How to Break Your Anger Habit | Sharon Salzberg

Hearing a voice can change everything. So AT and T wants everyone to gift their voice to loved ones this holiday season because that conversation is a chance to say something they'll hear forever. AT and T, connecting changes everything. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey. Hey, everybody. How we doing? When you are exhorted to love your enemies, which is a common Buddhist refrain, you may hear it as, an appeasement. Images of Neville Chamberlain might come to mind. You might be tempted to think that loving your enemies means hurling yourself at their feet or cosigning on their terrible ideas. But, actually, it's nothing like that at all. Loving your enemies turns out to be the wisest and most strategic possible countermeasure. Not only psychologically, in that it can help reduce your anger and anxiety, but also, as I said, strategically in that it can help you make better decisions. As you might imagine, this is a conversation I have to have all the time since I'm often out in the public square making the case for love and compassion in a world that is filled with hatred and division. When I make this case, just to be super clear about this, I am absolutely not arguing that you should go soft or be a doormat. I'm arguing that you can take really firm and even stern action, but and this is the key. That action does not have to be motivated by hatred or anger. Sure. Some amount of anger can be clarifying or energizing. It gets you off the couch. But it can very quickly curdle into a kind of constricted state. There's a reason they call it blind rage. By contrast, there's some scientific evidence that a state of warmth or loving kindness actually increases your peripheral vision. So that's what I want for you in these difficult times, to be able to stand up for what you believe in, but to do it from a place where you're drawing on the cleanest burning fuel, which is love, as cliched as that may sound, which brings me to my guest today who's one of the most effective proponents of this argument in the world. In fact, I learned everything I just said from her. Sharon Salzberg is a meditation pioneer, a world renowned teacher, and a New York Times best selling author. She's among the first Westerners to go to Asia and learn about mindfulness and loving kindness and Buddhism and to bring it back to America and inject it into the cultural mainstream. She's written many books, including her latest book, which is a kid's book called Kind Carl. Today, though, we're gonna really focus on one of her older books, which seems especially relevant right now. And that book, which she coauthored with the renowned Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, is called Love Your Enemies. In this conversation, we talk about how the quality of meta or loving kindness can be …