YoGA FoR AnGeR MAnAGeMent

8 | Yoga for Anger Management
when we say that we are angry?
For this in Bhagavadgeeta, we
get a very nice shloka in which
Bhagavan Sri Krishna is talking
about the mechanism of how
we end ourselves into a loop of
anger thoughts which draws us
like a whirlpool. Imagine a person who is a great swimmer.
He got into a river to swim. He is enjoying the river. He is a
professional swimmer. He has got enormous capacity to swim.
He has enough muscle strength and he enters into an adventure
of entering into a fierce river. He is still able to enjoy the
river. He enjoys swimming. After a few minutes of enjoying
that, he tries to go to the left side of the river where the river
is fiercer. He wants to be a little more adventurous. But he
does not know that this part of the river is pulling him into the
whirlpool. What is a whirlpool? Whirlpool is rewinding of the
speeded up flow of the river. In that whirlpool, however good a
swimmer he is, he is in the rewinding of the forced water flow
in that turbulence, going to be drawn. He is going to be killed.
This is exactly what happens in our mind, when we allow ourselves
to get drawn by anger.
Let us take an example of how this builds up. For example, if
somebody has insulted you, somebody has hurt your feelings.
Then you get angry. What the sages want us to understand
is: when you are in that state of mind where you are terribly
angry, because somebody has insulted you, please analyze
what is happening in your mind. What are the thoughts in
the mind? Mind is defined as a flow of sentences on the back-
Yoga in Education for Total Personality Development SERIES - 8