My Dear Little Anger

The idea that anger is evil, that mindfulness is good, and that you should use the good to fight evil, that is not Buddhist.

You have to use mindfulness, and embrace your anger in the most tender way possible, like a mother embracing her suffering baby: "Darling, I am here for you. Don’t worry, I will take good care of you."

Not only do you deal with your anger in that way, but also you deal with your fear, your jealousy and all kinds of suffering in that way. You have to attend to your pain, you have to provide the energy of mindfulness to take care of the blocks of pain in you when they manifest.

If you know how to do that, you get relief after ten or fifteen minutes…sometimes longer, but continue the practice of mindful breathing, mindful walking, and other kinds of practice.

But after five or ten minutes of embracing it, it may go down again into the seed, and you feel much better. But that does not mean that anger has been eliminated from you.

Anger has just ceased to be a zone of energy up here, and it has returned to its initial form: a seed. And next time that you or someone else comes and waters it, it will be back again.

But one thing is sure: after having been embraced by mindfulness for a few minutes, ten or fifteen minutes, it will go down a little bit weaker. It will always be like that. After taking a bath of mindfulness, your pain and sorrow will be lessened a little bit when they become a seed.

If you know how to do it, next time that they manifest you continue the same practice: "My dear little anger, I know you are there, I will take care of you." You are always ready for it.

Don’t try to suppress it, allow it to come up without fear, because you already have the energy of mindfulness that you have cultivated during the practice.


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We suffer not because things are impermanent. We suffer because things are impermanent, but we don’t know that they are impermanent.

Looking into a flower, looking into a cloud, looking into a living being, you touch the nature of impermanence. Without impermanence, nothing can be possible.

If things are not impermanent, how could a grain of corn become a corn plant? How could your child grow up? So impermanence is the ground of life.

But in spite of the fact that things are impermanent, we are not aware of that nature of impermanence in life. So when you practice looking deeply into things, you should discover the nature of impermanence, and you should make it into a living insight.

A living insight means that you carry it in every minute of your life, and then you become a wise man, a wise woman, and you get rid of so much of your pain and sorrow and delusion.


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A flower cannot be by itself alone, because it has no separate self.

A flower can only inter-be with the sunshine, with the clouds, with the earth. If you remove the element sunshine from the flower, the flower will collapse. If you remove the element cloud, meaning water, from the flower, the flower will collapse.

So a flower is full of everything. Everything in the cosmos can be found in the flower: sunshine, clouds, minerals, earth, time, space, humans, everything. Only one thing is lacking in the flower—that is a separate existence, a separate self. Now you understand what is meant by "non-self."

Non-self does not mean non-existing; non-self means you don’t have a separate existence, like the flower. A flower is there, full of the whole cosmos, but not having a separate entity.

Nothing can be by itself alone, everything has to inter-be with everything else.

That is the law of interbeing, the law of interdependent origination, the law of no self. "No self" does not mean non-existing. Everything is, in a wonderful way, but everything is a formation.


Extract from: Taking Care of our Mental Formations and Perceptions, by Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh