Yesterday I spent some time with an old friend who just got back from an 11 day meditation retreat in Thailand. She learned about the Three Poisons and was explaining them to me. I found the metaphors of the three poisons an effective way to look at my behavior.

The three poisons are:

Greed (represented by the rooster)

Anger or Hatred (represented by the snake)

Ignorance or Delusion (represented by the pig)

These three concepts are thought of as the roots of unwholesome karma.

“In Buddhist teachings, greed, hatred, and delusion are known, for good reason, as the three poisons, the three unwholesome roots, and the three fires. These metaphors suggest how dangerous afflictive thoughts and emotions can be if they are not understood and transformed… The poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion are a byproduct of ignorance—ignorance of our true nature, the awakened heart of wisdom and compassion. Arising out of our ignorance, these poisonous states of mind then motivate nonvirtuous and unskillful thoughts, speech, and actions, which cause all manner of suffering and unhappiness for ourselves and others.” Naljor Dharma Service

1. Greed: Refers to selfishness, misplaced desire, attachment, and grasping for happiness and satisfaction outside of yourself. Greed is a burning desire, an unquenchable thirst, craving, and lust; you want the objects of our desire to provide you with lasting satisfaction in order to feel fulfilled, whole, and complete. The poison of greed creates an inner hunger so that you are always striving towards an unattainable goal. You mistakenly believe happiness is dependent upon that goal, but once you attain it, you get no lasting satisfaction.
2. Anger or Hatred: Refers to aversion and repulsion toward unpleasant people, circumstances, and even toward your own uncomfortable feelings. With aversion, you habitually resist, deny, and avoid unpleasant feelings, circumstances, and people you do not like. You want everything to be pleasant, comfortable, and satisfying all the time. This behavior simply reinforces the perception of duality and separation. Hatred or anger thrusts you into a vicious cycle of always finding conflict and enemies everywhere around you. You can also create conflict within yourself when you have an aversion to your own uncomfortable feelings. With hatred and aversion, you deny, resist, and push away your own inner feelings of fear, hurt, loneliness, and so forth, treating these feelings like an internal enemy.
3. Ignorance or Delusion: Refers to dullness, bewilderment, and misperception; your wrong views of reality.Delusion is the misperception of the way the world works; your inability to understand the nature of things exactly as they are, free of perceptual distortions. Influenced by delusion, you are not in harmony with yourself, others, or with life; you are not living in accordance with Dharma. Affected by the poison of delusion, which arises from ignorance of your true nature, you do not understand the interdependent and impermanent nature of life. Thus, you are constantly looking outside of ourselves for happiness, satisfaction, and solutions to our problems. This outward searching creates even more frustration, anger, and delusion. Naljor Dharma Service

It is generally understood that each of us has a tendency to practice one of the poisons more often than the others. Spend a minute to contemplate which of the poisions you have a tendency towards. It was relatively clear to me that I have a tendency towards anger or hatred. I have a rather inward directed version of this particular poison. I aver my uncomfortable feelings and direct my discontent inwards.

There are specific practices that are geared towards combating each of these poisons.

The practice to overcome greed: Learn to practice selflessness, generosity and detachment. If you are strongly experiencing the greed poison, contemplate the impermanence of the object you desire. Practice charitable giving; give your time and material possessions. You can practice giving away those things you would most like to hold onto. You can also practice acts of selfless service and charity, offering care and assistance to others in any way you can, free of all desire for recognition or compensation. The problems associated with greed and attachment only arise when you mistakenly believe and act as if the source of our happiness is outside of yourself.
The practice to overcome anger: Learn to cultivate loving-kindness, compassion, patience, and forgiveness. Here you learn to openly embrace the entire spectrum of your experiences without hatred or aversion. Practice meeting unpleasant both experiences in the outer world with patience, kindness, forgiveness, and compassion and your own unpleasant feelings in the same way. Your feelings of loneliness, hurt, doubt, fear, insecurity, inadequacy, depression all require your openness and loving-kindness. Soften your defenses, open your heart, and let go of hatred, aversion, and denial.
Practice to overcome ignorance: Cultivate wisdom, insight, and right understanding. Learning to experience reality exactly as it is, without the distortions of your self-centered desires, fears, and expectations, you free yourself from delusion. Deeply sensing and acting in harmony with the ever-changing nature of this world—realizing that all living beings are inseparably related and that lasting happiness does not come from anything external—you free yourself from delusion. As you develop a clear understanding that positive, wholesome actions that bring happiness and the negative, unwholesome actions that bring suffering, you cultivate the wisdom that counteracts delusion and ignorance.

I have been practicing loving-kindness regularly and am absolutely amazed at how well it works for me. I encourage you to contemplate the three poisons to see what insights you can personally glean from them.

Much of what I wrote was paraphrased from Naljor Dharma Service