Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're

getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Cory Muscara, 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 TickNotHon, the

Zen teacher talks about. He says, among 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

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