Understanding and dealing with Anger is difficult!
Watch this unscripted intimate unfolding between me and Authenticity and Conscious Relationship Expert Chiara Gizzi, and their experiences and insights with this difficult emotion:
I was at a rebirthing/breathwork workshop on the weekend, and we did an exercise called Primal Law. Our Primal Law is our most negative belief about ourself. I started out with the usual list of negative thoughts about myself that I’ve come up with in workshops a million times before:
No Wonder We Feel So Anxious
But the one that really resonated with me was something somebody else came up with:
Well, no wonder I feel so anxious with a Primal Law like that. The next step was to convert the Primal Law into an Eternal Law that represents the truth of our existence; even though it seems like a lie at first, given what we’ve been telling ourselves for so long.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with anger lately; an emotion I used to be uncomfortable with. Not any more! Just for fun, here’s an angry monologue: the “you can’t handle the truth” Courtroom scene from “A Few Good Men” with me reading Colonel Jessup:
There are a lot of happy people in the world today. Sure, we all have difficulties now and then, but for the most part we live at a time when we have more opportunity, greater personal safety and a longer life expectancy than any time in history. So many of us have the potential to be quite happy.
Learn To Turn This…
This is a big problem for advertisers and companies marketing products at us that we don’t really need. Most advertising targets areas of dissatisfaction in our lives, suggesting that we fill the void or distract ourselves from our pain by purchasing products of little intrinsic value. The happier we are, the harder advertisers have to work to convince us that we need that new car, can of cola, or aftershave in order to attract the people we want into our lives. And major pharmaceutical manufacturers would go out of business if we all felt happy and didn’t need to rely on the latest round of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications. Wealthy shareholders are suffering as a result.
To help address these problems, here are my tips on How to be Unhappy:
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 … Continue reading…
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. … Continue reading…
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 … Continue reading…
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 … Continue reading…
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 … Continue reading…
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 as well as I would have liked. 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 … Continue reading…