| Workout, meditation, distraction, talking with people didn't work for me. They were ways to silent the emotions and postpone the problem. What worked for me was a lot of self reflexion. Understanding way I was angry in the first place. I found out that happiness is just the way of approaching things. That the world is just a projection on your head. An interpretation of the five senses + state (learned experience mostly). Changing the input, just mades you an slave of the environment.
Changing the state, gives you back control over your feelings. If you reflect about why the feelings appear in your mind that generates stress, anger, you can start accepting them, welcoming them, until the point you no longer get anger, or stress... For me, it become a routine. A) a way to trigger the self reflexion, or consciousness while stress happens B) find the reason for the feelings. Example: People don't understand what I say, and then do other things. It bring up fear, rejection, mostly coming from childhood. Ok. I converted an unknown unknown into a know unknown. I excuse my self and decide if better communication skills is a task that I am willing to commit learning, on that case I do, or I just acknowledge that I often going to have mistakes and laugh about it. Time over time, I was able to have happier live. Even enjoying the sadness that sometimes generates things not going the way I wanted at work. |
I have also begun to look at the world reductively, sense + state, as you said. It helps.
What I found is most powerful, however, is to fall in love, then to focus on building intimacy.
Not very scientific, I know. But I think we can all agree that being in love is a wonderful feeling. The problem with love science is that love feels out of control and science requires tight controls to measure and validate results.
There is no way to do this with love, thankfully, but it works.
In the process, I have come to accept my faults and helped my partner to accept hers. Through mutual understanding and support, we have been able to grow together through shared experiences.
We have also had our share of arguments, and we have both given in to moments of human weakness and self-destructive behavior. But, through accepting responsibility for those off moments, apologies, and forgiveness, we have only grown closer. If we never fought, we wouldn't recognize how good we have it otherwise.
I would make one addition to your beautiful comment by suggesting that the ultimate answer does not lie within.
The answer to anger and host of other issues lies in the deep, time-tested reflection of who we are in another person's eyes.
This is especially true when a person feels unworthy of love.