There was one section of Sam Harris' new book that resonated with me, because it described a type of mindfulness I've found myself practicing lately in the context of FFL -- screening out anger, so as no longer having to deal with that low mindstate, and get sucked into it. What he wrote was originally about meditation and how to deal with the daily cascade of our *own* thoughts and moods, but I found it also applicable to dealing with other people's moods on a discussion group such as this one:
Breaking the Spell of Negative Emotions Most of us let our negative emotions persist longer than is necessary. Becoming suddenly angry, we tend to stay angry—and this requires that we actively produce the feeling of anger. We do this by thinking about our reasons for being angry—recalling an insult, rehearsing what we should have said to our malefactor, and so forth—and yet we tend not to notice the mechanics of this process. Without continually resurrecting the feeling of anger, it is impossible to stay angry for more than a few moments. While I can’t promise that meditation will keep you from ever again becoming angry, you can learn not to stay angry for very long. And when talking about the consequences of anger, the difference between moments and hours—or days—is impossible to exaggerate. I liked this, because it's kinda the way I live my life. I have an ongoing mini-mindfulness routine going on in my mind, almost a "background process," that enables me to *notice* when I've dropped into a lower mindstate such as anger. On the rare occasions I become angry, I just allow this background process to wake me up a little, and then I gently move my attention to somewhere happier and more productive. As a result, I honestly can't remember a time in *years* in which I managed to stay angry for more than a couple of minutes, five minutes max. This may be one reason why Fairfield Life is a challenge from time to time, because it seems to be populated by people who do the exact opposite. When something makes them angry, they seem to do everything in their power to STAY angry. It's not unusual to see someone like Judy or Ann or Jim or Steve or Richard or Nabby or Dan nurse a grudge and hold onto it for YEARS. And the fascinating thing is that they seem to believe that just because *they* prefer being angry to being happy, the people they're angry at "owe it to them" to prefer being angry, too. Days, weeks, months, and even years after they first became angry over something, they trot it out again in an attempt to jumpstart the original argument or insult, jumpstart the anger, make the anger mindstate lively in their minds again, and force the person they blame for that anger to participate in it as a kind of victim, so they can aim their jumpstarted anger at them again in the present, just as they did in the past. This strikes me as pretty much the opposite of mindfulness, and I finally got tired of it, so I just decided to write these people out of my life. And it works. I feel much better no longer having to interface with these anger junkies. On the other hand, past history makes me suspect that my approach may *not* be working as well for the dumpees. I would bet that a few of these people I've written off and chosen to ignore are even angrier at me now than they were before, as if I've somehow done something BAD to them by never reading anything they write. So -- since I know with near-absolute certainty that while I may not be reading their posts they're reading mine :-), for them I'll post the rest of Sam Harris' advice about the mindfulness of dealing with anger. May they learn something from it: Even without knowing how to meditate, most people have experienced having their negative states of mind suddenly interrupted. Imagine, for instance, that someone has made you very angry—and just as this mental state seems to have fully taken possession of your mind, you receive an important phone call that requires you to put on your best social face. Most people know what it’s like to suddenly drop their negative state of mind and begin functioning in another mode. Of course, most then helplessly grow entangled with their negative emotions again at the next opportunity. Become sensitive to these interruptions in the continuity of your mental states. You are depressed, say, but are suddenly moved to laughter by something you read. You are bored and impatient while sitting in traffic, but then are cheered by a phone call from a close friend. These are natural experiments in shifting mood. Notice that suddenly paying attention to something else—something that no longer supports your current emotion—allows for a new state of mind. Observe how quickly the clouds can part. These are genuine glimpses of freedom. The truth, however, is that you need not wait for some pleasant distraction to shift your mood. You can simply pay close attention to negative feelings themselves, without judgment or resistance. What is anger? Where do you feel it in your body? How is it arising in each moment? And what is it that is aware of the feeling itself? Investigating in this way, with mindfulness, you can discover that negative states of mind vanish all by themselves.
