phatic, but it seemed relevant and relatively harmless. One fellow approached on a bicycle, and I waved and said that magic phrase to him. His face contorted, veins stood out on his forehead, and he let loose a stream of oaths, incendiary language sufficient to set the air to shuddering. My first response was defensive, to choose anger and even a minor kind of hatred for this man on a bicycle. Then it struck me: "If he is doing that to me, what in the world is he doing to himself?" I calmed down and shifted directly into compassion. Once I entered compassion I found that forgiveness and acceptance of his humanity and our shared humanity followed.