Irritability

Sometimes it can be hard to differentiate between sort of anger and irritability and frustration and restlessness. They can all sort of manifest in a similar way in so much as the body feels a little bit techy, kind of restless. There's no sense of being settled, grounded, calm and ease in the body. And likewise, the mind is very kinda busy. It just doesn't seem to wanna settle down in any way. And often when we're sitting to get some head space and we're wanting to sit in a nice kind of way and not move around too much, when we're feeling irritable, then it's really hard to just sit there 'cause we wanna kinda move around physically as well. If you think about the body, maybe a bit like being a container and the mind is inside. So when the mind's very sort of calm, then naturally the body is not kinda moving around too much and the body's quite happy just to sort of sit there in one position. But when the mind's very irritable and every little thing is really sort of standing out and the mind seems to be jumping on every thought and feeling that arises, then the mind's essentially kinda rattling around the body, and the body doesn't wanna kind of stay steady. It wants to move 'cause the mind is moving. So it's only as the mind starts to calm down that the body starts to calm down as well. This sort of feeling of an irritable mind, it often feeds itself. So like all of these obstacles, if we sit often enough and for long enough, we will experience irritability in the mind. It's not that we are a bad person, it's simply because this is an expression of the mind. Is one expression, it may not be our favorite one, but it's an expression. And we wouldn't want to kinda get rid of our emotions. Instead, we need to kind of see, okay, how can we understand irritability? How can we approach it in such a way that it doesn't make it worse? And ultimately, can we approach it in such a way that it appears less frequently in the mind? So the key I think is how we approach it. So let's say a thought arises in the mind. And it's a thought that doesn't seem to wanna stay still. It just leads to another, and another, and another and another. The temptation is to feel frustrated, we feel angry, we might even feel a bit anxious, or we might feel disappointed in ourselves because we don't feel that we're doing a very good job, and all these things start to kind of play out in the mind. We are feeding the irritability. We are giving it more fuel to jump around, to move around. It's just more thinking. But if we see those thoughts arising in the mind and we're able to step back momentarily, so that we...