Listen while you workout, cook, or commute.
When agitation hits, most people reach for something. Food, phone, distraction. Anything to make the discomfort stop. Meditation for anger works differently: you sit with the fire until it transforms.
I set a timer for one hour. No expectations. No goal except to notice what’s happening in my body and let the energy move however it needs to move.
That’s it. No mantras. No visualization. Just sitting and feeling.
Why Sitting With Agitation Works
Meditation for anger isn’t about calming down. It’s about giving the energy permission to exist. And in that permission, watching it transform.
The agitation in my stomach wants to become behavior. It wants me to check my phone, send a text, eat something, fix something. But if I can sit still and let that energy burn, it clears out like Drano through clogged pipes.
The uncomfortable sensations move. From solar plexus to heart to forehead to crown. They ping-pong around. And gradually, they dissipate.
The anger doesn’t disappear because I suppressed it. It disappears because I let it complete its cycle. Most emotions just want to be felt. When we let them, they move through. When we resist, they get stuck.
The Trap of Pushing Through
For most of my life, when manic feelings or agitation came up, I would use behavior to shove them down. Go drink, do drugs, eat food. Send a bunch of text messages. Try to find anybody who would get me out of how I was feeling.
But the body wants to heal itself. It wants to move through the agitation. I just have to be still and create enough space for that energy to clear out what it needs to clear out.
Every time I reached for a behavior, I was interrupting a process that was trying to complete itself. The relief was temporary. The underlying energy was still there, waiting for another chance to surface.
How to Practice
Set a timer. Sit. Scan your body for sensation. Put your attention wherever there’s energy. Heat, pressure, agitation, tingling. Don’t try to make it go away. Give it permission to get bigger if it wants to.
When your mind pulls you toward thoughts, notice where those thoughts create sensation in your body. Sit with the sensation instead of the thought.
Let yourself burp, make noise, breathe funny. That’s energy moving. Good ideas will come and go. Let them pass. They’ll return if they’re worth anything.
Start with 20 minutes if an hour feels impossible. But know that the real shift often happens around the 45-minute mark. That’s when things start to break loose.
You don’t need a quiet room or perfect conditions. You just need a commitment to stay seated no matter what your mind tells you. The mind will try everything to get you to move. That’s normal. It’s actually part of the process.
This is the work that actually changes things.
Explore the Shadow Work practices for guided exercises that help you feel, process, and transform.
An hour of this creates more capacity than a week of white-knuckling. The agitation that was trying to drive bad choices transmutes into creative potential. That’s the alchemy.