Wildfire Practice: A Meditation for Dealing with Anger

By Thomas McConkie, based on an episode of Mindfulness+.

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A few years ago Lower Lights held a meditation retreat in Southern Utah during one of the largest wildfires in Utah history. We were pretty enveloped in the smoke, and for several days we thought we might need to evacuate. 

We heard through the news that the fire was started by fireworks. It became an interesting metaphor to me that the fireworks in and of themselves that caused untold damage were not inherently destructive. Instead, it was the tinder. It was the spark that connected to fuel that was able to burn down a big chunk of our beautiful state. 

And it occurs to me that we see this scenario on an individual level all the time in life. What do I mean by this? We have challenging thoughts. We have negative emotions. We get activated, provoked, disturbed, and triggered every day of our lives, often many times. We have an experience where we find ourselves deeply disturbed, and we hate to feel the way we're feeling. 

Sometimes it's obvious what the connection to the emotion is. Say I’m somewhere in public, for instance, and an altercation breaks out and somebody harasses and insults me, and my adrenaline's pumping and I feel I've been really disrespected.

But sometimes it's just a faint smell in the environment that triggers something deep in our body and calls up some unresolved pain that may go back decades. Or maybe it's hearing a song that we haven't heard for a long time, and that song just happens to be encoded in our personal nervous system with an extremely painful memory or a time in our life. 

Or — and I'm going to up the stakes here and get really juicy and tell you about my marriage — I might notice that I'm really sensitive to whether or not I feel like my wife is really listening to me when I'm saying something important. She and I have checked in on this over the years and she'll tell me, “Hey, I'm paying attention. Come on, give me a break. I'm paying attention.” And after a number of our own spats, I've realized, “Oh, there's something in the way people look at me and their quality of listening that is triggering to me if I perceive they don't care about what I care about.” And I realized that this core vulnerability, this pain that comes up all the time in my day-to-day life, goes back to the very beginning. It goes back before I can even remember. 

We're all like this. We all have core vulnerabilities. We all have emotions that we hate to experience. And it just so happens that life is teeing them up for us hundreds of times a day. 

I think you'd get the drift. So what I want to explore is how we work with this intensity. 

It seems to be a fact of life that our days are often disturbing for no rational reason. The sound of a song, the smell of a grocery store, or the look in our friend's eyes might trigger something in us that takes us back to pain in early life and suddenly we're transported from heaven to hell in an instant.

Maybe objectively our life is amazing. We have people around us who love us. We love our work in the world. We have a supportive family, we have plenty of food in the pantry. A lot of times the objective situation is that everything's fine, but it doesn't feel fine internally. It feels like a red alert, like our very lives are in danger. And when we started to pay attention to this in mindfulness practice, we realize that it's happening many times a day. 

In these moments we realize there’s a problem because our whole mindfulness practice is centered around how we can feel at peace and how we can be open and joyful and spontaneous for more of our lives. But if we're honest with ourselves, we realize so much of our lives we're suffering, so it's a really natural thing to fantasize and think, “What if I just once and for all didn't feel disturbed anymore? What if once and for all I learned to just hang out in heaven and never go to hell?”

What I find to be a more realistic approach to liberation practice is not to eliminate disturbance, but to learn how to more fully include it. 

We're going to practice this momentarily, but let’s first get back to the firework analogy. The fireworks themselves aren't the problem. We might think, “Oh, fireworks caused the forest fire. Let's ban fireworks everywhere.” Maybe at a state policy level that's a good idea. I don't know. But my experience is that's a very bad policy for the self and for training mindfulness. Instead of banning fireworks — instead of trying to never be disturbed because that's never going to happen — we should separate the spark from the tinder.

What's the tinder? The tinder in human life is the way we feel at the emotional level. The moment I start to tangle with a disturbance, I'm feeding that spark. How many times have you been disturbed and months later you're in your head rehearsing some story, experiencing painful memories? It's like you're putting tinder on the fire, and you don't know how to stop. 

Well, we're going to practice stopping. The sparks will fly, but we'll learn how to remove any fuel, any tinder from the situation, so the sparks burn hot and then they wink out. Just like that. Life continues to be disturbing, but we know how to handle these challenging situations. And the more we handle them, the more free we realize we already are. 

Let’s practice.

Take a few breaths. Go ahead and get settled wherever you are.

And just relax while the body softens. Whatever effort you're putting into practice at this moment, see if you can reduce that effort by 10%. Let things be even easier, just trusting that you don't have to force it. 

Good. We're going to do something a little counter-instinctual here. We're going to take the first step towards starting a massive forest fire. But don't worry, it's a controlled blaze.

In this relaxed and open state, I want you to call up in your memory, in your experience, the last time you were really upset. Remember the last time you really lost your cool. Where were you? Who were you with? Notice what happened. We're not going to pay a lot of attention to why you lost your cool. We just want to set off these fireworks in the body. 

If you can, go to the very first moment you recognize that there was a storm in the body. There were fireworks starting to go off. These fireworks — these intense sensations — they're often so intense and so uncomfortable to us that we'll do anything not to feel them. We don't want to feel them. We organize our whole lives around not feeling them, and one reliable way to blunt the sensation is to escape into our minds and let thoughts flare up in emotion. Sometimes we erupt in anger. Sometimes we collapse into a self loathing sadness. Oftentimes we reach out and blame, saying it’s someone else's fault. 

Just notice whatever intense sensation you can conjure up in your memory. It might be as intense as it was the first time you had the experience. It might be much dimmer. 

If it's too intense, I'd just invite you to open your eyes, to stand up and walk around. You don't have to jump too deep into this all at once, but if you're able, feel the intensity associated with the last time you really lost it. Just notice specifically in the body where it comes up — not emotionally, but at the level of sensation.

So for me right now, I'm noticing that I felt a disturbance that quickly turned into anger and aggression, but before my interpretation that spun it into anger and aggression I'm aware of simply a pressure in my chest. That's where I want you to work for a minute. Just the raw spark, just the sensation. Find it in the body. Feel its intensity and even describe it to yourself simply as I just did. It could be a closing in the throat, pressure in the chest, heat and a sense of being flushed throughout the body. Whatever it is for you just notice the raw sensation, the spark, and see clearly that you're able to stay present to the sensation. 

Ask yourself if these raw sensations could actually damage you. And most often when we ask this question we realize the sensations can't objectively harm us, though we don't like to feel them. 

So you can take that invitation to go deeper, to really just envelop and permeate the sensation with awareness, to hold it with equanimity acceptance, even unconditional kindness. Note, as you do this, that these sensations are likely very familiar too. Oftentimes the most disturbing sensations that we have in life go way back to early childhood. They represent sensations that signal to us that our very lives might be in danger because when we're kids in an emotionally saturated environment in the family, these disturbances can feel life threatening.

And then we grow into adulthood and realize we have adult capacities to just hold these disturbances like infants in our arms. We can hold these disturbances. Even when an infant is wailing and crying and screaming, we can still unconditionally love that infant. So whatever you're feeling at this moment, just hold yourself. Whatever disturbances, whatever sparks, see if you can just stay present to the intensity of the sensation without getting into emotional interpretations, narrative stories about whose fault it is that you feel this way in this moment without making judgements about yourself for feeling this way. It just is. Nothing to do but just be in the intensity for the moment. Let the fireworks blaze. Eventually they'll die out. 

If you get pulled into thinking, if you get tangled up in emotion, notice this and remove the tinder from the firework. Don't let the fireworks make contact with any fuel. Don't let the raw intense sensation in the body connect with emotion or story. 

Keep breathing when you work this way. It's a cue to commit to stay present, to investigate the sensation without judgment, without story, just feeling the raw aliveness of this moment. 

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Beautiful, beautiful work, everybody. Thank you. 

Take this practice with you. You will be disturbed another time today, perhaps many more times. Remember at the raw level of sensation, you can let these fireworks just go off, not let them connect with the tinder of the thinking mind or of our emotions. As you do this, you realize that at the level of awareness, you are already free, free to be in heaven and enjoy the green pastures. Take an occasional trip through hell and realize that somehow, miraculously, you remain happy beyond condition.

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Photo by Issy Bailey on Unsplash