The Cow in the Parking Lot: A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger

Zusatztext The Cow in the Parking Lot: A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger offers one of the best titles available on anger management. It's packed with insights and techniques that advocate getting calm instead of angry! and comes from a trial attorney who used anger to fuel his fiery courtroom presence. Buddhist wisdom permeates a powerful survey of what provokes anger and how to turn it aside. California Bookwatch Informationen zum Autor Susan Edmiston, a former editor at Redbook and Glamour , writes for New York , The New York Times Magazine and Book Review , Esquire , The San Francisco Chronicle , and Women's Day . She lives in Berkeley, California. Leonard Scheff, a successful trial lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, is also a practicing Buddhist who, for the last fifteen years, has conducted seminars on managing anger. Klappentext Road rage. Domestic violence. Professionally angry TV and radio commentators. We're a society that is swimming in anger, always about to snap. Leonard Scheff, a trial attorney, once used anger to fuel his court persona, until he came to realize just how poisonous anger is. That and his intense study of Buddhism and meditation changed him. His transformation can be summarized in a simple parable: Imagine you are circling a crowded parking lot when, just as you spot a space, another driver races ahead and takes it. Easy to imagine the rage. But now imagine that instead of another driver, a cow has lumbered into that parking space and settled down. The anger dissolves into bemusement. What really changed? You-your perspective.Using simple Buddhist principles and applying them in a way that is easy for non-Buddhists to understand and put into practice, Scheff and Edmiston have created an interactive book that helps readers change perspective, step by step, so that they can replace the anger in their lives with a newfound happiness. Based on the successful anger management program Scheff created, The Cow in the Parking Lot shows how anger is based on unmet demands, and introduces the four most common types-Important and Reasonable (you want love from your partner); Reasonable but Unimportant (you didn't get that seat in the restaurant window); Irrational (you want respect from a stranger); and the Impossible (you want someone to fix everything wrong in your life).Scheff and Edmiston show how, once we identify our real unmet demands we can dissolve the anger; how, once we understand our "buttons," we can change what happens when they're pushed. He shows how to laugh at ourselves-a powerful early step in changing angry behavior. By the end, as the reader continues to observe and fill in the exercises honestly, it won't matter who takes that parking space-only you can make yourself angry. Zusammenfassung Don't get mad. Get calm. Ask yourself: Do I really want to be angry? Leonard Scheff, a trial attorney who used anger to fuel his courtroom persona, realized the answer had to be no. Anger is toxic. Anger is in the eyes of the beholder. Using simple Buddhist principles and applying them in a way that is easy for non-Buddhists to understand and put into practice, Scheff and Susan Edmiston have created an interactive book that helps readers change perspective, step-by-step, so that they can replace the anger in their lives with newfound happiness. Based on the Transforming Anger workshop Shceff created, The Cow in the Parking Lot shows how anger is based on unmet demands, from the reasonable (we want love from our partner) to the irrational (we want respect from a total stranger) to the impossible (we want someone to fix everything in our life). The authors show how, once we identify our real unmet demands, we can dissolve the anger. The same is true for our buttonsonce we understand them, we...

Auteur

Susan Edmiston, a former editor at Redbook and Glamour, writes for New York, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, Esquire, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Women's Day. She lives in Berkeley, California. 

Leonard Scheff, a successful trial lawyer in Tucson, Arizona, is also a practicing Buddhist who, for the last fifteen years, has conducted seminars on managing anger.

Texte du rabat

Road rage. Domestic violence. Professionally angry TV and radio commentators. We're a society that is swimming in anger, always about to snap. Leonard Scheff, a trial attorney, once used anger to fuel his court persona, until he came to realize just how poisonous anger is. That and his intense study of Buddhism and meditation changed him. His transformation can be summarized in a simple parable: Imagine you are circling a crowded parking lot when, just as you spot a space, another driver races ahead and takes it. Easy to imagine the rage. But now imagine that instead of another driver, a cow has lumbered into that parking space and settled down. The anger dissolves into bemusement. What really changed? You-your perspective.Using simple Buddhist principles and applying them in a way that is easy for non-Buddhists to understand and put into practice, Scheff and Edmiston have created an interactive book that helps readers change perspective, step by step, so that they can replace the anger in their lives with a newfound happiness. Based on the successful anger management program Scheff created, The Cow in the Parking Lot shows how anger is based on unmet demands, and introduces the four most common types-Important and Reasonable (you want love from your partner); Reasonable but Unimportant (you didn't get that seat in the restaurant window); Irrational (you want respect from a stranger); and the Impossible (you want someone to fix everything wrong in your life).Scheff and Edmiston show how, once we identify our real unmet demands we can dissolve the anger; how, once we understand our "buttons," we can change what happens when they're pushed. He shows how to laugh at ourselves-a powerful early step in changing angry behavior. By the end, as the reader continues to observe and fill in the exercises honestly, it won't matter who takes that parking space-only you can make yourself angry.

Résumé
Don’t get mad. Get calm.

Ask yourself: “Do I really want to be angry?” Leonard Scheff, a trial attorney who used anger to fuel his courtroom persona, realized the answer had to be no. Anger is toxic. Anger is in the eyes of the beholder.

Using simple Buddhist principles and applying them in a way that is easy for non-Buddhists to understand and put into practice, Scheff and Susan Edmiston have created an interactive book that helps readers change perspective, step-by-step, so that they can replace the anger in their lives with newfound happiness. Based on the Transforming Anger workshop Shceff created, The Cow in the Parking Lot shows how anger is based on unmet demands, from the reasonable (we want love from our partner) to the irrational (we want respect from a total stranger) to the impossible (we want someone to fix everything in our life).
The authors show how, once we identify our real unmet demands, we can dissolve the anger. The same is true for our “buttons”—once we understand them, we can defuse what happens when they’re pushed.

We learn to laugh at ourselves, a critical early step in changing angry behavior. We learn how to deal with the anger of others, and ultimately how to transform anger into compassion.

And finally, we learn the liberating truth: Only you can make yourself angry.