Member-only story
How Can Anger Generate Positivity and Empowerment?
Recognize, acknowledge, choose, and do.
Despite the many flaws and awful dialogue in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Yoda utters one extremely deep and useful nugget of wisdom.
“Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”
Just about everything you do is inadvertently checked by our fear-based society. The bombardment of messages telling you to fear this, fear that, be afraid of them, and on and on, quickly overwhelms you. Much of that fear targets your sense of lack, scarcity, insufficiency, and suffering as a result.
A frequent path many find themselves on as a result of this is to anger. It’s very easy to get angry about real and perceived problems, slights, challenges, and so on. Anger can be a dangerous thing when it leads to violence, destruction, and the like. If anger leads to hate, as Yoda warns, suffering is sure to follow.
Anger is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. The trouble with anger is, unrecognized and unacknowledged, the most typical course can be anger to hate to suffering. That’s because most fear is not about a given thing you’re afraid of.
