When Meditation Meets Rage: Holding Anger in Awareness Without Fixing Yourself

What happens when you're a daily meditator and still choose petty revenge? After a brutal morning of delivery work and a no-tip pizza order to a 4th-floor apartment, I left the food outside—fully aware I was being petty, watching myself make the choice, unable to stop it. This episode explores the uncomfortable truth about spiritual practice: you don't become perfect, you just become aware of your imperfection.

I share the raw moment of choosing anger over maturity, the internal battle between Buddhist noting techniques and actual rage, and what Ram Dass meant when he said "falling off the path IS the path." We dive into holding doubt, despair, and anger in awareness without trying to fix yourself—because you can't lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Drawing from Buddhism, Taoism, and Lao Tzu's wisdom about waiting until the mud settles, this episode is for anyone who's ever questioned whether their practice is "working" or felt like a spiritual failure. Sometimes the stumbles aren't detours—they're the actual path.

Topics explored: mindfulness practice, spiritual imperfection, anger management through awareness, doubt as discriminating wisdom, trusting the Tao, gradual transformation, self-compassion, Buddhist noting technique, spiritual bypassing vs. real practice

Transcript

Watching Myself Choose Petty Revenge

When Meditation Doesn't Stop You

You Can't Fix Yourself—You're the One Who Needs Fixing

Doubt as Discriminating Wisdom

Trusting the Tao—Letting Right Action Arise

Jacob 0:14

So today I'm driving DoorDash deliveries, uh, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Instacart. And I had a very unlucky morning this morning. I'm recording on my lunch break now. I had several bad orders. You ever you ever feel like people are taking advantage of you and there's nothing you can do about it? And there's this quiet desperation or rage that builds inside of you. And for me, there's a moment of choice. I have enough awareness now where I can see it happening, but I still do the thing. And it's almost like I'm in awareness watching it, and and I can see the decision forming in my brain to do the petty revenge thing, and then I do it anyways. Every now and again it I will stop, but today was not that day. I picked up a I had a couple of bad orders, then I pick up a pizza from this place, and I won't say what delivery platform it is, but you can probably figure it out. Let's just say this is a platform that does not allow drivers to decline orders anymore. So I take it. It's four dollars going four miles. I think that's not too bad. It's a short four-mile delivery, terrible pay. The customer probably didn't tip, but I'll do it anyways. So I take it. I realize where the order is going after I pick it up. It's going to an apartment complex that was just built recently. It's one of those like fancy places where there's an entry code to get into the building, and you have to take an elevator to get to the different floors. And this guy who didn't tip me lives on the fourth floor. I have to put a building entry code in, find the elevator, go all the way up, go to this person's room. So I'm driving to the apartment complex, and the only thing I can think to myself on the way there is well, first, it's just a feeling of rage, of anger. The fact that somebody did not tip me, it just feels so disrespectful. So these thoughts are going in circles in my head. Like this person is a lot, you know, comfortable with not tipping another human being to pick up their food, bring it to them, enter the building code, travel to the fourth floor in an elevator all the way down the hall to their room, and they're okay with not tipping. So all this is like doing really quick circles in my brain. And this is after I've already had a bad morning full of bad orders. So my mind is like just not feeling good, right? And then the idea, the thought forms in my head, well, maybe, just maybe, I'll put a note that says the door wouldn't open, and I'll leave it outside the front of the building so this jerk can come get their own food at the very bottom. And and my other part of my brain is like, no, don't do that. That's petty. You might get yourself in trouble, blah, blah, blah. And I'm having this internal dialogue with myself, like, well, you're really not gonna get in trouble. You're gonna be just fine. And then at a certain point, I realize that the petty side has won. I just kind of know inside that I'm gonna do this petty thing. Yes, the customer is in the wrong for not tipping me. Yes, the customer is objectively disrespecting the driver. Um, doesn't care. Uh, I'll bleep that name. The company doesn't care. And they're allowing me to deliver this person's food with minimal to no pay, so they're okay with it as well. So it's like there's these two parties taking advantage of me, and here I am putting my time in, destroying my car, risking my life to get this person their food. So I realize at a certain point the petty thought has won, and I'm gonna do the thing. I get there, I I do the buttons I need to do in the app to um to let the customer know I couldn't get in. I did it very quickly, of course, and I left. Didn't get in trouble for it, knock on wood, but sometimes, you know, uh especially after when you're trying to work on yourself as a person, it doesn't matter if you're a meditator or not, it doesn't matter if you're a spiritual person or not. If you're a good person with morals, as most people are, you want to better yourself or do better, or at least learn from your mistakes and try not to make them again. Because you want to leave the world in a better place than you found it. So when ideas come to mind of petty revenge, there's a battle that takes place inside between the maturity and the immaturity. You know, do I digress do I descend and lower myself to these other people, or do I keep my head high, you know, and maintain uh a more mature posture? Nine 99 times out of a hundred, I I always maintain the high road. And I want to. I don't want to let other people's disrespect towards me drag me down with them. But I'm a human being, and eventually, no matter how nice the dog is, you kick the dog enough times, the dog's gonna bite back. Some of you listening might agree with me, some of you might say, yeah, you should always be perfect and always, always do the right thing. You know, it's like, yes, I want to do the right thing. In my mind, I wanted to bring the food to the person's door and just call it even like, okay, you be immature, but I don't know. I'm human and these thoughts appear. And what can where I'm going with this is that sometimes when we're trying to improve ourselves, it's easy to overlook the successes and just look at the failures. Like I can I can doubt my practice all day long and say, is my practice even doing anything? I sat in uh Zazan meditation this morning for 30 minutes, as I do pretty much every day, and here I am leaving someone's food outside of the building. And this is a reminder that improvement is gradual and it takes time. Who knows what I would have done to this person's food had I not been meditating? It's easy for me to say I failed, I'm a failure, meditation's not doing anything, and follow that thought trail, or I can simply realize, hey, maybe I would have spit on this person's food if I was a different person and not working on myself and I've just given up and don't care. I mean, there's all kinds of different levels you can fail, you know. So you got to look at the bright side and count the W's as well, or the wins. So there's that. And by the way, uh last episode, a lot a couple of you guys did reach out to me and checked on me how I was doing, and I really appreciate that. And I want to let you know, um, I recorded that episode during crunch time at the end of the month where it was really close to make um rent. I mean, that's how it is pretty much every month. But the good news is I did make rent on time, so you guys can celebrate. Uh, no late fees this month, and uh I am pretty much ahead of my bills and I'm feeling pretty good. And my son is visiting next week, uh, Valentine's Day weekend. So things are good. I just wanted to put that out there, but um because it you can hear me uh jump on this episode and then oh man, now he's really angry about deliveries and stuff. And it's like, no, I'm um on this episode in particular, I wanted to let you know about the rough morning I was having and doubt in particular how it can creep in, especially after you've had an angry moment where it feels like life is ganging up on you, nothing's going your way, and it's real easy to feel, you know, sort of overwhelmed. I have plenty of those thoughts, like I mentioned, where it's like, is this doing anything? Um, is this going anywhere? Am I making progress? And I just wanted to talk about that a little bit, you know, and share this with you guys because what I do in these situations, uh, when it's raw and real like this, is well, first I want to share it and let you know, you know, it what I'm going through in case you can relate. And um, the second thing is not to despair because I've fallen into despair many times, especially over the last couple of years, and it doesn't feel good when you despair. You feel like you're powerless and nothing's ever going to get better. And um, especially if you're you're practicing uh in a spiritual practice, it's easy to throw your hands up in the air and say, well, screw this, it's not my reality, anyways. This is God's reality, God's in charge. I pretty much have no self-control or free will. I can't even control the thoughts that are in my head. So what does it matter, anyways? It's all part of the divine plan, right? You know, spiritual bypassing, they call that. But the key is when you practice cultivating awareness and mindfulness in your life, there is not going to be sunshine and rainbows at every moment. Light is not going to shine down from the sky on you. You're not going to be a Jedi dodging laser blast that life is shooting at you all the time. Sometimes the uh the stumbles are part of the path. I remember Ramdas, he was always famous for saying that when you think you've fallen off the path, that is the path. That is how it's supposed to be. We we get into this phony holy mode in our minds. You have to understand that you are a human being. You are not a fully realized being. You are not the Buddha, you are not Jesus, you are not Krishna, you are you. And you're perfectly you, you're perfect the way you are, and there's still room for improvement, if that makes sense. So what I do is I hold my doubt in awareness, I hold my despair in awareness, I hold my anger in awareness, I see it happening, and I understand that I can't always change it and I can't always override it myself. I really wanted to bring that person's food up to the fourth floor and deliver it and be totally serene and equanimous about it, but I wasn't able to. And it's funny because I even had some degree of awareness while it was happening. I was watching myself and I was doing the Buddhist technique of noting. So I was saying to myself, anger, anger, anger, just being aware of it, noting it. And it did not pass. And on the way there, it just kind of congealed and got a little worse. And I must say it got to a point where I just kind of finally decided, yes, I'm just gonna leave it out front. I'm just that angry and fed up, and I'm not gonna let this anger go anywhere else. And I didn't, I just held it in awareness. I did text the person, I said, uh, front door wouldn't open, left left the food at the front for you, and I did a heart emoji. And truth be told, I did have a little bit of uh a sarcastic edge. Like I was hoping the customer knew that I was being sarcastic in the message with the heart emoji. And here's the thing, I'm realizing I can't fix myself because I'm the one who needs fixing. It's like trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. It doesn't work. The effort to control, to override, to force myself to be better, that's still me trying to manage me. But awareness, that's different. Awareness just sees, it holds everything, the anger, the pettiness, the choice in a wide pasture. And when I trust that space, when I try when I stop trying to fix it, uh, the right action has room to arise on its own. Not always in the moment I want, but eventually. So I was a little petty today, and I'm gonna call myself out on it, but it's okay because I'm a human being, and maybe you've had a moment like that today or in the last few days, or maybe it's coming up later. But the point is, whatever has happened or will happen with you in the near future, it's okay. It's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to have doubt. It's okay to have a little despair once in a while about things. But for me, when you hold doubt in mindful awareness, it becomes discriminating wisdom, I think is what the Buddhist term is. Because if you follow doubt without any inquiry or mindfulness, it becomes very powerful despair. Whereas doubt can be a healthy thing, it can have you question things. And if I doubt this podcast, for example, that's okay. Maybe some of the episodes I've produced are actually dog turds. Maybe some people are not into them, and that's okay. Is it okay for me to have an episode that someone's not into? Yes, I'm learning how to do a podcast for crying out loud. First episode is called I Don't Know What I'm Doing. Here I am 33 episodes later. I still have no idea what I'm doing. I am recording a podcast episode by myself, staring at my sound panels on my wall, in my room by myself, on my lunch break. I'm still figuring this out. I've had a couple of fun interviews. I want to have more. I'm learning. I have some great ideas for future episodes and where this podcast is going. And we're going to have to just kind of wait and see how it all turns out. And when you bring in awareness and mindfulness to these things, what happens is that little negative voice in your head that says it's all fucked and it's not going to work out, it kind of gets a little quieter and it starts to go away after a while. Right now, I am feeling all of these feelings about the podcast, about, you know, my future job prospects and uh my new schedule that I just started today. And I'm I'm I've got a little bit of doubt, you know, but it's a healthy doubt. And I'm just going to turn it into a kind of a self-checking or a self-scanning periodically to see how things are going and make subtle improvements from there. And yes, sometimes anger feels overwhelming, and there's no way you can avoid it. And I don't want you to avoid it. I don't want you to stuff it down or pretend it's not there. Like when I picked up that pizza with no tip, I was angry. I can still feel the echoes of it right now because it just happened like an hour and a half ago for me. But anger is valid. You give anger your your awareness, your space. Give space to it. How do you control a raging bull, they say? Give it a wide pasture. And that's what your awareness is. It's a wide pasture. Can we trust our awareness to guide us in the right direction? Or do we have to fix it? See, that's another thing. When you have that overwhelming um what's the word? Uh I'm drawing a blank here. When you feel restless or exhausted that you have to solve everything or keep plates spinning, this is the ultimate form of faith. Faith is another word for trust. Can you trust the way of things? The Tao, as they say. The Tao is another way of saying the way. And twenty five hundred years ago, a little old man named Lao Tzu wrote a book called The Tao De Ching, which means the book of the way. And in that book, he has a verse that says, The ancient masters were profound and subtle, their wisdom was unfathomable. There is no way to describe it. All we can describe is their appearance. They were careful as someone crossing an iced over stream, alert as a warrior in enemy territory, courteous as a guest, fluid as melting ice, shapable as a block of wood, receptive as a valley, clear as a glass of water. Do you have patience to wait? Till your mud settles and the water is clear. Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? The master does not seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present and can welcome all things. So just trust that things are going to work out the way that they're supposed to work out. Keep cultivating that mindfulness, that spaciousness, that loving awareness, and trust that things are going to go the way they're supposed to go. I love you guys. Thank you for listening to this short episode. I will be back soon. I love you.