It’s easy to feed the fearful angry wolf. Especially if we’ve experienced great wounding, the anger pathway can become deeply ingrained in our nervous system. When our old sense of injury or fear is triggered the intolerable heat and pressure of anger instantly surges through us. Our attention gets rivetted on the feelings and the thoughts of violation and all we want is revenge. Often before we have any sense of choice, the nasty comeback is out of our mouths, we’ve slammed a door, hit send on an ill advised email, put someone down behind his back.
Yet we do have a choice. Mediations that train the heart and the mind directly deactivate the anger pathways that propel our habitual behaviours. While the limbic system acts almost instantaneously, we and develop a response form the frontal cortex – which includes the social centres involved with compassion – that interrupts the re-action. (We can pause and recognise with mindfulness what is happening in that moment.) We can soothe (or hold the hurting angry part of us, just as a loving mother would hold a distressed or hurt or fearful or angry baby)….we can remember our own goodness and strength (and not listen to the self punishing voices that tell us there is ‘something wrong with us’ for feeling this way). No matter how painfully we are triggered by the world’s violence and insensitivity, we can direct our attention in ways that carry us home to our intrinsic sanity and good heartedness. This awakening is our evolutionary (and revolutionary) potential. For the sake of our own inner freedom and the well being of others, we can intentinally feed the understanding kind wolf.
Tara Brach : The Gateway of Love, Finding True Refuge.
Emerging From The Dark Night 