Driving Lessons

Manufacturing Emotions

It may seem like the world is driving us mad. However, if we are mad, we have to wonder, who is driving what? Anger does not lend itself to introspection. Once we are angry, it seems that some external thing is making us mad. That may be, but there is also some internal thing that boils our blood. Anger is something we manufacture. It is generated in our bodies, and subsides into our bodies, hopefully before causing too much internal or external damage. Every time something makes us mad we practice manufacturing anger in response. With a lifetime of practice, we are pretty good at getting angry and lots of things will tick us off. All that anger takes a toll on our body, on our relationships, and on our quality of life. To stop the world from driving us mad, we must understand that we are the ones driving.

Taking full responsibility for our emotional responses means that we can no longer blame the world for making us mad, we can’t blame the people who push our buttons, and we can’t blame global affairs. All we can do when we find ourselves getting mad is to own it and recognize that we are manufacturing anger again.

By owning our anger we interrupt our habit of blaming outside stimuli for our internal responses. When we get upset, instead of lashing out at those who made us mad, we feel what the anger feels like, notice what we are thinking, and drop all the stories of blame. It is hard to keep blaming the world once we know that our anger is our own creation.

We work with our anger because it is a destructive emotion. It may mask other emotions like fear or sadness, but when anger arises, it tends to hurt those exposed to it, including the ones getting mad. Because anger makes us certain and prone to rash action, the best time to work with anger is in times of calm.

In meditation, people trying to sit peacefully and quietly will get angry at the birds making noise. In meditation though, we don’t get up and quiet the birds, we quiet our mind, sit with the anger, bring our attention back to our breath and let the birds and the anger go.

Anger is not the only emotion we manufacture. We make each of the emotions we experience all day, every day. We give lots of credit to external sources for inspiring all these compelling experiences that make up our lives. When we accept our central role in driving our emotional experience, we can make more of an effort to learn how to drive. As we learn to spend less time seething in anger, we can use that time to practice generating positive emotions, like gratitude. We can be grateful for the world, even if that gratitude is our own creation.