Anger

In this 2-minute video, the Dalai Lama talks about how anger destroys not only our inner peace, but also our ability to clearly make decisions because this negative energy makes us blind to the reality of any given situation.

Am glad he says "anger **sometimes can**.. " (cut off our reasoning mind, etc.)... but that tends to be true only in people who have no practice in feeling it, so invariably mess up when they can no longer hold it back (& yes, they are often those who irrationally blame others for their discomforts, as Christine mentions). Or it happens more for men, maybe... it's certainly not my experience - anger often comes to wakes me up, and I think just fine whilst feeling it.

"Love is a verb. We have to let our love call us into action." Lierre Keith.

There is another, very important side to this (things are never that simple, in this beautiful complex universe :)

Anger was created by Nature, or God, or the Evolutionary Drive for a reason: it has the function to protect, to make us move, big time. It is our injustice-detector! So it's incredibly worrying is it to have so many injustice detectors switched OFF, at a time like this, when we are threatening the very basis of life on earth with our stupid complacency. It makes me VERY worried that this kind of denial is often 'spiritualized' by giving only half of the story (& we know that a half-truth is often worse than a big lie, in the damage it can do).

If 17000 children dying per day simply because we're being selfish & obtuse as humans, thousands of girls & women being raped & maimed every day because we still devalue anything female, or humanity being the cause of 200 species disappearing every day... if that doesn't make a someone (who isn't already working to stop these terrible crimes) very angry, they're probably energetically cut off at the neck!

What this kind of news (which is definitely part of reality today) does to most people (look around) is just make us depressed, which leads to apathy & non-action... then things get worse, so more depression, etc. Anger is a zillion times better than that! (if pure compassion & love move you to do things, that's great, & of course it can do. But just check in your own life: how many people you notice that is happening for, v. how many are just sitting on our butts, consuming our way through some depression?)

Because what is amazing about this most evolutionary of emotions... is that when you move, (do something about what you're angry at), it feels GREAT! When you repress it, if feels awful.

So I really think that the only thing that is 'negative' about what are often called 'negative emotions' is that they are the ones we are taught to repress, and any energy block feels yuccky in our bodies. If they are repressed for too long they harm our own bodies AND minds. And we don't get to do the evolutionary work we came here to do.