Anger and Resentment
For years, I was consumed by anger and resentment. “What do you mean, don’t be angry?” I would rail at well-meaning bystanders. “It’s not right, it’s not fair, and I’m not just going to stand here, smile, and do nothing.”
But anger is a self-destructive force that eats away at you from the inside. Despite the belief in some circles that anger is necessary to get things done, my experience has shown otherwise. You accomplish far more when you’re calm and composed—not when you’re fuming and boiling over.
You can do more by being nice
When I first began working as a Professor of Physics at a community college, I was as prickly as a hedgehog. Everything seemed wrong, inefficient, and downright stupid in my view. I wasn’t shy about expressing these opinions publicly and took every opportunity to do so. To make matters worse, I had a sharp tongue and a knack for sarcasm. Once, I declared that someone lacked “the wherewithal to split a bale of hay evenly between two donkeys.” My cleverness was undeniable, but rarely productive.
My friend and mentor, Jon—a senior math professor with decades more experience—often tried to guide me. “Be kind, lass!” he’d say. “You’ll accomplish much more by being nice than by being angry and provocative.” But I refused to listen. As a result, I achieved very little beyond what I could control entirely on my own.
Students liked me, and I delivered engaging lectures, created exceptional resources, and proposed effective solutions for the college. Yet all of that went unnoticed or was actively avoided. My behavior put others on the defensive. Some avoided me; others quietly sabotaged me. Most often, my suggestions were simply ignored.
When I am angry, I don’t want to calm down
When I began practicing Jin Shin Jyutsu (JSJ), I started recognizing my perfectionist and hyper-critical tendencies. JSJ helped me confront long-denied fears and resolve them. But with anger, I hit a wall. “What do you mean, hold your middle finger and it will make the anger go away?” I’d scoff at my well-meaning JSJ friends. “I don’t want to resolve my anger. I’m right, and I have every right to be angry.”
The idea of holding a finger to dissolve anger seemed absurd. Did it even work? On one hand, skeptics would argue that it was “mumbo-jumbo nonsense.” But I had doubts about its validity even from a spiritual point of view. In the higher realms, cause and effect always flow from mind to body, not the other way around. Anger, I argued, was a mental attitude with its root cause in the mind. How could it possibly be affected by something I did with my body? It felt like putting the cart before the horse.
Yet, while anger is mental, I still felt it physically. For me, it manifested as a churning, cold sensation in my stomach. I’d lose my appetite entirely, and if I tried to eat while angry, I’d feel nauseated. One day, when I was furious just before a meal, I had a choice: stay hungry or risk feeling sick. Reluctantly, I decided to give the JSJ finger hold a try. Not to stop being angry—I still felt justified to be so—but to see if I could at least eat my meal without discomfort.
Backfeeding
It turned out that holding my middle finger for about fifteen minutes did make a difference. The unpleasant sensation in my stomach all but vanished, replaced by a sense of lightness. Although I was still upset about the situation that had triggered my anger, I felt calm enough to eat. And on the heels of that lightness, waves of true gratitude reappeared.
Some merciful soul, somewhere in history, had discovered this simple technique and shared it with humanity—offering a small reprieve from suffering during moments of mental turmoil. My heart swelled with gratitude for them and for everyone who had preserved this knowledge and passed it down through generations.
I realized that holding the finger wasn’t about eradicating anger at its root. Instead, it cut off its disruptive flow to the body, preventing the physical consequences of my mental storm. Interestingly, once the physical symptoms disappeared and gratitude took their place, I no longer wanted to be angry. That original injustice became nothing more than a small blip on my radar. I was too curious to learn more about JSJ and how it could help with daily nuisances.
In electrical engineering, there is a concept called backfeeding, where downstream electrical elements can influence the upstream generator. This is perhaps the closest physical explanation for what happened with my anger. My mind was the generator, but by relieving the physical symptoms downstream, the sense of lightness fed back into my mind, lifting its burden. This practice of holding fingers wasn’t putting the cart before the horse—it was backfeeding.
Excerpt from Effortless Reality, Chapter 5, Anger and Resentment
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