Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

Consider hatred, jealousy, or obsession at the moment they form — there is no question that they make us deeply uncomfortable. Moreover, the actions and words they inspire are usually intended to hurt others.

Conversely, thoughts of kindness, affection, and tolerance give us joy and courage, open our minds, and free us inside. They also spur us on to benevolence and empathy.

Every incident of aggression and jealousy represents a setback in our quest for serenity and happiness.

The ideal, contrarily, is to allow negative emotions to form and dissipate without leaving any trace in the mind. Thoughts and emotions will continue to surface, but they will not proliferate and will lose their power to enslave us.

like an infection that goes untreated, the disturbing emotions gain in strength when allowed to take their course. Unleashing anger whenever it arises, for instance, tends to create a state of psychological instability that only increases irascibility.

By systematically allowing our negative emotions to express themselves, we develop habits to which we are vulnerable every time the emotional charge reaches the critical threshold. In addition, the threshold will gradually become lower and anger will erupt ever more easily.

those who are best able to balance their emotions (by controlling them without repressing them) also demonstrate the greatest selflessness in the face of the suffering of others.

it is because we haven’t been able to establish the right dialogue between our intelligence and our emotions.

“One movement precludes the other; when you extend a friendly hand, you cannot make a fist.”4 In the same way, by habituating your mind to altruistic love, you gradually eliminate hatred, because the two states of mind can alternate but cannot coexist.

So the more we cultivate loving-kindness, the less space there will be for hatred in our mental landscape.

It is therefore important to begin by learning the antidotes that correspond to each negative emotion, and then to cultivate them.

desire can drive us continuously to seek satisfaction at any cost; the more satisfaction seems to elude us, the more it obsesses us.

As for anger, it can be neutralized by patience. This does not require us to remain passive, but to steer clear of being overwhelmed by destructive emotions.

“Patience safeguards our peace of mind in the face of adversity. . . . It is a deliberate response (as opposed to an unreasoned reaction) to the strong negative thoughts and emotions that tend to arise when we encounter harm.”

You are overwhelmed by a sudden tide of anger. You feel as if there’s no choice but to let it sweep you away. But look closely. It is nothing more than a thought. When you see a great black cloud in a stormy sky, it seems so solid that you could sit on it. But when you approach it, there’s nothing to grab on to; it is only vapor and wind.

The experience of anger is like having a high fever. It is a temporary condition, and you do not need to identify with it. The more you look at anger in this manner, the more it evaporates under your gaze, like white frost under the sun’s rays.

If, on the other hand, we come to see that anger has no substance of its own, it rapidly loses all power.

This is what Buddhism calls liberation from anger at the moment it arises by recognizing its emptiness, its lack of its own existence

In so doing, we have not suppressed our anger but neutralized its power to become a cause of suffering.

It is at the very moment of anger’s emergence that we must recognize its empty nature.