Aliveness comes from fear and rage.
Numbing out leads to Zombies.
When I tell my friends that I’m doing Anger Practice or Rage Club Spaceholder training, a part of me cringes and shrinks. Not wanting to toot my own horn, draw attention to myself or make people uncomfortable. Rage Club? That sounds intriguing comes the response at times. Yer it’s pretty cool. But it also sounds scary, I would never go to that. Yeah I didn’t get it at first either. But these thoughts of contraction and shyness about it tell me either that I’m learning, or that I have more work to do… At least I don’t run from my fear anymore, I just sit in the moment, uncomfortably at times and wonder what will come next. There’s a kind of excitement and thrill about it now actually… oooo what will my fear tell me next about what’s needed in this conversation, or maybe this fear is not only mine but is giving me information about what’s in the field, what other people are feeling in the room. When that happens at times, magic unfolds, it almost feels like REAL magic. I’ll tell you about that in a minute, but first I have to clear something up.
You might be wondering why I’m talking about Fear, when I originally was talking about my Anger Practices. And what IS an anger practice anyway. Well we will come to that too. FIRST, fear, anger, sadness and joy are the 4 core feelings. Every other feeling is a mix of these. Example Isolation, like you might be feeling now in the pandemic is a mix of sadness and fear. Don’t take my word for it, check in your body now, what is it for you? It takes a little while to fully get what these feelings actually feel like in my body, sometimes it’s quite obvious and other times they’re just more subtle. SO my fear and anger are directly related.
You see as a little girl I had a strict father, he got angry and shouted at me at times. I can’t remember how many times. We also had lovely times don’t get me wrong. Yet those times when he lost his temper, especially when he lost his temper at me, I was terrified. It was REALLY scary as a little girl. So I realised now as an adult, that at that time I had made certain decisions about anger;
(1) Anger is scary, always.
(2) Anger Hurts people
(3) If someone is angry at me, I must always be wrong.
(4) I am not good enough.
(5) I must be stupid.
My dad was doing the best he could to raise me, he never had parenting training, or emotional communication training, or training about how to raise a daughter. He did his best. Even though I know now some of his methods were not useful, he did his best with what he had.
However the combination of what he did and what I decided, to protect myself as a little girl meant that, even when I was older and someone said “No” to me I felt scared and regularly gave my power to them. I was afraid of other peoples anger, and I was afraid to have or express my own anger, because I had the belief that that would just drive people away and that my OWN anger was unsafe and would ultimately hurt people. So I used less and less of my anger and just kept quiet. I was afraid to be seen, afraid of my own anger, afraid of other peoples small or large anger that was directed at me. All the while my own unexpressed and suppressed anger was dwelling and rumbling inside of me taunting me inside and provoking me to express in small explosions at unexpected times.
Since then I’ve learned about the Old and New Maps of Anger, which reframed my thinking that all anger is “bad”. That anger, like all the feelings are useful energy and information that I can use as wisdom for my personal and professional life. I learned that Anger on the Old Map is seen as; harmful, immature, unprofessional, destructive, violent, disrespectful, uncompassionate, shameful, embarrassing, more acceptable for men, unlady-like, ego driven, overpowering, hurtful, disconnecting. Yet I also learned that Anger on the New Map is…about creating clarity, making decisions, having a clear “yes”, clear “no”, creating clear boundaries. Anger is about choosing to be here, claiming my centre, claiming my space, honouring who I am, having my own back, choosing to stay in connection with someone even when my fear shows up. I use my anger now, for keeping me motivated and in fact inspired and committed to my life, passion, tasks, growing my skills. I use my anger to speak up, be seen, step up, walk beside others in challenging conversations. I use my anger to stay in my power centre and to have power-with conversations, rather than power-over.
My New Decisions are:
(1) Anger is empowering for my life
(2) Anger helps me stay connected with others
(3) Anger helps me to choose and stick to my values
(4) I use anger to claim my space and to value myself and my skills
(5) Anger helps me to listen to others more deeply and compassionately.
My experience with Rage Club.
I have been doing an Anger Practice with a friend of mine. 3min of anger 3 times a week for 3 months. We’re almost at the end of the first month. I’ve tried this practice manytimes before, but have often only made it halfway, before my brain would tell me that “this anger is too dangerous” “I’m just getting more judgemental now!, this is old map anger” “I don’t want this” so I stop. But Now I’m glad to have the support. I am beginning to fully trust that reclaiming my relationship to anger is a powerful process for me.
After setting our grounding chords, placing a bubble around our personal space and clicking in the work space with its own grounding chord. We make the agreement: “I will not hurt myself of anyone or anything else”. We pick an anger practice (1) towel pound (2), tantrum (3) towel wring (4) fluid expression. For 3 minutes we let the anger quickly build and express it with our voice and our bodies however our body wants to express.
After the 3 minutes we breathe in through our nose and down into our bodies the energy that has moved through us. We do not breath the breathe/energy out through our mouths, we keep it in our bodies and let it move through.
As I was writing this article, fear came over me that this article would not be good enough, transformative enough, that I am writing a diary instead of a transformational article. I felt fear come over me, freeze me, my inner critic got louder and louder I started feeling tired and like I just wanted to sleep and run away. I started having thoughts that I couldn’t face my feelings because I didn’t know how to really trust them. I knew I had to do 3min of anger practice, but my inner critic, (a.k.a. gremlin) was resisting and wanted my box to stay safe, to stay the same. The box is my culturally accepted identity that keeps me safe in the world, the “good girl” identity, for example.
Well I guess I’ve had enough practice with anger now to trust it and there seemed to be not much other pathway forward, the choices were (1) go to sleep (2) do anger and see what happens.
This is what happened.
I chose the towel pound, rolled bath towel held together with one elastic band at either end. Grounding Chord, Bubble, Set the Space with a Grounding Chord. Agreement to not hurt my self of anybody/anything else. 3min of anger, building up 3 breathes, one HA! With a pound. 5 breathes, 3 pounds, 7 breathes pound until I need to stop….
Thoughts arising….of a memory without images or context, just feelings and words… I just trusted the unfolding story my body needed to tell. It didn’t need to be connected to a specific event, it was just the story that my body had decided to hold at some point, to keep itself safe…
No, no, no, no, no, no…. don’t touch me, I need my space! Sadness, anger fear.. one by one these feelings flowed through me. I cry when I’m afraid, maybe that worked for me before, but don’t mix the feelings now. Ok I let the shaking come with the fear, then the sadness with tears…..the feelings unfolded for a while like this…
Then anger; I’m not afraid of you! But I am, switch it, I AM afraid of you, yes you are little girl inside of me aren’t you. You were really afraid of him. Then more wisdom, I don’t know how to trust my feelings. I’m not enough. I’m afraid of my feelings. Ok got it. This is the decision I made… I’m afraid of my feelings, they must not be right…
Now there’s a new choice to make, do I want to choose a new story? Yes! I dissolved the old story with some “Is Glue dissolver” and took the new story out of my magic pouch…”
“feelings bring me into presence” “I am grateful for feeling alive”.. hmm not quite…
“I am Aurora and my feelings teach me compassion” yes that’s it!
I wrote those words into the sky then put the sentence on as if it were a suite. From head to toe and then zipped it up and sensed what it was like to stand in this new suite.. .still a bit scary… yet more peaceful, clear and a YES. I am complete.
Imagine if Rage Clubs were the norm. What could the world be like?
Anger is about lowering our numbness bar so that we can access more aliveness in life and stop needing to fill the void with material things. Having a high numbness bar leads to a world of zombies walking around that are too afraid to feel. Most of us have learned to numb out in our lives, because maybe when we were young, people told us “don’t be sad, be happy” or “well at least your situation isn’t as bad as someone elses” or “you should be more grateful”. We learned to supress and not trust our feelings, so instead we fill the hole of numbing out with addictions, addictions to fulling our lives with stuff we don’t needs, with alcohol, drugs, coffee, chocolate, sugar, filling out lives with always being busy. This is not about creating guilt for having these in our lives. This is about having choice and choosing to lower our numbness bar, so that we can learn to belong to the places we live, listen deeply to eachother, have time for what is really important to us.
Anger makes space for all the feelings, creates time for sadness, fear, anger, joy and healing. We would not be so afraid to disagree with each other. There would no longer be a need to step on eggshells in fear or making someone else uncomfortable; sad, mad or afraid, because we know that these feelings are gifts and we would trust each other for feedback when something doesn’t work. Feedback would be a social technology that would help us connect deeper not turn away from each other. We would have clear authentic conversations about what we want and need. We could be comfortable with difference, we could heal more easefully from trauma and be less hindered by old protective thoughts that are no longer real in this adult reality.
People in previous generations may not have had the social technology and communication know how, to just companion us in our feelings. So that we didn’t learn to trust them and know that THIS is where resilience comes from. Resilience does not come from suppressing our feelings. The MOST important thing in the social fabric of our lives is connection. Everything comes down to how we relate to ourselves, each other and the ecosystems of life. There’s never a day that goes by where we are not relating to another being or being with our own inner worlds. Yet we barely focus on becoming masters of our feeling sense and body wisdom. Feelings are not a fault in the matrix of life, they ARE the matrix of wisdom for connection.