How To Feel Less Frustrated

We have been talking about inner peace and happiness lately. I received a call from my second cousin over the weekend. He said I get all this but life is frustrating. That got me thinking. How about we find a way to feel less frustrated? So today, we are going to talk about how to feel less frustrated.

We have talked about how it is possible to feel happy all the time. That we have this Buddha nature our golden nugget if you will. That our root mind is naturally peaceful. But even then, we get this unhealthy thoughts, the thoughts that make us unhappy, thoughts that get us into negative states of mind. What we are calling delusions. Anger, jealousy, frustration, and so forth. Usually, these delusions arise from inappropriate attention. What does that mean you ask? Well, it means focusing our attention on a faulty situation or in a faulty way. And when our mind is not thinking these negative thoughts, our mind is peaceful.

So key it seems to me is to find a way to identify our delusions and figure out a way to get rid of them. Sounds simple right? The book How To Transform Your Life actually deals with the delusion of aversion that includes frustration including the feeling of being overwhelmed and feeling of not being able to accept what is going on. Have you ever had a day where you feel like you were fighting all day? Actually, reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my tenants. I had a dentist as a tenant in our office building 20 years or so ago. Before he left for the day, usually he would stop by my office just to chat. I would ask how his day was and at least once a week, he would say they won today Nirav. You see, for him, it was always a battle between him and his patients. He was always in a reactive mode. If they said X, he would say Y, and so on.

So when we react in this reactive mode, with the aversion, oh, no, no, I hate this. I don’t like this. We’re fighting it. At that point, we have already lost because we’re fighting, right? So we go around, not liking things a lot and not liking people a lot. And actually, it just makes us unhappy. And it’s not in accordance with reality. It’s a distorted way of thinking about ourselves and the world and the people in the world, what’s going on.

So in general, we can understand that frustration, dislike, hatred, aversion, all of them just different names for anger by the way; is one of the most common and destructive of our delusions and afflicts us almost every day. The reason why there are so many problems in our world. Imagine if the world if no one ever got upset, angry, or hated each other, then many of the world’s problems would disappear, like immediately right? There wouldn’t be a war in Europe, there would be wouldn’t any fighting, and there wouldn’t be any people killing each other harming each other, yelling at each other. All, that would go away if people liked each other.

To solve the problem of anger, we need to first recognize it, within our own mind, and acknowledge how it’s harmful. Anger is really when we just don’t accept something we don’t like. That’s it. Now there are degrees of it from mild irritation to grumpy to full-throttle rage. It’s all on the same spectrum. In the simplest terms, anger is a deluded mind that focuses on an animate or inanimate object. It then exaggerates its bad qualities. And as a result, it wishes to harm it. Take our partner for example. They have a lot of good qualities otherwise we would not be together. But they did not take the trash out and all of a sudden, we just see all the faults they have and exaggerate and get angry at them. We forget about all the good qualities of why we are together. We don’t think that maybe they were busy with other things or they may have something going on that occupied their mind and so on. Nope, we feel wronged and get angry. This is an unpeaceful state of mind.

At that point, the idea is not to accept what is going on in our minds but practice patience. We need to practice patient acceptance of the situation. If we feel bad, we accept that it is there and realize that whatever is arising in our mind is our delusion and that it’s not us. Remember the golden nugget we keep talking about? We need to realize that this is just the dirt on that golden nugget and that we are that peaceful person. Now once the delusion arises it is difficult to push back. So the idea is to get in just when is arising before it develops and starts exaggeration and distortion. Because once the anger is here full-blown, there is nothing we can do about it. So that is why we have to get in early and put our minds somewhere else. So we don’t put exaggeration into it. So for example, in the case of taking out trash, instead of thinking, okay, they never do this. We get in there we think okay, let me just think five good things about this person. This is an incredibly practical way to stop full-blown irritation and anger arising, we think five good things about that person. Know that I can’t think of five good things right now. Okay, try three. Okay, three. No, can’t even think of three good things right now. Okay. Well, in that case, try one, and well, I can’t even think of one well make one up. You know, the dog loves him. That’s enough. Anything to like to derail the anger train, you know, just not let it get full steam ahead. Because it’s based on that exaggeration, or we call it inappropriate attention. We could think I don’t have to exaggerate, distort, or make this person intrinsically evil. And if we learn to do that, then there’s no repression required. The anger just doesn’t arise in the first place.