Dear Thay, dear Sangha
my question which I ask also on behalf of a friend
who doesn't want to be found
is, how do we defend, or how do we face agression
To give you an example,
let's say that a neighbor shouts at your kids
and behaves agressively with them, with your children.
What could you do then, how do you face agression like this?
Thank you.
Dear Thay, dear Sangha
I'd like to offer at least a part of an answer
Phap Li may offer the other half
For much of my young adult life
I worked in a juvenile detention center.
I saw a lot of violence
and I was confronted with a lot of violence as well
At one point in my life I felt,
I had a lot of trauma in myself
I was very reactive when I would hear a loud bang or..
I remember one experience, I was in a shopping center and...
I believe it was a balloon that popped
and my heart started racing so fast
because I was so afraid
from working in that environment,
there were so many incidents where I felt threatened
I felt that if something was to happen
it would be very difficult for me to protect myself.
When we practise mindfulness
I see that we cultivate particular qualities
and one of these qualities is
when we come back to our breath, and when we come back to our body
we learn to be present with whatever is happening within us.
And we learn to cultivate a kind of relationship to our inner experience
We learn to open up, we learn to soften
we learn to become quite tender
and just allow whatever it is that's happening, to happen
and we make a commitment to stay there
and to observe
and to stay there long enough so that we can learn something.
In the sutra on mindfulness, the Buddha asks us to be aware of what's inside of us
and also what is outside of us.
And he asks us to be aware of things as they arise
and things as they pass, as they cease
and I see that...
just as we are aware of the anger inside us
we're aware of the fear inside us
and we're aware of the unpleasant feeling in our body
and we learn to stay with that
We also learn to relate to experiences outside of us in the same way
so that when somebody comes to us and they're quite..
reactive, and they're quite agressive
we can stand back and we can observe what it does to us
and we can also learn about how to relate to that person
in a way that they can calm down.
We are encouraged to not speak when we're angry.
We're encouraged to go for a walk
to come back to our breathing
to go and do something that nourishes us
that allows us to calm down, because...
when we're angry, it's like...
it's like a mind that's full of hot water, bubbling up.
When you try to look through the hot water
you can't really see what's happening so you cannot make a good decision.
So it's important that we don't try and negotiate with someone who's angry
but maybe while they're angry
we allow them the opportunity to calm down
and we behave in a way that we don't become overwhelmed
by their emotion as well.
So if we notice that we're getting angry, we can also take some space, withdraw
and maybe we can come back to the interaction again when it's calmed down.
That's my answer, thank you.
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