Have you ever noticed that in any reasonably large group of people, there's always one person who you just don't seem to get on with? One person who gets in your face, and just doesn't seem to agree with you or like you, no matter what you say or do? How do you deal with them?

Earlier this year I went to a Shamanic Practitioner's training course, up near Byron bay. The purpose of the course was to learn shamanic healing techniques for dealing with spiritual, emotional and sexual problems. I had been lured by the promise of dealing with three of my biggest bugbears: guilt, fear and shame. It was one of those courses where you just know everyone's going to wind up getting naked.

This was a residential course lasting 6 days, in the beautiful, warm Byron hinterland. There was a lot of stomping, pillow-hitting, tantrum-throwing and other techniques to deal with the range of emotions that came to the surface. There was a lot of discussion and practise of setting boundaries, learning to say "yes" and "no" to what we did and didn't want, learning to ask for what we needed, and recognising when we were playing out old patterns in the way we related to other people. We learned some extreme healing techniques, and then practised them with each other. It was intense, and I was way outside my normal comfort zone.

Anything that happened during the week was considered part of the course, whether it happened in a formal training session or not. I stayed in a 6-share mixed dorm room, and took an immediate mutual dislike to the woman in the bunk bed directly above me. Let's call her Bertha. Bertha was a large Germanic woman with a thick accent and short black hair. During the night she would toss and turn every 30 seconds. Being in the bed beneath her felt like trying to sleep in an earthquake zone. I was fatigued and exhausted pretty much the whole time, and after the second night of being kept awake I decided I was going to have to practise asking for what I needed.

So I said to Bertha in the morning:

"I'm finding it really difficult to get to sleep at night. The bunk really rocks whenever we move, and it keeps waking me up when you move around suddenly. Could you please be aware of this when you move?"

"Well, I can't help it if I turn in my sleep!", she screeched back, "There's nothing I can do about it! Why don't you sleep somewhere else?"

In hindsight, that mightn't have been such a bad idea, but I didn't know if there was anywhere else; certainly all the bunks in our room were full and as far as I knew the place was booked out. But the next night was much better: Bertha didn't move nearly as much or as violently. In the morning I thanked her, saying "I had a much better sleep last night, thank you". She merely grunted in reply.

Nevertheless, I was still exhausted most of the time and desperately needing rest. I spent every lunch time in bed hoping to catch some sleep in the hour or so we had free. Right next to my bed was a small wooden table with a few small meditative ornaments on it. During lunch time while I was in bed, Bertha came in to our room and set up her laptop on the table only a foot away from my head.

She was relatively quiet, but nevertheless the gentle tap-tap-tap of her keys on the keyboard and the occasional Windows login sound so close to my ear was distracting. It felt like she was right in my space, and I just couldn't fall asleep. "Can't she see that I'm struggling with exhaustion?", I thought to myself as my frustration slowly grew, "Why doesn't she just leave me alone? Does she really have to do this right here, right now? Can't she go and do it somewhere else? And what is she doing on her computer anyway? Surely that's not part of the course."

I was desperate for rest, and Bertha was keeping me awake. "How can she be so uncaring and insensitive?" All these angry, paranoid thoughts were buzzing around my head, making it even more difficult to rest. I hate conflict, and the idea of asking for what I need from a potentially hostile person dosen't thrill me. But it's all part of the course, and I was here to learn to deal with these kinds of things.

So I figured I'd better risk it:

"Do you have to do that right here?", I enquired.

"What?", she said acting suprised

"I'm exhausted and I'm trying to sleep, but you're keeping me awake."

"I'm not making any noise.", Bertha snapped back.

"Well, it's disturbing me. Your laptop is right next to my head. I really need to rest."

"Well, I'm doing my work."

"But you're in my space. Do you have to do it right now? I'm really struggling here."

"I have to do my work!!!"

"But we're on a course. I'm not here doing work. I'm trying to rest so I can get everything I can out of the coure."

"Well I'm doing my work."

She was adamant that her work was more important, and she couldn't possibly do it anywhere else. No matter what I said, she was staying.

"So your work is more important than my need to rest?", I said angrily.

"No, I'm not saying that. You're saying that."

"Oh come on! If you're going to disturb me because your work is more important than me getting the rest I need, you could at least acknowledge that."

Now I was incensed.

"Look, could you please just leave?", I asked with increasing fury.

"It's my room too! I have every right to be here."

"Well yes it is your room, but do you have to work right next to me when I'm trying to sleep? I'm really struggling here."

No good.

So much for asking for what I need. How could this woman be so insensitive to another person's needs? I was furious. She was determined to do what she wanted regardless of how it affected me, and wouldn't even acknowledge that. For all I knew, perhaps her work was saving the building from imminent destruction... but I doubted it. I was livid. Instead of getting the rest I needed, I'd spent half of lunch time arguing with this woman who I just couldn't reason with. It felt like arguing with my mother. Eventually when lunch time was almost over anyway, I got up, and stormed out:

"I don't want to be around you; you've got a real 'F_ck-You' energy. I just don't want to be anywhere near you."

I was angry. Really angry. I could see that being unable to reason with an emotionally insensitive woman who always put her own needs first was just replaying the pattern with my mother that I grew up with; but how was I going to break it? Normally I'd try to fix things by appologising, trying to talk to them, and working to smooth things over. Play the nice guy. But it never seemed to work; I'd just end up giving away even more of my power, and Bertha clearly wasn't in the mood for compromise.

Cranky as all hell, I went down to the main hall and did some stomping, threw some tantrums, and bashed some defenceless pillows in an effort to get it out of my system. But I was still angry. Every time I saw Bertha, it reminded me of how little she seemed to care. I'd see her showing love and grace to other people, but cold indifference towards me. It really pissed me off. I tried not to think about it, but the unpleasant thoughts and feelings kept coming back. "How can someone be so insensitive?" It was pushing my buttons, big time. I wanted her to suffer, like she'd made me suffer. Now in addition to being exhausted, I was suffering inside because I felt so angry.

Later in the afternoon, I found myself chatting to Caroline, a drop-dead gorgeous young woman with a pretty face, cheeky smile, long brown hair, tall and slim, with subtle female curves in all the right places. She was a Gestalt therapist who had done a lot of deep inner healing work and had got to the point where she was in an almost constant state of bliss. The weather was warm and Caroline wandered around totally naked and blissed-out pretty much the whole time. So when I bumped into Caroline in her natural state, I asked her what her secret was.

"It's love", she said in a starry-eyed, spacious kind of way. "Everything is about love. I send people love, no matter what. Love love love."

Maybe Caroline was onto something.

Later that evening I was back in the room when Bertha stormed in and grabbed her sheets and blankets. "I can't stand being around you", she cried, "I'm sleeping somewhere else tonight! Tomorrow night, you can move."

She was angry. Angry women freak me out. But I didn't want to keep replaying my mother-pattern of giving in to an angry woman just because I was afraid of conflict. And I didn't want to stay feeling angry myself, either.

"I'm sending you some love", I said.

"I don't want you're love!", Bertha shrieked back

"Well I'm sending it anyway!", I replied as she slammed the door on her way out.

Oh well, at least she wasn't in my face any more. Over the next few days, those feelings of anger kept coming up in me from time to time. Each time, I'd consciously think "I'm sending you some love.", occasionally along with "You sure as hell need it!"

I'd had a lifetime of repressing my anger, and I knew that wasn't the solution. Anger had empowered me to speak up for myself and ask for what I needed; but if I was to hang onto it, the only person who really suffered was me. No doubt Bertha had her own reasons for being so easily triggered by a man who just needed his space from her, and I probably pushed her buttons just like she pushed mine. I never really found out. For the rest of the course, she ignored me. She never came back, and she didn't say goodbye to me or give me a farewell hug like everyone else on the last day. But I was able to sleep better at night, and to rest during lunch time. I was able to ask for what I wanted, survive conflict, and even end up getting what I really needed.

So when uncomfortable feelings of anger at someone who has done you wrong come up, firstly stand up for yourself. And then if the feelings persist, just do what I do: visualise blissed-out naked Caroline, remember her wisdom... and share the love.

Share The Love is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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1. Path of Love

I went to Path of Love hoping that it would help me deal with a constant feeling of mild anxiety that I was experiencing. Whenever I wasn't engrossed in some activity, I felt anxious and I just couldn't seem to shake it.

David Guetta's "When Love Takes Over" (Featuring Kelly Rowland) always reminds me of my Path of Love Experience. Play it as you read along:

There were some obvious contributing factors: I had been ill with Chronic Fatigue for over two years, and although I was gradually recovering, my limited energy and feeling constantly unwell for such a long time was a constant source of frustration. I was also lacking direction generally: it had been about six years since I'd had a full-time job, and I was unsure how to find a new vocation earning money doing something that I loved again, especially with the added burden of illness. I'd been working on several writing projects for years, and was having difficulty committing my limited energy to any one thing sufficiently to bring it to fruition. I was afraid of failure and the feelings of shame and embarrassment it creates for me.

My 42^nd Birthday was also coming up, and I had been single for several years with no relationship on the horizon. That alone was depressing enough. I had been studying acting since the beginning of the year to help unlock my suppressed emotions, but didn't particularly want to be an actor. I couldn't see how I could take an acting job anyway given that I never know whether I'll be well enough to turn up to anything on any given day. I missed so many classes due to illness it's ridiculous. Plus the feedback I was getting from the teachers in class suggested I was much too emotionally constrained; which was the reason I was there in the first place.

I heard about Path of Love from a couple of different healing and counselling centres that I visited while doing other courses aimed at unbottling the various emotions that I've learned to push down so well. Anger in particular is one emotion that I pushed down so effectively that I rarely even felt it. I also had a growing awareness that without the personal defense afforded by a functional ability to express anger, I was likely to be left feeling anxious whenever I was under threat.

I also wanted more love in my life. Love is another effective antidote against anxiety, and I wanted to be better able to both express and receive more love. When I asked a friend who had done Path of Love what they got out of it, she said "It was great. I got to this really blissful state." I thought, "Wow... I could use some of that!".

For me, the best thing about Path of Love was the emotional healing that occurred. The 7-day process was conducted largely in silence, with a group of about 25 other participants and an equal number of support staff. We only spoke during sharing exercises to release emotions; the rest of the process was conducted in silence to allow us to work internally by ourselves. And release emotions we did! Over the course of the process I felt, expressed and released anger, sadness, rage, fear, shame, excitement, love, joy, and peace. I dealt with lots of shame and anger that I suspected had been lurking in my psyche for a long time. I was really able to let go and trust the process, feeling loved and supported the whole time. To be able to expose the deepest darkest blackest emotional areas of my life, and to only feel loving acceptance in return from the support staff and other participants was tremendously cathartic. The process was similar in some respects to what I had experienced at Passionately Alive, but longer, deeper, and more intense; and hence more healing and impactful.

I was concerned about how well I would cope with such an intense process given my relatively limited energy, and was tremendously relieved to find that I could participate fully in all the activities with only the exception of one evening when I went to bed early with a headache. Resting in bed every lunch time for about an hour helped get me through, and I didn't suffer much from my usual insomnia so I could get a decent night's sleep most of the time.

My Path of Love was held at a beautiful and comfortable retreat centre in the Hunter Valley, not far from Sydney. Knowing I was likely to be exhausted afterwards, I booked a couple of nights at the Youth Hostel there before driving home. I'd stayed at the hostel before, and knew it was nice and quiet during the day when all the backpackers go out on winery tours. I took my guitar and thought I'd spend some time playing and reflecting on whatever I got from the retreat process. The first evening immediately after Path of Love I turned up to the kitchen in the youth hostel to cook my evening meal, to find it full of women.

In fact I was the only male guest in the hostel that night, with twenty or more women. “We're here for a hen's weekend”, they said. “I suppose you want to use the kitchen. Well sorry, but we've taken over. But don't worry, we'll feed you!”. And so they did... I was getting more love coming my way already.

The next day I was completely wiped out with exhaustion and barely got out of bed. Just outside my room was a little green bird who kept tapping on the window. Give that I just wanted to sleep, this became very annoying and my attempts to scare the bird away were ineffective. After several hours of tap-tap-tap at the window, I lept out of bed in rage and thumped the window so hard that it smashed. As the broken glass tinkled down onto the floor to my surprise I thought “Wow, I've really got in touch with some anger. I've never smashed anything in anger before!”. Rather than feeling foolish and ashamed, I felt proud. Well, I did feel a little foolish telling the hostel staff about the bird and the broken window, but I fessed up, took responsibility for it and said I'd pay for the damage. Path of Love wasn't exactly cheap, and I figured I could just factor the cost of the broken window into the total cost.

All the heavy duty emotional healing and emotional expression work that I'd been doing over the past few years helped me to be in a great position to get the most out of Path of Love. There is no doubt in my mind that learning to unlock the negative emotions that we bottle up is the key to experiencing more love, joy, peace, happiness, fulfillment and aliveness; and less anxiety, stress and depression.

Finding and hanging out with a group of like-minded people through Path of Love has been absolutely priceless and allowed me to feel much more accepting of myself and other people. We are all fundamentally driven by emotions and neglect them at our peril. Path of Love was the next logical step in my own journey of emotional healing and reversing years of emotional repression that go back several generations.

Prior to Path of Love I had been afraid of really committing my limited energy to completing any of the projects I had been working on for fear of failure. Since returning, things have been very different. I immediately threw myself into rebuilding my blog with better software that would allow me to publish my writing more easily, and committed to writing articles containing the ideas that I want to publish. I decided to revamp one of the books I had been working on, and finish a major structural edit on another that I had been putting off for two years. I also decided that if my insomnia continued, I would use the time I previously spent in bed feeling frustrated and unable to sleep writing content for my website or working on one of my books instead. Since then, the insomnia has settled down somewhat.

It's a couple of months now since I returned from Path of Love, and while I've had many ups and downs since then, I recognize that this is part of what it means to feel truly alive. I feel so much less anxious about whether I will succeed or fail, and a greater sense of determination to get my stories and ideas out to other people who will benefit. Since returning I've done several public speaking and storytelling workshops to improve my communication skills, and am now learning everything I can about marketing so I can get my message out to help other people.

Although my physical symptoms of fatigue continue to improve only very gradually, I feel much less anxious and bothered by them. I made a decision about two months before Path of Love that I was physically well enough now to get on with my dream of being a writer and telling my story to help inspire and heal other people. But at the time I felt overwhelmed by everything I needed to do to make that dream a reality, and was paralyzed by fear. Now I feel like I have a new lease on life and feel excited that I'm taking the next step towards my dream on a daily basis.

Path of Love is gradually spreading across the globe. It's an amazing group of people working on spreading unconditional love and acceptance, even of the darkest part of ourselves. That in itself is a healing process. If you're feeling lost, anxious, depressed, uncertain, have lost your way or just want more love in your life, I highly recommend doing the Path of Love.

Path of Love is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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1. Share The Love

See larger image The Dance of Fear: Rising Above Anxiety, Fear, and Shame to Be Your Best and Bravest Self (Paperback) By (author) Harriet Lerner The main thing I got from this book is that fear and anxiety aren't just individual problems; they totally affect the way we relate with each other. Anxiety is contagious and gets passed around between us whenever we interact with anxious people. Families, companies, organisations, churches, countries and social groups of all kinds can become infected with anxiety that affects everyone in the group. When a social system becomes fear-based or shame-based, everyone in it suffers. Since anxiety causes suffering, we naturally want to escape. One way of escaping is to dump our anxiety on someone else. Being a sensitive person, I've always been susceptible to having other people's anxiety dumped on me, but it's only now that I'm learning to recognise when this is happening. This book helped me identify such a situation recently when I volunteered to lead a public speaking training course run by my Toastmaster's club. I had run it successfully several times before and we always got great feedback from the participants on how valuable it was. But this time I wanted to make it even better by talking more about how anxiety works physiologically, and throwing in some exercises to help deal with fear right up front. Two of the big things that people are afraid of when learning public speaking are forgetting what they wanted to say, and looking foolish. My own experience was that when I first joined Toastmasters, I was trying so hard to be perfect that I wasn't connected with the audience. My perfectionism and fear of what other people think took over. I so worried about getting it wrong that when I got up to speak, my anxiety took me right out of the moment. My focus was on me, rather than my audience. It wasn't until a club meeting one night where I actually did get it wrong and forgot what I wanted to say, that I was able to get past this and be more authentic, more present, and a much better speaker. Actors face the same problem whenever they feel self-conscious, and it makes for terribly fake acting. So I decided to use some activities from my acting class which involve taking a risk, looking foolish and then being rewarded for it. I knew that I would be taking a bit of a risk by including this activity in the agenda, but I felt it would make the course even more valuable for the participants. While preparing the agenda I discovered that my assistant would be the woman who taught me public speaking on this very same course three years ago when I did it. I was aware that she might not be entirely comfortable with what I wanted to do; she's been involved in Toastmasters for many years, and even runs a business teaching communication skills. She has helped and encouraged me a lot, is a model Toastmaster and knows a lot more about public speaking than I do. But I fear her judgements. Toastmaster's philosophy is that if you teach people public speaking skills and get them to practise in a safe, supportive environment, their anxiety dissipates gradually over time and their self-confidence builds naturally. While this is true to some extent, I see a lot of experienced speakers in the organisation who either still look very scared when they speak, or appear very aloof; despite all the skills they have. And I find them hard to listen to. I look at things the other way: deal with the anxiety first, be authentic from the start instead of trying to cover up our inadequacies with a bunch of techniques, and then learn skills to enhance the delivery of our message. But start off by being real and, shudder, even vulnerable. In the week preparing for the course, I considered whether to take the risk of using something experimental in a Toastmasters course. But I realised that I was really just trying to avoid either feeling insecure in front of my assistant, or the way I would feel if I got criticism instead of encouragement. That would certainly push my buttons and expose the insecurities I inherited from my quick-to-criticise mother. I wanted to create a safe place for people to learn by experimenting without being punished for it, and not consider anything a “failure” when it's really all just a learning experience. If I was to walk my talk, I could hardly baulk at taking a risk with the course content while preaching to my students how they needed to be prepared to take risks if they wanted to learn to be powerful, authentic public speakers. So I took the risk, had my students deliberately forget what they wanted to say, then jump around like a monkey (or a Chihuahua... their choice!), and be rewarded for all their foolishness and willingness to have a go. I recommended the best books I knew about the importance of connecting with people emotionally (Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman) and being in-the-moment (The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle), as these are key attributes of powerful public speakers. After the first of the two days, my assistant told me “I was mortified with what you taught them. All that talk about fear was very negative. If you teach them the skills, that all deals with itself. Having them acting like monkeys was ridiculous. And those weren't Toastmasters books you recommended. We don't use that material.”. She was extremely negative and critical. I felt very discouraged. I thought the first day of the course had gone down pretty well, and the participants certainly all seemed to get a lot out of it; although I wouldn't know for sure until the course evaluations were done. But that wouldn't be until the end of the second day, two weekends later. Until then, I'd just have to trust that I'd done the right thing; and ended up losing quite a bit of sleep worrying about it. And it got worse: While preparing the agenda for the second day of the course, I got emails saying that my assistant had reported what had happened to the club committee, and they were very concerned. They wanted to make sure that I stuck to a fixed agenda, and used the standard course evaluation form to gather participant's feedback. Ugh. This didn't feel good for me at all. But the agenda mandated by the committee wouldn't work, because it was based on a different number of people, and I still needed to include the teaching material that we hadn't yet covered. So I nervously rang my assistant and said “Look, I sense a lot of anxiety coming my way from you over this.” “Yes”, she replied, “I do feel very anxious about it. I really felt uncomfortable when you had them jumping around all over the place, and not following what we normally do. I didn't like it at all.” I realised that I had triggered my assistant's anxiety, and it was now coming my way. Perhaps her use of the skills has allowed her to hide her anxiety instead of really dealing with it, and me saying that it's better to deal with it up front was too confronting. I couldn't imagine her jumping around like a monkey; she'd be too worried about what other people thought. It's just not something she'd do. Maybe there was a little fear of change in there too. With the issue of her anxiety out in the open, I could relax a bit and prepare the agenda for the second day of the course without taking so much anxiety on board myself. We both ended up feeling a lot better after this conversation. When the course evaluations were done, the feedback was extremely positive. One of the participants even said that she specifically appreciated the extra things that I had included in the first day of the course, which she could see most other presenters would not have been able to do. She was grateful for the very exercises that had made my assistant so uncomfortable, and caused me to question myself. My intuition had been accurate, and the risk I took paid off. It made for a rather uncomfortable couple of weeks, and caused me to question whether Toastmasters is really the right environment for what I want to do. Our fears aren't always easily dismissed; our fear that other people won't like what we do may be well-founded. But the risk of making someone else uncomfortable isn't a good reason to cop-out of doing something. For a while there I was really doubting myself; I was prepared to deal with the anxiety of the course participants, but I wasn't expecting to have to deal with anxiety from my assistant. Ultimately I learned to trust myself better and go with my intuition. I would not have had this lesson had I not taken the risk, and dealt with the resulting fallout. Anyway, back to the book which helped me piece this puzzle of anxiety all together. I think women will probably find it more helpful than men; some of the examples are a bit female-oriented. Still, I got a lot out of it. I haven't come across any really good books on fear and anxiety written by men; they all seem to be by women. Perhaps us guys are too scared of dropping the male bravado to write a book on fear. If fear plays too big a role in your life, I still recommend you deal with it up front rather than hoping that it'll just go away in due course. This book is an easy read, and a step in the right direction. List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $6.98 In Stock Used from: $1.66 In Stock Release date May 3, 2005.

The Dance of Fear by Harriet Lerner is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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See larger image Into the Wild (DVD) Director: Sean Penn Starring: Emile Hirsch, Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt Rating: R (Restricted) Spoiler Warning: This review gives away the ending. If you don't want to know what happens, stop reading now! Listen to Eddie Vedder's cover of Hard Sun written by Gordon Peterson from the Into The Wild Soundtrack as you read along: I was profoundly moved by this film telling the true story of Christopher McCandless's journey of self-discovery into the Alaskan wilderness. Directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless, this film hit me hard and I found it hugely cathartic. Despite a packed cinema, it was as though there was just me and this film connected to each other; I cried almost the whole way through. Part of the reason I connected with it so strongly was that I first saw it while on a journey into the wild of my own: a solo 2,500km motorcycle road-trip of self-discovery from my home town of Sydney to Byron Bay where I saw the film, and beyond. There are also many parallels between Christopher's emotionally disconnected family, and my own. The scenes depicting the ongoing conflict between his parents transported me straight back to my own childhood and the sense of emotional disconnection between Christopher and his father mirrored that between me and my father. Every character in the film is flawed in some way, and I found myself relating deeply to the pain in each and every one. I was so moved that as soon as I got back to Sydney two weeks later I saw it again, this time in a virtually empty 11am mid-week session at Fox Studios where I could fully immerse myself in it without distractions. I also read the book by Jon Krakauer, borrowed the soundtrack by Eddie Vedder from the library, and even learned to play the main song Hard Sun by Gordon Peterson on my guitar; although I do like Eddie Vedder's version better. I'd never felt so connected to a film before. So what's it all about? Having completed the obligatory college degree demanded by his overbearing father, Christopher leaves home and takes to the road. His planned destination is the Alaskan wilderness, and on the way he travels across the USA meeting various different people as he prepares for the final leg of his great adventure. Each person he meets is profoundly affected by their interaction with him. It is as if his unspoken pain, which he keeps barely hidden beneath layers of thoughtful philosophy, allows other people to release their own pain and grieve. There's the hippy couple with a missing son of their own, a talented young girl stuck in trailer nowhere, a playful European couple on the Colorada river, a dodgy grain harvester operator and part-time illegal pay-TV installer, and an ex-army veteran whose life has contracted since the death of his wife and only child many years before. Each of these people form a profound but somewhat one-sided connection with McCandless. He motivates and inspires them to move on in their lives through the pragmatic manner in which he pursues his own adventure. Yet at the same time, he's relatively unaffected emotionally in return. He dismisses questions about his family and whether they know where he is. He doesn't seem to care; in fact, he takes deliberate steps to stop them finding where he is. When veteran Ron asks him tearfully if he can become his adoptive grandfather, Christopher replies “Let's talk about this when I get back from Alaska. Is that OK, Ron?” Clearly it's not. Christopher has been so wounded that he's given up on finding happiness in connection with other people, and now finds greater solace in the wild. The impact of Christopher's disappearance on his family is enormous. He is either naively unaware or simply indifferent to the suffering that he causes them, perhaps considering it justified by his parents' lies and hypocrisy, and the pain that the conflict in their relationship has caused him. I could relate strongly to his feelings of ambivalence towards his parents. His rejection and unwillingness to forgive them is particularly extreme. Much of the movie is narrated by the voice of his sister with whom he had a close and loving relationship; he had no reason to hurt her, and it's clear that she is devastated by his desertion. While she can understand him not wanting to contact his parents, the fact that he doesn't contact her clearly hurts. As I sensed the pain in her narrative voice, I thought “Gee, I wish I had a sister who loved me like that”. Ironically, I do have a sister; two in fact, and while they would most probably be equally devastated if I were to disappear I can't say that I really feel it because of the emotionally distant way that we all relate to each other. Christopher pursues his ultimate adventure with naïve recklessness. It leads him into the Alaskan wilderness, where he struggles to find food to feed himself. Hunting turns out to be harder than he expected. When he decides to leave because the winter is over, he finds that the spring thaw has caused the small stream he crossed on the way in to swell into an enormous uncrossable river. He is now trapped in the wild, and has run out of food. The cover of the book makes no secret of the ending to the story, nor did any of the movie reviews; but I'd heard of the film only in passing and hadn't read the reviews before seeing it. So it came as a complete shock to me when I realized that Christopher McCandless wasn't going to make it out of the Alaskan wilderness alive. He'd eaten the poisonous berries that looked similar to the edible ones in his book, and was now too weak to feed himself, or escape. This troubled character who I'd well and truly bonded with, was starving to death. The final scene shows Christopher's dying thoughts of his life flashing before his eyes, interspersed with the famed white light that dead people are supposed to see as their brain shuts down. As the credits rolled, more tears rolled down my face and I was genuinely stunned. That may have been the end of the movie, but it's not the whole end of the story. The book which inspired the film tells the story of how journalist Jon Krakauer reconstructed Christopher's final epic journey by tracking down and interviewing many of the people he met on the way to Alaska. The final chapter in veteran Ron's story is particularly telling. We know from the film that when his wife and only son were killed by a drunk driver many years before, Ron had turned to alcohol to ease his pain. Eventually he dug his way out of that hole, and the experience of losing his family didn't cause him to lose his faith in God... In fact, he found solace in the church. But the part of the story that the movie doesn't tell is that for several months after Christopher left Ron to head to Alaska, Ron would visit Christopher's old desert camping site in the hope of meeting him again. When news finally gets back to Ron that Christopher has died in the Alaskan wilderness, he is so devastated that he recants his faith, refusing to believe any longer in a God who would let a kid like Christopher die out in the wilderness. The death of his own family didn't even affect him this much. Into The Wild is now definitely one of my all time top 5 favorite films, if not my very favorite. I had never had such an emotional reaction to a film before, and it still gets me each time I see it. It's one of the few films that I actually own on DVD, and I highly recommend it. List Price: $8.99 USD New From: $3.63 In Stock Used from: $2.24 In Stock Release date March 4, 2008.

Into The Wild is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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See larger image Escaping Toxic Guilt: Five Proven Steps to Free Yourself from Guilt for Good! (Paperback) By (author) Susan Carrell Five Proven Steps to Free Yourself from Guilt for Good! I came across this book while scouring the library shelves for something on topic of dealing with shame. Guilt and shame are close relatives. This book defines guilt as feeling bad about something you've done, and shame as feeling bad about who you are. Hmm... I could relate to that. Firstly the book distinguishes between good guilt, which reminds us when we've violated one of our own personal values and prompts us to make amends or to act differently next time; and bad guilt, where somebody else's agenda is at work causing us to suffer unnecessarily or to fall under their controlling influence. In the second section, the author outlines some common guilt-inducing situations, like relationship break-ups, divorces, and dramas over where we will have Christmas or Thanksgiving this year. Then once you've identified your guilt as unhelpful and recognized the scenario that causes it, the third section outlines a five-step plan for dealing with toxic guilt by speaking your truth, setting boundaries, bracing for resistance from others, going with the new flow, and maintaining boundaries. I found this book a really interesting read. Toxic guilt isn't something I'm dealing with right now, but I still found the book had some really great points to make about setting boundaries with other people. If you spend more of your time feeling guilty than you'd like, I recommend giving this book a spin. Escaping Toxic Guilt is available online in Australia at SeekBooks. List Price: $15.95 USD New From: $8.09 In Stock Used from: $3.20 In Stock

Escaping Toxic Guilt by Susan Carrell is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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I recognize shame in myself as the fear of what other people think about me. While many people feel shameful about a specific event that has happened to them or something they've done in the past, for me it's more a general fear of what other people are thinking based on my own feelings of unworthiness. It makes me feel self-conscious, restricts my movements and actions, leaving me feeling trapped. It's common for many people to feel a sense of shame about themselves. At an anger management workshop I recently attended, I felt free to dance uninhibitedly at the end while I noticed the girl next to me being much more constricted. Healing shame is a process, and she was slowly releasing her inhibitions as she was making progress. Shame is still one of my main areas of frustration with myself, but I have come a long way when it comes to healing my own shame and being free to be myself.

I think I inherited most of my shame from my mother. She seems most worried about what other people think of her when it comes to displaying emotions. I have often heard her say “There's no point worrying about what other people think”; yet she has always held back on expressing emotions directly. While these may be contradictory positions, I too find that my attitude to my own shame can be polar opposites at times: on the one hand, I'm thinking “Who cares what other people think? That's just a self-imposed limitation I'd rather be free of” and on the other, I can feel so self-conscious that I don't act the way I would like. On the dance floor I hold back from trying anything new for fear of what other people would think. Attitudes like these make learning anything new very slow progress because we're always constrained to what we think is socially acceptable and reluctant to risk trying anything new or daring because we're avoiding failure that might bring our shame and feelings of unworthiness to the surface.

It's one think to know where shame comes from, but it's quite another to know what to do to heal it. Shame and self-esteem are inversely related; shame cuts me to the core because it tells me, incorrectly, that I am unworthy. It limits my freedom to be myself and to interact with people in the way I would like.

The “cure” for shame, as far as I can tell, is to share the shame with other people. This gives them the opportunity to be cured of their own shame, and helps us to see that the things we feel shameful about don't actually bother other people anywhere near as much as we thought. Sure, some people will be judgmental; after all, that's probably what caused the shame to develop in the first place. But judgmental people only act they way they do to avoid their own feelings of unworthiness; their harsh judgments aren't actually about us at all, they're about them. Most self-aware people will recognize their own shame in what we share, and be able to empathize.

So, if you suffer from shame too, feel free to let me know your deepest, darkest, most shameful stuff; I promise to be accepting and non-judgmental. All I ask in return is that you do the same for me.

Shame is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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One of the rules that had to be obeyed when I was growing up was: Don't run in the house, because you might break something. Walk instead. Stay calm. Don't get too excited. Getting excited might cause you to hurt yourself, something or someone else. It also seemed to irritate the grown-ups; it seemed that grown-ups just weren't supposed to get excited.

Not when they were happy anyway. The only time grown-ups seemed to get excited was when they were angry; and then there seemed to no limits to how excited they could get. The rest of the time they seemed to be holding their excitement inside; but when they were really angry, they really let loose. I found that terrifying. I got in real trouble when I acted like that, but grown-ups were allowed different rules to me. And so I learned that I wasn't allowed to get excited no matter how I actually felt.

The problem with not being allowed to get excited is that it suppresses joy, and makes life much less fun. And the problem with only getting excited when we're really angry is that it's frightening for other people. In addition to learning not to get excited, I learned not to get angry either because I could see how destructive anger could be. But in doing so, I made the same mistake my father did of suppressing it rather than expressing it; which is what led to his explosions that I found so terrifying in the first place. I very rarely feel or express my anger. I often feel frustrated, and have the subtle urge to break something though: car windows, shop fronts, my own TV set; and that's before I've even seen what's on it. I hold back though, figuring that the owners of said cars, shops and TVs aren't going to share in my catharsis. I can't get away with being a teenage hoodlum, but I'd still like to break out and break something sometimes.

With this in mind, my life coach recently assigned me the task of buying a set of cheap crockery from K-mart, and smashing the bejesus out of it. Even better, I thought, would be the left-over crockery from all the years of share accommodation that I had stashed down in my storeroom. I didn't need it; wasn't sure why I was even hanging onto it. It was just baggage from a bygone era. Smashing it would be a nice cathartic way of killing several birds with one stone: ditch some baggage, release some anger, and have some fun; all in the one hit.

So on a recent road trip, I loaded up the box of old crockery into the car along with my baseball bat. While driving back towards Sydney, I turned off the Hume Highway down a side street, which led to a dirt road into the forest. With nobody around except the occasional construction truck thundering down the road, I unleashed fury with my baseball bat onto some poor defenceless crockery, sending its fragments whizzing into the forest.

Most of the cups exploded nicely. My aim wasn't too good at first, but it got better with practise. One cup with the old Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children logo on it took several hits just to get it to fracture. Maybe it was specially reinforced. Eventually it too relented. The bowls were good fun, and the small plates had a nice balance of being sufficiently solid to take a nice hard blow, but small enough to really fly into smitherines on impact. The large plates were particularly satisfying, as it was virtually impossible to miss them even with a poor swing. And many of the resulting chunks were big enough to afford a second or even third hit.

Gradually I worked my way through the whole box, smashing every last piece into oblivion. When my swing was really accurate, it gave a really nice satisfying thud feeling, as powdered ceramic flew every which way, and the larger chunks hurtled skywards into the trees with a really neat whizzing sound. It felt great. Very cathartic.

By the end of the session, my baseball bat was looking rather worse for wear, I had a blister on my thumb, and I was feeling kinda tired. But it turns out that breaking things is really great fun. I highly recommend it. And if nothing else, I've really done some great work on improving my baseball swing.

Anger Management by Crockery is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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I often feel that my emotions are running my life. When it comes to happiness, joy, peace and love, that's fine by me; but when it's fear, sadness, anxiety, loneliness or depression, that's not so good. We like to think that we're in conscious control of our lives all the time, but the reality is that everything we do is driven by an emotion of one sort or another. We're constantly either seeking the pleasant emotions or avoiding the unpleasant ones. Our emotions exist in our subconscious, so we often aren't consciously aware of them until they pop up strongly enough to interrupt what we're doing and make their presence felt. But they still play their role whether we acknowledge it or not; and if we ignore them, they just get louder and stronger until we start paying attention.

Our society places a premium analytical thinking and often downplays the importance of emotions. We learn very little about the role of emotions in our lives at school or university; which is ironic considering that it's not our analytical thinking that is driving our behaviour: it's our emotions. If we really want to get a handle on running our lives more effectively, we need to deal with how we feel. As a guy growing up in a family where emotions weren't generally expressed directly but were often bottled up, I had lots of practice at pushing down how I felt for many years. Yet I always knew I had strong feelings; I just felt out of place in a family and society where they didn't seem to be recognised. A bit like a square peg in a round hole. Not surprisingly, when I did start to deal with some of the emotional pain I had experienced in life, it wasn't particularly pleasant. But it was either that, or suffer an awful loneliness, anxiety and depression. Emotions are the key binding force between people and being able to recognise and express them is essential for having really meaningful relationships. Empathy is the basis of all deep connections between us, and unless we know how to express how we feel, that's not going to work so well.

My 20-year career in engineering was great fun while it lasted, but none of the training or on-the-job experience dealt with the topic of emotions. So I figure I have some catch-up work to do. Many women I meet complain about their disillusionment with men who are “like robots” when it comes to their emotional availability: workaholics, perfectionists, pessimists; all working hard to avoid how they feel or just lacking the skills or practise at expressing it. I don't want to be one of them any more. Coming down with chronic fatigue 14 months ago also had a huge impact on me; one of its common symptoms is that feeling tired and sick all the time tends to magnify any unpleasant emotions; and it's the emotional and psychological toll that this takes more than the physical illness which causes me suffering.

With all this is mind, I recently drove 900 km from Sydney to Melbourne to attend Nicholas de Castella's Passionately Alive workshop on emotional mastery. I knew that a theoretical knowledge of emotions wasn't going to cut it; I had to actually experience how I really felt, pleasant or unpleasant, to release the bottled up emotional energy and get a better handle on dealing with my emotions. I had met Nicholas briefly once before, and from what I read in his Heart Thoughts newsletter, I could see that he was the real deal when it came to putting emotional intelligence into practise and could provide a safe environment for doing so. We also had a bit in common: being the “sensitive” one in families where this hadn't been validated, left-brained careers that ultimately became unfulfilling, and even the chronic fatigue thing. Nicholas seemed like a compassionate man, and I was pretty sure I'd be able to relate to what he had to say.

I knew I was tuned-in and ready for getting in touch with my emotions even before I arrived: A guy in the barber in Albury had suggested I take a back route to The Basin east of Melbourne, which took me past the turn-off to King Lake, a suburb devastated by recent bushfires with tragic loss of life and property. From far-off Sydney, the bushfires had been a media-frenzy far away, but I felt an immediate sense of heaviness as I drove through the burnt-out forest towards the workshop.

The workshop itself consisted of a 3½ day residential with a series of small group exercises and sharing in pairs. Each day built upon the previous one, as Nicholas shared his insights into the role of our emotions. We laughed, we cried, we danced, we sang, we got angry, we yelled and screamed, and we allowed ourselves to feel whatever we felt without being judged for it. It was all very cathartic. The process was intense, but I never felt anxious about what Nicholas was going to get us to do next. It was tremendously moving, and it was remarkable how close the group felt to each other due to the sharing that was going on and the respect we all showed for each other's journey through life. During a Breathwork session, I literally felt emotional energy buzzing in my body for the first time.

There's still a voice from the rational part of my brain that jumps in every now and then while doing any kind of emotional exercise to say that “this is ridiculous!”. Usually it sounds a lot like my mother. But I'm learning to not listen to it so much any more, go with my intuition and listen to my feelings instead. The emotion I struggle with the most is anxiety: it's not always giving me helpful clues and more often than not, it seems to be getting in the way. Shame gets in the way too, big time. Both stop me from being free to be myself, to do what I want and have the life I truly desire.

Before Passionately Alive, I was feeling pretty anxious about a lot of things: my career, my relationships, and what I was doing with my life generally. At the workshop, I got a lot of my buried feelings off my chest, met other people willing to work at mastering their emotions too, and learned some new tools for continuing to do so in the future. I feel more peaceful now. I had a dream one night shortly after where I was being attacked by a robber, and as I woke in a state of panic I felt the fear rush through my body and leave, rather than hanging around like it used to do. I still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes wondering “where is my life all heading?”, but I've got more of a sense that I'm on the right track, whatever that is.

I wish all my friends and family would do things like Passionately Alive, so that we can all have deeper more meaningful relationships. This is the stuff that makes life worth living. If you struggle to find peace in your life or would like to be handling your emotions better, I highly recommend Passionately Alive. One of the ironies my group recognised was that the people who probably needed this training the most were the least likely to recognise it. So if you've never had any sort of training or therapy on the topic of emotions, but you just find some areas of life aren't working as well as you'd like or you keep pushing other people away or pissing them off repeatedly, perhaps this is just what the doctor ordered for you too.

For more information on how you can get your emotions to work for rather than against you, check the Institute of Heart Intelligence website. If you register for Passionately Alive, please mention this website and my name to Nicholas, tell him I sent you.

Mastering Emotions at Passionately Alive is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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I was feeling depressed on Tuesday. I'd been struggling with Chronic Fatigue for over a year, and it was one of the bad days when I woke up feeling like I'd been run over by a bus that just kept backing up and having another go me it over and over. I'd also spent over a year writing and publishing an ebook which wasn't selling. I was having a bad day and felt lousy.

Australian society doesn't do a great job of encouraging us guys to express how we feel, especially when we're down. Our English stiff-upper-lip cultural heritage combined with the rugged blokey mentality tells us that if you're a guy and you cry, there's something wrong with you. Yet crying is our natural way of releasing emotions of sadness or loss. When you have a good cry, it might feel painful and embarrassing at the time, but you feel better afterwards. If we've spent a lifetime suppressing our sadness, we may actually need some practice crying in order to get back in touch with how we feel.

The best way I know to trigger a good cry is to watch Find My Family on Tuesday nights on Channel 7. This show is all about reuniting children that have been separated from their parents and adopted out many years ago. You're pretty much guaranteed that unless you're made of solid granite, this show will get your tear ducts flowing. The pain that the people on the show revisit as they describe the heartbreaking loss of being separated from their parents or children so many years ago, combined with the joy of being reunited makes it an emotional roller coaster to watch. We're guaranteed a happy ending and somehow the tears of joy at the end always leaves me feeling like I've had a good cry. I haven't personally experienced what it's like to be separated from a parent physically and adopted out, but somehow just watching and hearing their experiences triggers something in me that never fails to make me cry. And ironically, like on Tuesday, I always end up feeling better after a good cry; so I felt better afterwards.

If you're out of touch with your emotions and find you don't cry when you feel down or sad, give Find My Family a watch and get those tear ducts flowing!

Feeling Depressed? Try having a Good Cry is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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See larger image Whose Life is it Anyway? When to Stop Taking Care of Their Feelings & Start Taking Care of Your Own (Paperback) By (author) Nina W. Brown When to stop Taking Care of Their Feelings & Start Taking Care of Your Own. This is a great little book aimed at those of us who tend to take on other people's emotions a little more readily than we would like. It's a relatively short and easy read, covering topics relating to emotional boundaries, and how to avoid becoming enmeshed in or manipulated by other people and their emotional states. The early chapters deal with emotional susceptibility, avoiding taking responsibility for other people's feelings, and allowing other people to experience their own emotional states without negatively impacting on us. Later chapters deal with psychological and emotional strength, creativity, spirituality and improving relationships. There are lots of exercises in the book similar to those I was doing with my life coach at the time that I read it, so I skimmed over them... but they sounded pretty good and surely the book would have been more rewarding if I had done them. If you're a self-starter who doesn't need to be prodded to do your hard yards, you should get a lot out of these exercises. This book is like a short course on building self-esteem by enhancing emotional resilience. A key theme is that of balance, particularly when it comes to empathy. We want to be empathic, because understanding how others feel is the basis of all meaningful human relationships. But we don't want to get so enmeshed that other people's emotions adversely affect our own emotional state. Nor do we want our emotions to be so easily triggered by others that our own feelings can be used against us. True empathy draws a line where other people's feelings are understood, but not taken on board by us. I recommend this book to anyone who has difficulty saying “No”, or finds that their own moods seem to be at the mercy of the moods of other people. List Price: $16.95 USD Used from: $25.00 In Stock

Whose Life Is It Anyway? by Nina Brown is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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