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with the compassion cultivation practices - it's the same as any other exercise - you start with something a little challenging yet achievable. well, when lifting weights for example, you actually use a very light weight first to learn correct form (learn the practice). then each time before you start lifting, you do a warm-up set. the cultivation of compassion starts with generating a strong feeling of compassion, and you do this by thinking of someone you love/loves you, someone you're very fond of. you let the feeling grow and grow, and get a strong radiance going. then you start gently nudging that sense on to other people (in your mind) in order of difficulty. after the people (and pets if you like) you really like and care for, you move on to people who you have no particular emotional involvement with - the guy who works at the post office, or whatever. hopefully somewhere before this stage, you can generate compassion for yourself...that's a big transformer & catalyst there. next stage is the people you have issues with, from little personality clashes to the big stuff. the purpose of the practice isn't about healing or developing any of those relationships - it's simply about expanding your ability to generate compassion. exercising the compassion muscle. some stages will feel a little awkward or uneasy, some present too much of a challenge, so you just leave it alone for a while. at each stage you just note any trickiness without the need for mental commentary or self-judgment. as for how it all applies to anger, and your post about feeling compassion for someone who hurts you - of course that is hard if you don't actually have a practice of generating compassion. it's not a passive function that we're all born with, so we need to actively develop it, if we can understand and have faith in its benefits. but before we get to that very advanced stage of feeling compassion for 'our enemies' we can certainly have compassion for ourselves and the people we love, and see that persistently re-engaging with negative emotions only damages us & them. (note that this is not suppressing or refusing to acknowledge negative emotions...it is referring to the intoxicating & compelling nature of emotions like anger, where like santiago was saying, some of us just can't seem to help getting hooked into / can't walk away). definitely on-going work