Exploring the Costs and Benefits of Anger and the Value of Forgiveness - Talk with sujatha baliga

Anger often serves as a powerful fuel for advocacy for a better world. Anger can also be a healthy part of our healing journeys after a harm or injustice. But there may come a time in our lives when anger no longer serves us personally or our work in the world. Our (even righteous) rage can burn out of control, sometimes scorching our friends, families, our co-workers, and ourselves.
In this talk with sujatha baliga from Dr. Rick Hanson's Wednesday Night Meditation + Talk, we explore:
- Our personal relationship to forgiveness, or letting go of anger
- The value of forgiveness in our own lives.
- And we grapple with these questions:
- When is my anger beneficial, and when does it harm me and others?
- What does it mean to forgive someone? To forgive myself?
- What might it feel like to ask for forgiveness?
- How might we continue to work against harm and oppression without anger as the motivating force?
In the Q&A, sujatha shares some practical tools for examining anger’s value and drawbacks, and for cultivating forgiveness of ourselves and others.
sujatha baliga has been a long-time Buddhist practitioner and internationally recognized leader in the field of restorative justice. A former victim advocate and public defender, she’s spent the past 18 years helping communities across the nation implement restorative justice alternatives to youth incarceration. sujatha’s restorative justice work is inspired by the personal advice she received when she was 24 years old from His Holiness the Dalai Lama about becoming a public survivor and about the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable acts. Today, she’s dedicated to finding restorative justice responses to intimate partner violence and sexual abuse. She’s a lay member of the Gyuto Foundation, a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Richmond, CA, where she leads secular meditation on Monday nights. sujatha has been named Soros Justice Fellow, an inaugural Just Beginnings Fellow, and is currently a MacArthur Fellow. She is working on her first book.
You can see the meditation that went along with this talk here: rickhanson.com/meditation-tal...
And if you would like to join the free, online Wednesday Meditations, sign up here: rickhanson.com/wednesday-medi...

[@aaditkamat4995]

Thank you for this talk, Sujatha. So sorry to hear what you have gone through. You are such a great source of inspiration for others who have gone through or are going through similar experiences. The work you do is very representative of the value of forgiveness that you have shared your insights on.
As you have said, there is no black and white way of viewing anger. Anger is an emotion like others that provides useful information. It can be a tool, so long as the energy is harnessed towards a goal, for example, achieving social justice.
But anger that is left untended can grow into something much worse. In many cases, the anger towards the perpetrator does not affect the perpetrator as much as it does the victim. So it becomes like the "double darts" that Rick often mentions about: not only are you already hurt because of what you have experienced, but you end up hurting yourself even more. Forgiveness is the only way to move forward in such circumstances.
The key thing to take note of though is that forgiveness is not an invitation to "sweep your anger under the rug". That goes into the realm of "toxic positivity", which can also do more harm than good. Rather, forgiveness stems from the knowledge that anger can't be the long term solution.
It takes a lot of work to get to that state of mind. I'm glad that you have reached a point where you can be calm even as you fight for justice and are inspiring others to do the same.

[@S2023.]

Be wise. "Don't go to the butcher for bread".