> I was taught it was shameful to be angry, and my main religious experience was with Buddhism, which says anger is always purely bad. I don't know who your te

> I was taught it was shameful to be angry, and my main religious experience was with Buddhism, which says anger is always purely bad. I don't know who your teacher was, and I'm sure their motivation was coming from a good place, but I have to say that I think they were wrong about that. Was it a Theravada tradition perhaps? Anger itself is not bad, but reacting out of anger unskillfully is. Yes, the Buddha many times all over the Pali cannon says to abandon anger, that it is a poison, but that doesn't mean that we should generate aversion for it. How can we abandon aversion if we don't look at our anger directly? At the beginning we might have to put it aside, but we'll always have to come back to it and deal with it at some point. One of my teachers told a story that sort of relates to this in one of his talks, just to emphasize that we need to look at these emotions and deal with them directly. In case people are interested, it starts after the opening meditation at about the 20 minute mark: https://phuntsok.org/media/Meditation-NYC/080417_Healingthetroubledchildwithin.mp3 https://phuntsok.org/media/Meditation-NYC/080417_Healingthet...