First Yoga. Now, Rage Club
While it had been a practice for more than 5000 years in the East, Yoga only appeared in the West in the late 1960’s, early 1970’s. In the 1970’s, if you, as a “white person” said you were doing Yoga, your friends and colleagues would frown and ask: ‘What is yoga? Is it a new kind of yogurt?’ If you were doing Yoga, you were weird. You were a hippy.
Yoga was far beyond the edge of ordinary American or European lifestyle. It was a doorway for the westernized folks to engage a new set of physical, mental and spiritual practices that were simply nonexistent in a Catholic and Capitalistic environment. At that time, practicing Yoga was easily seen as a form of heresy. You would have been judged as dismissing the core values of your parents. You would have been criticized for leaving behind the legacy that they sacrificed so much for you to inherit. You were abandoning the career path they had designed for you.
The Western people who were practicing Yoga 50, 40, 30 or even only 20 years ago were revolutionaries, inner revolutionaries. They were at the forefront of the evolution of Consciousness.
Today, Yoga has moved from far beyond the edge of westerners’ life to the center of it. If you do not own a pair of leggings or if your town does not have a yoga center, you are behind the times. There is Yoga for elders, Yoga for children, Yoga in school, Yoga for pregnant women. There are hundreds of different yoga, and hundreds of thousands of yoga teachers. Almost anywhere in the world at any time, you can participate in a Yoga Teacher Training, and immediately after that provide the benefits of Yoga to the people of your Circle.
And there are a number of benefits to practicing Yoga. I just read that the purpose of Yoga is to recognize a detached witness-consciousness untouched by the mind and mundane suffering.
The theory is that Yoga teaches you to be centered in your physical body. It also teaches you to not identify with your mind. That you do not have to limit your behaviors to your thoughts. For example, you can maintain a painful practice even if your mind says: “I don’t like this.” “I am tired.” “This hurts.” “I don’t want to do this anymore.” It is true that other long term practices create similar results such as long distance swimming, marathon, triathlon, ballet or martial arts.
What the original yoga practitioners from India did not take into account is that we have more than two bodies. Yoga works exclusively with your physical body and your intellectual body, leaving aside your emotional body, your energetic body and your archetypal body.
It can be surprising to experience that when you are centered, in other words, when you place your energetic center onto your physical center, your other bodies start coming ‘online’. All of the sudden, your emotional body — your heart — awakens and you start feeling. You could not access these feelings as long as you lived in the narrowness of your mind.
Yoga brings your Heart back to life! But from the perspective of a yoga practitioner, it is horrible! Yoga is supposed to make you calm! And now, you are feeling all this anger, deep sadness and maybe even fear. You think you are an emotional mess. So, what do you do? You go back to the mat! It makes sense. The main selling point of yoga is to become neutral and unattached to what causes you pain and suffering. If you are feeling, it probably means that you are not practicing hard enough. And the mat works, to some degree and for some time. Many yoga practitioners were willing to admit to me that their intense practice of yoga was their number one numbing strategy.
What the yogi missed is that your (and their) Feelings and Emotions are NOT a design error from the Universe. You have a Heart and it is meant to be used. Your Heart — your emotional body — has so much information and energy for you to use for your life, for your relationships, for what you are here to create. But you have not been training to inner navigate your Heart to be able to make use of all this aliveness. Your experience is then that feeling is complicated, hurtful, and that it does not lead anywhere.
When I say that your Heart can experience and express Feelings and Emotions, I am very clear about what Feelings and Emotions are. You might be suspicious if I say that there are only 4 Feelings: Anger, Sadness, Fear and Joy. (This revolutionary New Thoughtmap of Feelings was not discovered by Possibility Management, but by Valerie Lankford, a Transactional Analyst who worked with Eric Bern, the originator of Transactional Analysis.) Unless you are a man, and instead of being suspicious, you might just be relieved! Only 4 Feelings? I can handle that! As a woman, you might feel robbed of your vast palette of expression: your archetypal Everythingness is not willing to be limited to 4 Feelings. Do not worry, the Four Feelings are comparable to the primary colors, you can mix them as you will and get the full spectrum of Mixed Emotions as a result.
There is so much to learn about inner navigating the aliveness of your Heart. And it starts with inner navigating your Anger. Why? Because the power of your Conscious Matured Anger is that you can take are of yourself fully and completely around anybody. Your Anger is the force that allows you to keep your center, and not be adaptive or collapse in front of ‘authority figures’. Anger is the force that allows you to find what you want, and say what you want, no matter how uncomfortable it makes other people. Anger is the energy that you need to say ‘No’, or ‘Stop’, but also ‘Yes!’ Your Anger is an endless source of Clarity. Only after you access your Conscious Anger can you make it safe for yourself to feel and express your more delicate feelings of Fear, Sadness and Joy.
Learning to inner navigate your Anger might seem easy on paper but not as easy in practice. You immediately face your deeply ingrained belief that Anger is bad, dangerous, unprofessional, destructive, and hurts other people. You have proof: you have seen your parents, maybe from a very young age, hurting each other verbally or physically. You have experienced the pain that teachers inflict on children with their punishments and threats. You might have been the victim of the psychological or physical violence of the Patriarchy on women and children. While you have probably never witnessed an Adult modeling the true power of Anger.
This is what Rage Club is about. Rage Club is about discovering the force and clarity that lies within your Conscious Adult Anger, and how to make use of it for your life personally and professionally. Rage Club starts with practices and processes to mature your Anger from a reactive, childish or aggressive Unconscious anger (with a small ‘a’) to unleash the Clarity of your Conscious Adult and Archetypal Anger (with a capital ‘A’): the Warrioress and Warrior in you.
Learning to take care of yourself with your Anger is only Phase 1 of Anger work. Phase 2 of Anger work is to use your Anger for what you are here to create. Anger is your compass about what you care about. Anger informs you about what needs to be changed, or transformed, what needs to stop and what needs to start. If you did not care about something, you would not be angry about it, you would simply not notice it.
Here is an experiment for you as you start considering the power of your Conscious Anger: the experiment is to discover what people care about by listening to what they are angry about. When someone is angry around you, instead of trying to make their Anger go away, listen. If they say “I hate when people are late to their appointments with me.”, you can answer: “I hear that you care about people having integrity with their promises.” If they say “I am frustrated because my partner does not help me with the children.” you tell them: “I hear that you care that your partner is in a Team with you about how to raise your children.” Notice the quality of the interaction when you acknowledge and mirror back someone’s Anger as care. Warning: this experiment is not about being an emotional garbage can for someone who is aggressively angry at you. This experiment is about listening to other people’s anger about something, not their anger about you.
The second part of this experiment is to notice what you are angry about while you might have been pretending that you did not really care about anything. Any time you feel Angry, ask yourself: ‘What do I care about now?’ ‘What would I change?’ ‘How would I change it?’.
You might discover that your Heart, your care, and your wish for things to be different are a lot bigger than you originally thought. That when you experience and express your Anger, you are immediately closer to yourself and have more power over reality. And that when you listen to other people’s Anger, you find out who they truly are, and can be more connected with them.
There are already more than 100 Rage Club Spaceholders around the world. There are already Rage Club online and offline being delivered all year round. There are already a dozen of Rage Club Spaceholder Trainers training the next generation of Rage Club Spaceholders.
It might take 20, 30 or 40 years, but someday, there might just be Rage Club studios in every town as spaces of Empowerment, Love, Healing, Clarity and Care.
rageclub.org
