Jane, age 23, engaged to be married: “My boyfriend openly flirts with other women in front of me.”

Jim, age 40, an IT professional: “a work group back East didn’t finish their project on time, which made our progress look bad – I blew up!”

Joe, age 46, successful business owner and young grandfather: “I get so mad at everyone that my daughter won’t let me see my grandchild. Now, I’m angry at my daughter, too.”

Mary, age 38: “I am constantly yelling at my two teenagers because they won’t do what I tell them to.”

Nancy, married 28 year old successful writer who goes into period rages toward her equally successful husband: “I can’t stand that he never picks up his clothes and he doesn’t do things around house that he says he will do.”

Alex, a 50 year old salesman in class because of road rage: “ I can’t stand it when people cut in front of me on freeway… it makes me crazy.”

Different Anger, Common Cause

In all cases, cause of anger isn’t what happened to these basically normal people; rather it is how they assessed or evaluated what happened.

Anger often results from comparing behavior of others to your expectations. Sometimes it’s a reasonable thing to do that, but more often it’s not because we have unreasonably high, and sometimes just plain wrong, expectations of ourselves and those around us.

We can thus say that anger is caused by discrepancy between what we expect and what we get. Indeed, definition of expectation is “eager anticipation.”

Our Goal

It’s important to figure out exactly what “reasonable” means in terms of expectations of yourself and others. If your expectations are too low, you’ll feel cheated in life – or worse – that you are “settling.”

My response is always this: "Oh, you poor thing! Have you tried *playing* with mindfulness? It's very effective, and much more fun!"

They tend to look at me like I'm some kind of kook, and then ask million-dollar question: "How can you play with mindfulness?" Glad you asked.... We tend to think of mindfulness as something that develops only after years of dedicated meditation. We must sit for hours, contemplate in silence for days, go on retreats for weeks, practice daily for years. Okay, that can work.

The unfortunate thing is that it IS work, and consequently, it's about as appealing to most folks as lying on a bed of nails. Sure, they want to develop a clearer perspective on life. Yes, they want to become calm and contemplative. Of course they want to live more meaningfully and with greater joy. But does it have to be so hard?

Absolutely not. You see, while most people knock politely on that front door of meditation in order to get inside House of Mindfulness, I like to sneak people in back door to steal a few cookies. Why can't we play with mindfulness, dance with it, treat it like our favorite goofy cousin who happens to be brilliant instead of our strict uncle who happens to have a Ph.D?