About Anger and Love

When our teacher Garchen Rinpoche has talked about the faults of anger, inside my response has often been, Yes, but – All sorts of exceptions exist in my mind: standing up for what’s fair, holding against injustice, defending the innocent, protecting the Earth, naming stupidity, setting healthy boundaries – you name it, I can defend anger. Yet today this one is about anger and love.

In a recent text to a dear one about other loved ones, I wrote, We want them to be perfect, so we don’t have to be aggravated. Spare me my anger, just be perfect. Not likely!

The wisdom of a loving group

In an online Ayurveda mentoring group with past participants of classes this week, our focus morphed toward anger and love. Each person was facing complex challenges in an increasingly difficult world. Often anger can get stashed and become deep-seated resentment. Each of us had our entrenched patterns.

Yet the approach to handling anger seemed to be shifting for us. One person found their anger dissolving, as if the loved one who had died this past year had carried it with them. They said, I don’t want anger to have a place in me. It needs to be let go of. We talked about anger as if it was toxic sludge, which of course, it is.

Another person in the group talked about their recent journey with anger and love. They were tired of the drag on their family relationships from the steady resentment and unfulfilled expectations. In the last few weeks they’d asked the Universe for help. I want to love cleanly, they said.

The things we like about each other

What spontaneously came forward for them was an entirely new focus with their family. We’re only talking about the things we like, admire, or have admired, about one another, they related. All three generations of family members have been willing to try this. They reported that their interactions had gotten lighter, and a lot more flowing with the change in focus.

Fire in the mountains

There’s a serious fire in the mountains here in northern New Mexico. Last Sunday as the smoke poured upward in the sky toward the north east, I was a participant in ceremony at the annual Southwestern College Transformation and Healing conference in a workshop with therapists Concha Garcia Allen and Michele Rozbitsky. In the midst of what Concha called kinesthetic prayer, dancing to restore the balance of the elements in this moment, a moving prayer for rain with Danza Tonantzin de Analco dancers, I found myself inside the fire and the mountains. I could feel the anger smoldering in the earth. This wasn’t just the anger of the villages of Cundiyo and Cordova, so close to the front lines of danger. It felt like all of our anger, a male-female anger, fierce anger between the genders. There was this instant realization of I’ve got to give it up – it’s doing me no good and it’s doing my community and the Earth no good.

It was as sudden and definite an understanding as when I first read about the Plastic Continent of Trash in the Pacific in Ruth Ozeki’s delicious novel A Tale for the Time Being. Horrified, my consumption of plastic dropped drastically, just knowing about this reality. It was like that. I found myself thinking, I’ve just got to find other ways.

Cutting links to discord

Concha and the company passed out thin pieces of string to each of us, instructing us, If there’s someone you’re in a stuck place with, tie a knot in the string. Thinking about someone I’d held resentment toward for years, I tied the knot. We were instructed to take our individual strings home, burn them on our own. I did so the next morning in my daily Smoke Offering. It felt good to have a tangible way to let go of the anger, and not pick it back up again. The knot was gone.

The pueblos of northern New Mexico face what’s happening

The pueblos of northern new Mexico create a strong presence here, up and down the Rio Grande River and out beyond. Their imperative has been to protect their culture, people, language, homelands, education, water, ways of life with courage and persistence for these many decades in the face of extractive greed and ignorance. They model their own ways to work together about anger and with love. The latest issue of Green Fire Times Pueblo Convocation 2026 outlines quite a few of these. I am grateful to be their neighbor.

Thanks to my companions in this journey

Thanks to the open loving influence of my companions in the group this week, I navigated a dicey family crisis with more flexible love in the days afterward, rather than with the locked down power dynamic I first brought to the challenge. Thank you, Ayurveda mentoring group!

It’s not simple, and it is. Faced with death, birth, change, loss, destruction, joy, can we love?

This Substack is in honor of Cindy and her faithful kitty companion Charlie. Charlie, may you fly with love.

And to Lisa, Gem, and Niko. Niko, may love surround you.

The 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas

Here are some of the things Garchen Rinpoche has said over the years about anger and love. Which ones could you connect with?

The antidote for anger is loving kindness and compassion. (p 63)

As soon as anger arises it is like a poisonous thorn piercing your mind. It has the nature of suffering. (p 62)

If you are in the right, of course you can talk about your side of things; you don’t have to accept false accusations or abuse. If you are in the right, it is alright to talk about it, but without anger. For example, if someone treated me with contempt and abused me, I would make sure not to retaliate angrily. I would think, “Oh! This is his afflictive emotion. This is his anger, but from the perspective of law it is alright to respond. His behavior is not okay.”….Still you must be able to discuss the situation free from anger. (pp 56 – 57)

All conflict arises out of the biased tendencies of benefactors, disciples and so forth. When we give way to bias, the activities of listening, pondering and meditation will not be useful to us…they will become like burned seeds. (p 93)

Your worst enemy is anger. Once one has defeated one’s own anger, no external enemy exists at all. Of course, even if you don’t have any anger there will still be some people who will try to harm you. But when anger is destroyed, you will become connected to everyone. (p 62)

Updates on Garchen Rinpoche can be found here.

Image: About Anger and Love Now thanks to Iza Bruen-Morningstar

Bio: I’m a student of HE Garchen Rinpoche, as well as a writer and health educator in Santa Fe, NM. My latest cookbook Easy Healing Drinks from the Wisdom of Ayurveda is on special here.