Even with a healthy Tiger, it can be easy to confuse concentration or determination with anger. But when a Tiger is unbalanced, anger can become a real problem.
If you are having trouble with anger, I recommend reading “Anger Kills” by Redford Williams and Virginia Williams, a book on the adverse effects of anger on health and the strategies to reduce hostility. The book offers great tips on how to curb anger, and starts with a useful way to think of anger as comprised of the feeling of anger, the attitude of cynicism, and aggressive behavior.
The feeling of anger, the tightening chest, rising blood pressure, muscular tension and acidic build up, comes from a cascade of physiological reactions which also come at a biological costs that can translate into heart attacks and increased likelihood of cancer later, in life. The behavior can be any kind of action, either real or symbolic. What is interesting is the attitude of cynicism: the assumption of intentional behavior on the part of others — when people upset you, you automatically assume they did it deliberately to get at you. In my own practice with Tiger and anger, this insight buys me a lot of psychological distance in a flash. It takes deliberate effort to remember and apply the insight. I have to stop and think, “Is this person deliberately doing this to get to me?” and of course the answer most often is “No.” But when I do, and I actively stop to ask the question, it’s like I can reach down deep into the basement of the psyche, find the old automatic abacus of erroneous assumptions, beliefs and conclusions, and pull the plug.
What’s great about this practice from the point of view of Ch’ien-Lung is that confronting your assumptions about the intentions of others actually strengthens your own boundaries, and strong boundaries is one of Tiger’s strengths. You might assume the opposite is true, that forecasting the intentions of others means you can better protect your own boundaries. After all, you can better protect yourself against what you see coming. And so much of pop-culture around emotional intelligence centers around expending massive amounts of empathy or psychic ability to gauge what others really want or need — enlightenment brownie points for forecasting. And in prescribed games, like chess, or emergency situations, like a bank robbery, that insight into intentionality may offer critical information. But as a constant buzz, that social calculus super-abacus causes you to over-extend yourself, so you end-up collapsing from being so far off your own center. Affirming you don’t know the intention of others greatly saves energy, returning that energy to serve your own intention. And this strengthens your Tiger.
You’re welcome.
Good book, Get it. You can also read more about Tiger in Unleash the Dragon Within.