Don't be angry because you are not getting what you want. Don't expect too much from others as well as from yourself. Just experience life as it unfolds itself. This is the Zen way of living. (Zen is the Oriental practice of emptying the mind through awareness and meditation.) And this is the way to natural healing, which begins with the mind and the spirit.

Living a life of anger is not Zen living. If you are always angry with yourself or at others, you need to seek not a psychiatrist, but self-knowledge through meditation to experience intuitive wisdom that will enlighten you with respect to your anger management.

Don't hold the grudge

Anger is a deep-seated feeling of resentment or rancor provoked by some incident or situation, for example, being unwilling to forgive someone.

Confucius: When anger rises, think of the consequences.

Learn how to use anger management to prevent harmful emotions from causing havoc in your mental well-being, which is an essential component of your overall wellness. Anger is usually a result of anxiety and stress triggered by an event, incident, or a person. For more information on the realites of anger, go to my website Rethink Your Behaviors.

Panic Away is a state-of-the-art program developed to help you get rid of panic attacks in everyday living.

Stress Management is the building of resilience for the science of stress relief. Turn stress into positive energy and enthusiasm for you.

Buddhism recognizes that feelings of hatred and ill will often leave a lasting effect on your mind. When resentments have already arisen, the Buddhist view is to release them by going back to their roots through meditation and receiving insight into the nature of reality. For more information on meditation, go to The Pillar of Mind Power.

Buddhism places much emphasis on the concepts of loving kindness, compassion, altruistic or sympathetic joy, and equanimity, as a means to avoiding resentments in the first place. In other words, if you seriously consider your lifelong relationship with birth, old age, sickness, and death (known as the inevitable four phases of life) with respect to all other beings in the world, it would give you a fresh perspective of Zen living with proper anger management.

Don't look back in anger

Forgiveness means not looking back in anger. Forgiveness has health benefits, especially for the mind. Forgiveness is anger management.

Confucius: It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.

Scientific studies have shown that people who forgive are happier and healthier than those who hold resentments. One study has shown that the positive benefit of forgiveness is similar, whether it was based upon religious or secular counseling as opposed to a control group that received no forgiveness counseling. Zen living is anger management.

Buddha: If we haven't forgiven, we keep creating an identify around our pain, and that is what is reborn. That is what suffers.

In Chinese culture and philosophy, forgiveness is not perceived as a weakness but rather a great power. Forgiveness is a virtue of the weak, and an ornament of the strong.

Don't have great expectation in life

According to the way of Zen living, live your life with no great expectation.

Zen is not an organized set of philosophical teachings; it is about emptying your mind and experiencing the mind itself. In the emptiness of your consciousness, you are awakened to the oneness of self and all life. Zen living is essentially the practice of awareness and meditation that can help you restore energy and build endurance for physical fitness, as well as suffuse your life with compassion and joy conducive to mental and spiritual wellness necessary for healing of the body.

Zen focuses on the present moment. The past is gone and the future is unknown. Always focus on the process of doing things, not the outcome - with no great expectation in between. That is the essence of Zen living. It is not passive living, but rather living life to the fullest without encumbered with its problems.

Life is not a problem to be solved; instead, it is a wondrous adventure. Zen living is living a life free of worries and troubles.

Confucius: Life is really very simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Once you perceive life as a problem, you would spend the rest of your life figuring out how to avoid and solve the problems, and thus inadvertently creating undue stress and more problems down the road.

That life becomes a problem to be solved is due to your great expectation in life. You want only the good experience without the bad - that is the root of all problems in your life. Therefore, have no great expectation in life. Otherwise, you would retreat into dreams and fantasies, often the groundwork for depression or other mental disorders.

To illustrate, you get rid of old "undesirable" relationships, seeking new ones, criticizing the persons you are with in order to remain in your "false" comfort zone. Remember, you don't go to people to get what you must find within yourself. This is self-knowledge. For more information on love relationship, go to The Pillar of Mindfulness.

You do not realize how your craving comfort and peace, that is, great expectation in life, may affect those around you, including yourself. Although dreams and fantasies may bring temporary relief, the bubble will burst sooner or later, and you are back to where you started, or even worse.

Find out more about Zen living from Living By Zen.

Also, visit my website The Way Of Zen Is A Healthy Lifestyle.

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

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