This is NPR's Life Kid. I'm journalist Simran Catee. Anger, we know, can be damaging.

It harms our bodies, compromises our judgment, and inflames public discourse.

But more often than not, it points to something complex.

Anger was the bodyguard for my hurt, my woundedness.

That's Lama Rod Owens, author of Love and Rage, The Path of Liberation through Anger.

While traditional anger management practices focus on taming our tempers, Lama Rod takes

a different approach, encouraging us to create space for this all-too-human emotion, and

to understand how and why it's worthy of our attention. A process that is neither quick

nor easy.

I just feel like I was born into this lineage of anger, you know, being born black and

queer within a social context that seems so antagonistic to both identity locations.

My earliest memories were memories of just feeling just really frustrated and marginalized

and erased.

Anger, he says, has been a constant companion.

Because I feel like it is older than me, like I just feel like it has been so dependable,

it has always been there, like when nothing else is there, the anger is there.

Today he holds a master of divinity from Harvard University and received teaching and recognition

from the coggy lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He still feels anger, but over decades has

learned to transform it. In this episode of LifeKit, Lama Rod will help us do the same.

Understand, acknowledge, and with any luck, let go of our anger.

I'd like to start off asking how do you define anger?

Yeah.

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