To conquer our anger, we must invoke the stronger and higher powers of love, peace, patience, poise and forgiveness. These powers we can find and gradually embody only through the regular practise of meditation.
Offering advice on how to conquer anger through meditation, Sri Chinmoy writes:
“For some time, concentrate only on divine Peace and leave aside all other divine qualities. During your meditation, try to bring down Peace, sublime and solid, from Above. Your enemy is anger. Anger’s enemy is Peace. Anger openly hates Peace. If you invoke Peace soulfully, then anger will hate you ruthlessly and never will it enter into you, your life, consciously or unconsciously.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Invoking peace during our meditation is a long-term project: we will not become flooded with peace to the extent that we lose all our anger overnight. Meanwhile, here is another approach to employ when we feel anger at someone brewing inside us: instead of blaming that person, try instead to identify with their weakness. Putting yourself in their shoes, you will see there is some good reason why they behaved so badly. Ask yourself: “Have I ever done anything so stupid or heartless or negligent in my life?” Of course the answer will be: “Yes, I have done millions of wrong things and committed countless mistakes.” Since you are ready to forgive yourself for your own blunders, you must be ready also to forgive and forget the blunders of this person.
If you take this approach:
“By this time, anger will lose all its hunger for you and it will not be at all interested in devouring you. It will leave you, it will go elsewhere to knock at the door of somebody else.”
– Sri Chinmoy
As anger consumes us, so forgiveness saves us.