Hello and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarra, and in today's episode we're going to talk about anger.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. And Okay, so I'm going to start this episode with a short story that Ticnot Han, the Zen teacher talks about.

He says, A monk decides to meditate alone.

Away from his monastery, he takes a boat and goes to the middle of the lake,

closes his eyes, and begins to meditate.

After a few hours of unperturbed silence,

he suddenly feels the blow of another boat hitting his. With his eyes still closed he feels his anger rising and

when he opens his eyes he's ready to shout at the boatman who dared to disturb his meditation.

But when he opened his eyes, he saw that it was an empty boat, not tied up, floating in the

middle of the lake.

At that moment, the monk achieves self-realization

and understands that anger is within him.

It simply needs to hit an external object to provoke it.

After that, whenever he meets someone who irritates or provokes his anger,

he remembers. The other person is just an empty boat.

So this is one of those stories that I don't want to say too much about. I think it's more impactful

to let it linger for you to feel it in whatever way that it lands for you right now and to mull it over.

The one thing I will say is just to notice how the emotion of anger has as one of its qualities the presumption

that someone else or something is out to get you or is trying to hurt you in some way or make your life worse in some way.

I remember meditating in Burma and there was just a lot of loud noises periodically,

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