Hi Friends!
Welcome back to Rest, the section of Bodhisavage where we wrap the theme with a guided meditation—something you can return to whenever you like 🫠
This month, we’ve been fearlessly prodding at the experience of anger. Not to fix it. Not to transcend it. Not to weaponize it in righteousness. But to get curious about what it actually is: a bright flare of aliveness that reveals what we care about most.
As part of our slow journey through the Five Wisdoms (a Buddhist map for recognizing how our most difficult emotions are actually expressions of clarity) we’ve been exploring the wisdom inside anger: mirror-like seeing. The kind of clarity that slices through uncertainty and says, this matters. Even when you’d rather not care.
We began with anger as mirror, exploring its elemental, water-like intelligence and how it reflects the truths we sometimes turn away from.
Then we looked at aversion in everyday life—the scroll, the flinch, the freeze—and how those micro-movements of avoidance might be doorways to creative engagement.
And finally, we questioned the dream of a frictionless life—because the goal isn’t to feel less, but to open ourselves to see more clearly.
And now, we rest.
This meditation—recorded live during this month’s Moonlit Sit—is an invitation to let anger be what it is. To give it our bare attention. If you’re feeling something sharp, stuck, or like a guttural, nameless growling in your undercarriage—this one’s for you.
We draw on two traditional ways of working with anger from the Buddhist path:
1. Antidoting (Sutra Approach)
When anger feels too much—too hot, too sharp, too much to sit with—we meet it with its opposite: love, warmth, open-heartedness.
This is about soothing the system, finding safety. Maybe it’s a hand on your chest. A long exhale. A moment of compassion for yourself, or even (gasp) the person you’re pissed at. It’s a way of saying: The best way to stay present right now is to soften.
2. Self-Liberating (Dzogchen Approach)
This is the heart of the practice we explore here. Instead of taming anger or soothing it, we let it unfold in space. We rest as the awareness that holds it all.
And from that wide, relaxed seeing, something shifts. The energy moves. The story loosens. The label “anger” drops away and what’s left is just raw, vivid life force—motion without a name, wisdom without a costume.
As I said during the sit: be your own best friend in this practice.
Some days you’ll have the capacity to sit there and watch anger dissolve into clarity, like mist off a lake. Other days, it’ll knock you on your ass and you’ll reach for compassion. Some days you’ll bounce back and forth like an emotional ping-pong ball. That’s the practice. We ride the ever-changing wave of experience.
Let me know how this goes. What does anger become when you strip it of its underpants?
And if you came to the live session—has it felt different to return to the practice over time? What’s shifted? What’s stayed the same?
With love,
❤️ Lama Tash
Join me and at our upcoming retreat:
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