Stillness Speaks Book Previews

Clear Seeing: How To Meet Anger or Shame with Mindfulness? Larry Rosenberg

by Sanjiv Manifest | Oct 1, 2025

mindfulness: “… Mindfulness is a power … Take each moment as it is, period. Give one hundred percent to that. When it’s over, let it go. Then bring one hundred percent of your interest to what’s next.” ~ Larry Rosenberg

Anger and shame are very tricky and slippery emotions, aren’t they? … difficult to navigate .. and they tend to leave a deep imprint! … with the “repeat cycle” ever looming.

They arrive—unbeckoned—like the weather—fast, convincing … and feel right up against the skin: the jaw tightens; the chest closes.

Of course, we try to “manage” what’s happening, to be “better” in this moment … It rarely helps 🙂

As we earnestly navigate our self-discovery journey, the natural question is: how do we meet these two “slippery ones?”

Larry Rosenberg, in his book, The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness, suggests an answer: give one moment your whole attention. Don’t try to fix it, simply meet it – fully, without getting caught up in self-judgement or guilt.

Stay with the breath that stays with you. Let the heat be felt in the body, and notice what unclenches when there’s no performance to keep up.

The pivot is simple, and it is enough: not managing, but seeing.

From then on, the arc is ordinary yet radical : begin where it’s small and workable; watch the mind’s hooks (to be right, respected, in control, pure); see how the grasping, not the state itself, keeps the knot tight. In time, this “contact or seeing” softens demand, bringing clarity to speech and action. Forgiveness turns out not to be a pose but a loosening—not so much letting go as letting be.

As Ajahn Chah said, “If you let go a little, you’ll have a little peace; if you let go a lot, you’ll have a lot of peace.”

So today, we explore Larry’s thoughts on anger and shame from the chapter Working with Fear, Anger, Shame, and Other Strong Emotions … words that are plain, workable, and free of theatrics. They show the quiet power of attention: initial contact … to clarity … to transformation .. and finally to wiser action.

This post is part of our ongoing Shambhala Publications series that offers substantive previews of selections from Shambhala Publications new and classic titles …

All italicized text here is adapted from The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness by Larry Rosenberg with Madeline Drexler, © Larry Rosenberg © Madeline Drexler. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.

Straight-Up Dharma: Inviting Trouble

Ajahn Chah, the Thai Forest master who strongly influenced my practice, vividly described a painful journey of self-awakening. During his days as a young monk, he was sometimes so discouraged, wandering alone in the forest and meditating, that he fell into total despair. He contemplated suicide many times. He talked about one particular day when it was pouring rain, and he was crying. The tears made him wet, the rain made him wet, and he just felt miserable. But he discovered something about himself: he had the capacity to sit through anything.

Self-knowledge has to do with being able to open to more and more. At times, we might even invite trouble, because we know that it’s a wonderful thing to do. But we invite just enough trouble so that we can grow a bit—not so much that we’re overwhelmed.

Ajahn Mun was one of the main teachers in the Thai Forest tradition. He and the yogis who practiced with him would go to the most dangerous parts of the jungle, where wild elephants, tigers, and snakes were everywhere. The reason the monks would go there was to provoke and flush out fear. They would do their walking meditation within close range of tigers so that they could hear and smell the animals. Naturally, fear came up. They would work with it through direct perception, knowing that if there was no fear, there was no problem with tigers, and if there was fear, they could be the tiger’s evening meal. Now I’m not suggesting we do that. But the main idea is that they actually invited and provoked some of the emotions inside themselves that were most uncomfortable and followed them through to the end.

What does this have to do with our lives? What is the wisdom in opening up to pain? Is it even plausible that the way to get free of suffering is to face suffering?

Some people say they’re afraid of being crushed by their pain. That feeling is not unfounded. Sometimes in life, you’re vulnerable. You’ve had so much suffering, so much sorrow. Something so terrible has happened that you have to back off and find a measure of joy and peace—like pulling over to the side of the road. In that case, if you have a formal meditation practice, just do some breathing, some metta, or take a walk in nature. But ultimately the emphasis in the Four Noble Truths is that the Buddha attained full awakening by steadily observing his own mind. If you want to be free of suffering, and you know another way of getting free of it, sign me up. I haven’t found it.

To start with, you might work with little pieces of dukkha throughout the day. Say you go to work and somebody who is usually friendly walks right past you, no smile. Maybe they’re preoccupied with something at home, but you feel rebuffed. Become aware of it. In that moment at work is a tiny piece of suffering. Little by little, you learn how to be with your dukkha around feelings of rejection, which often go back to childhood.

Like the sense of rejection, anger also has deep roots. What I’ve learned over the years from people who have a lot of anger is that, in the same way, it’s useful to apply mindfulness starting with smaller versions of anger—such as irritation or annoyance, which are more manageable. It could be waiting in line at a supermarket and watching someone take too long to pay their bill, and then they can’t find their credit card, and you find yourself saying between clenched teeth, “Oh, come on.” Start with situations that you can get a handle on and work your way up to stronger feelings.

Eventually you become aware of the cost of anger. The Buddha used vivid imagery to describe anger. He said that when you’re angry, it’s like you take a burning hot coal and you throw it at the person you’re angry at—you hurt them but you also burn yourself. In one of the sutras, he was earthier. He said it’s like throwing fecal material—you’ve besmirched someone else but also yourself.

As you practice with small sufferings, you develop the confidence that suffering is workable. Do you know why it’s workable? Because it’s observable. If you couldn’t observe what’s happening, you could never be free.

The Price of Grievance

The Buddha once said that all he teaches is the practice of liberation through not clinging. When you hold on to hatred, anger, or grievance, you suffer because you’re carrying that baggage, adding to the suffering that triggered your anger. Dropping that baggage depends on your ability to maintain a steady awareness without trying to get a result—just to look carefully. If you do, the grievance softens, weakens, even disappears. What comes out of that? I don’t know. I do know that some people have had atrocious treatment inflicted upon them and been able to forgive. I’m not suggesting you cultivate forgiveness by play-acting forgiveness—quite the contrary. I’m saying start where you are, which is that you don’t want to forgive.

Admittedly forgiveness is one of the hardest mind states to attain. You feel you should forgive somebody for hurting you. You’d be a “good” yogi if you could forgive. You could gain entry into buddha heaven if you could forgive—but you can’t. That realization is as valuable as the forgiving itself. What you’re interested in is not to get to some ideal place but to know the place that you actually inhabit in that moment, right here, right now. The letting go, the forgiveness, comes from seeing that you can’t let go, that you’re holding on. With that insight you open up, not so much letting go as letting be.

As with anger, you pay a price for holding on to grievance. It’s not simply that you haven’t forgiven the other person but that you haven’t forgiven yourself for not forgiving them. So start by forgiving yourself. How do you do that? Again, not by trying to forgive yourself but by seeing that you don’t forgive yourself.

In this practice, there is a difference between annihilation and cessation. Annihilation is when we don’t like something and we want to get rid of it. Cessation involves allowing whatever is there—in this case, resistance to forgiveness—and really seeing it, allowing it to flower, letting this emotion in, because it’s you. We’re often quite violent to ourselves—there are certain emotions that we disapprove of and try to banish or prevent from surfacing. This path is the opposite. It’s one of opening and allowing what’s there to come up. You learn the price that’s paid for entertaining certain mind states that make you feel righteous in the moment. You realize that not only have you damaged the other person but you’ve harmed yourself.

Getting Comfortable with Discomfort

The same stance—steady awareness, not managing but seeing, letting be—applies to any strong weather of mind, including anger and shame.

[…]

Mindfulness is a power. Think of it like the sun shining on a flower and the flower opening up. When mindfulness is directed to something, when its energy touches depression, fear, loneliness, or anger, there’s a transformation. The energy that’s been held captive in difficult mind states is released. It’s free energy for you to use and live with. The practice is infinite watching. But it requires full acceptance of our mind states, allowing that energy to flower, meeting it, seeing its nature and impermanence.

Interestingly, as you learn to be mindful of difficult emotional states, you will find that awareness cannot coexist with painful mind states. There’s no shame, guilt, or fear with awareness; there’s no old, young, male, female, gay, straight—no identity of any sort—with awareness.

Let’s take shame. Are you able to just look at shame simply as a mind state? If not, when you feel ashamed about something, the mind has a field day. The mind also loves it when you try to get rid of your shame, to put it behind you with bluster or bravado: “There’s nothing to be ashamed of; I outgrew that. That situation is long over with.” What the mind hates is inviting shame in: “Sit down, shame, have a cup of coffee and a muffin.” It hates it when you are open and aware of shame without any motive, when you’re not trying to get rid of shame, not trying to improve upon it, not trying to be heroic.

In other words, the truth in all these instances lies in the clear seeing. Clear seeing is the healing, the compassion, the insight. And that awareness is where, more and more, I encourage you to live. Just be that which knows.

In decades of teaching these ideas, I’ve been struck by how we humans can’t seem to separate language from the energy of what the language points to. Our words condition our habit energy. Anger, anger. Fear, fear. Loneliness, loneliness. Once you see the difference between the raw energy of, say, loneliness and the words you use for loneliness, you may still feel lonely, but it’s a bit more manageable. Mindfulness is also just a word, but it refers to a seeing energy. When that seeing energy touches habit energy, something new emerges.

The Buddha said that suffering was his gateway to freedom. In this strange path that he laid out for us, you come to peace by knowing its absence. When he said, “All I teach is suffering and the end of suffering,” he meant that you get to the end of suffering by looking at the suffering. The main thing is to uproot our attachment to highly charged states—such as fear, anger, or shame—not to try to uproot the state itself. We can’t control what’s going to visit the mind, but our relationship to it makes all the difference in the world. I can sum up all of the Buddha’s teaching about painful mind states in just a few sentences. It’s the Reader’s Digest Book of the Month Club version of vipassana. It’s a simple contemplation whenever you find yourself suffering, whether it’s mild annoyance or emotional torment: “What am I attached to here?”

~ Larry Rosenberg

Stay tuned for more substantive previews of other books (both new and classic) in this ongoing Shambhala Publications series …

All italicized text here is adapted from The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness by Larry Rosenberg with Madeline Drexler, © Larry Rosenberg © Madeline Drexler. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.