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 Mascara, 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. Okay. So I'm going to start this episode with a short story that Ticknat 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, whether it was the roof workers or background sound from the distant city

on the evenings of weekends. You could hear the loud music playing from different parties.

And I remember just feeling the anger in relationship to those sounds, as if the sounds were trying to get in the way of my peace.

And it was a big realization that it wasn't the sound itself or the people creating the sound.

It was my relationship to that experience.

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