Give anger space, and it transforms from a destructive blaze into Mirror-Like Wisdom. Like water, anger flows, revealing truths and injustices when we allow it to settle. Embrace it not as a fight, but as an opportunity for clarity.
Editor's Note: We're kicking off a new series with Lama Tasha Schumann, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher trained in the lineages of Dzogchen and Mahamudra and a longtime collaborator of Jeff Warren's. Over five weeks, Tasha guides us through five patterns that tend to run our lives, what she calls knots: Aversion, Grasping, Striving, Self-fixation, and Confusion. This week, we are focusing on aversion.
I was sixteen, sitting in class, holding way too much. Home was chaos, I was surfing the wake of my first big breakup, and my social life was a minefield. Then suddenly, while sitting in that English class, one of my ex’s friends turned and said the nastiest, most vicious thing out of the blue—I don’t remember what he said, but I can still remember the feeling.
A full-body surge of violent energy. I wanted to scream, to punch, to throw a chair through the window. Instead, I sat stiff as a board, fists balled, bottled-up venom sweating from my pores.
The bell rang. Everyone got up and left. But I stayed seated, morose as a haunted Victorian child.
I didn’t trust myself to move. I was afraid that if I stood up, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from burning the place down. And not in a cinematic Tasha the Amazon way. In a “gets tackled on the lawn by the principal” way.
My teacher came over, leaned against the desk, and asked what was wrong.
I tried to answer, but when I opened my mouth, hot tears boiled out. All I could choke out was: “I’m just so mad. I don’t know what to do.”
She gave me a deeply knowing look and said: “You don’t need to do anything but make space for it. Rage is like the red-hot part of the flame—it’s wild, aimless flailing. But if you give it attention and space, it becomes like the center of the flame, where it’s absolutely clear. And there, it becomes power.”
That transmission was like air rushing into a suffocated room. She suddenly gave me a new way to hold anger. I didn’t have to lash out or suppress it—the only two options I had ever known. Instead, I could let it be part of my experience and tend it as it became something else. Something clear. Something powerful.
I think of her words a lot these days, in our instant rage culture, where you can start a fight in the comments section of a sourdough recipe. We’re being trained to glance quickly, react quickly—to be mindless, red-hot flames.
But what happens when we don’t take the bait?
It’s intuitive to think of anger as fire—hot, explosive, destructive. But in the Buddhist framework of The Five Wisdoms (which we’ve been exploring these past few months), anger is actually linked to another elemental symbol: water. It moves, shifts, and transforms depending on how we meet it.
Like water, anger is fluid. It can boil, freeze, or settle into clarity.
When compressed, water boils—thrashing, spilling over, scalding everything in its path.
When frozen by suppression, it hardens to icicles—sharp, brittle, biting. Something that pierces and wounds.
But when given space, it settles—brilliantly—into a crystal clear medium with a mirror-like surface that reflects everything, exactly as it is.
This kind of anger is precise and present.
When we don’t get caught in justifying, suppressing, or weaponizing anger, it clarifies. It lets us see where something in our life or in the world is out of alignment. It reveals injustice, violation, truth ignored.
On a personal level, clarified anger can show us where we’ve been silencing ourselves, where resentment has been quietly accumulating, where we’ve been saying ‘it’s fine’ when it isn’t.
On a collective level, this clarity can catalyze revolutions, necessary reckonings—it brings to light what can no longer be dismissed.
And for the creatives among us—the storytellers, the artists, the world-builders—this clarity leads us to the truths we’ve been afraid to tell. Seeing clearly—really seeing—is what allows us to create art and narratives of power and to imagine bold new futures.
Anger, when given space, stops being a fight and starts being vision. This is why, in its transformed state, it’s called Mirror-Like Wisdom. It doesn’t distort. It doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t burn the one who holds it. It simply shows what is.
So the practice becomes: How can we stay with anger—not as something that boils us alive, but as raw energy? How can we give ourselves the presence, compassion, and space that allows anger to clarify into power?
This requires some softness — sitting with anger is hard. But the good news is, it’s easier when we do it together!
If you want to explore more of Tasha's work, visit her website or tune into the Mind Bod Adventure Pod, her podcast with Jeff Warren.
