Even though you can identify it easily in today’s world, anger may not be what you think it is. All you have to do is spend a minute with the headlines and you come in contact with many forms of anger. For many of us it is felt much closer than the anger the headlines report: We feel anger toward others and the anger of others directed at us.nnMost of us carry some degree of anger within us. We experience anger anywhere from mild irritation all the way up to seething rage, and we can feel it once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day, once a minute, or even all the time. But even if you only experience mild irritation once a year, you still harbor anger. Carrying anger hurts you much more than it hurts the person you have directed your anger at, so it is in your best interest to be free of anger completely. nnFor example, imagine that you are happily driving down the highway to work one morning. As you come up to an exit, a motorist blows by you and then dangerously cuts you off in order to make the exit ramp. You gesture wildly and yell at him for being so rude and careless. You think about it all the way to work, where you vigorously tell the story to your coworkers. You think about it often during the day. You drive home with your eye out for the offending driver so you can give him a piece of your mind or maybe even dole out a little payback. Once home, you retell the story to your family. nnWhat has happened is that you have kept your body on high alert all day. You have carried that anger with you all day—starting with when you got cut off and then every time you remembered the event or retold the story—and your body responded to every reenactment with a rush of adrenaline, an increase in stress levels, a contraction of your muscles, and a halt to your digestive and sexual functioning, to name just a few of the body’s automatic responses to a threat.nnThe driver who cut you off, on the other hand, has felt none of these symptoms. He forgot that he cut you off before he reached the light at the end of the exit ramp and went merrily about his day, never thinking about you again. You were the only one to feel the anger directed at him, and you were the only one to pay the price for that anger. nnAnger takes many forms, but they fall into two main categories: anger expressed inwardly is felt as depression, and anger expressed outwardly is attack. Whichever category it falls under, your anger hurts you, so it is in your best interest to be completely free of anger.nnHere is how most of us believe we get angry: Something external happens that wrongs us (a friend says the wrong thing, a child misbehaves, a driver cuts you off, etc.), and we correctly and justifiably respond with anger. As long as you agree that this is the way anger arises in you, you will be a slave to anger and all of its negative outcomes. nnAs this is a world of cause and effect, with our thoughts being the cause, to experience anger physically, we first have to hold an angry belief. If you want to be free of anger and its natural outcomes forever, you must first change your beliefs about where anger originates.nnAs I am writing this, I have been lying in the sun, and occasionally, a hornet will land on me and walk around siphoning off something it finds tasty in my sweat. Once it has had its fill, it harmlessly flies away. These are the same hornets that stung me when I drove over their nest with my lawn mower just the week before. People are the same: We are just going about our day, when someone does something that ticks us off, and we feel attacked by it, so we respond to the attack with righteous anger, knowing full well we were in no way responsible for the attack. nnTo that I say, “No matter how hard you squeeze a grapefruit, you can’t get apple juice.” Squeeze a grapefruit with varying degrees of pressure and from a variety of angles, and you can only get out what is already in there: grapefruit juice. People are the same way: No matter how much pressure we are under, only what is already in us can come out of us. nnWhen I was a kid, I bit my nails, sometimes to the point of injuring my finger so that it would get cut and filled with pus. The slightest pressure on that finger would cause me great pain, while ten times the pressure on the finger right next to it could hardly be felt. Emotionally, we are the same way: We can withstand great amounts of pressure where we are healed, while small amounts of pressure where we are yet to be healed cause us to writhe in pain and react strongly. So if you feel angry when your spouse misspeaks, your child misbehaves, another driver cuts you off, and so on, it is only because they are putting pressure on a spot where hurt already resides.nnThere are only two kinds of beliefs: a love-based belief and a fear-based belief. Anger is of fear, so when you are angry, you are actually afraid. As a love-based belief always comes down to “I am enough” and a fear-based belief always comes down to “I am not enough,” the original belief that makes you angry is a belief you hold about yourself that you are somehow inadequate, that you are somehow not enough.nnWhen we remember that our thoughts create our realities, we can see that we do not get angry as a response to someone attacking us. We get angry because we hold mistaken beliefs about ourselves as true, and they manifest in such a way that we come face-to-face with a pain we have been trying to disown. When we strike out with anger at the reminder of our mistaken beliefs (whoever or whatever they may be), we reinforce our beliefs in our own victimization and continue the cycle of miserable enslavement to a world that waits to attack. When we instead recognize that our own mistaken beliefs have created this event, we empower ourselves to choose new beliefs and set ourselves, and those around us, completely free. nnYou will find that over time, by healing your fear-based beliefs about yourself (your emotional sore fingers, if you will), you will respond with anger to fewer and fewer things and with forgiveness and joy to more and more things. And the more forgiveness and joy you experience, the easier your life is!nn** This article is one of 101 great articles that were published in 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life. To get complete details on “101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life”, visit
http://www.selfgrowth.com/greatways3.html n