A word has the ability to activate in you images, sensations, emotions, feelings, memories, behaviors, rules, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, judgments.
Each word bridges the gap between the story and what it is.
"What is Love?". Countless possibilities of answers can come to your mouth. How many different answers are you capable of saying to that question?
And to the question "What is a glass?", "What is Gaia?" and "What is Anger?"
Are you able to come up with more answers for 'Cup', 'Gaia' and 'Anger' than for 'Love'? Which word has more relevance to you? Which arouses more discomfort in you? Which is indifferent?
Love is Love. Glass is Glass. Gaia is Gaia. Anger is Anger. Anything different than that is story.
You don't relate to reality as it is. You relate to reality from stories.
The ability to create stories and meanings is innate in humans, just like breathing, walking, eating. Because it is an intrinsic ability, you don't even realize that you do it, or how you do it, unless you put focus/attention on it.
In everyday life, you forget that you are a storyteller and start to dress your stories as if they were your skin.
Stories are clothes. You can change them when you decide. But certain stories, when repeated over and over again, seem to be really true. They seem to make a symbiosis with you and become your skin.
When someone presents the possibility that there is something different possible from that story you have always worn, a wave of fear and horror goes up your spine.
"I have experienced my whole life that:
'feeling is bad, painful, negative, leads nowhere,'
'if I cry my parents will say: it's nothing, swallow your tears',
'if I express fear I am a coward, a wimp',
'if I am angry I can be like my father and hit someone',
'if I show too much joy I will be the envy',
How dare you say that there is anything different from this? These are not just stories. These are true facts, I lived through these things."
I know, it is scary to accept that there are other possibilities. It can feel crazy. You may have the feeling that your life up to that point has been a lie. It's okay. You can say to that horror running through your nerves "Hello fear. Welcome, I welcome you."
Take a deep breath.
One more time.
Allow the sensations that emerge in your body as you read these words to flow. Don't repress. Just breathe and be present with whatever emerges.
Now connect with your heart. Let's research the stories connected to anger, as an experiment.
Put your feet on the ground. Intentionally increase your anger a little. Something like 10%. Just observe.
ANGER. What does this word cause in you? What are the images? What are the rules? The feelings? What memories in flashes come to you? How have you experienced anger in other people throughout your life? How have you experienced anger in yourself?
Stay a moment in this place.
Begin to write down everything that comes to you. Phrases, words, images.
Aggression, violence, war, fights. Disagreement, baseness, complaining, irritation. Fear, crossed boundaries, abuse. And so on.
These are some of the stories you have about anger. (You can do this experiment with any other word you want to discover the attached stories you use.)
Action is taken from a conscious or unconscious decision (not deciding is also a decision) and the decision is the result of a story.
If all your life you have heard and experienced the story that feeling anger is bad, dangerous, disgusting, what decision do you take every moment that this energy appears in your body? Not to feel it, (probably this decision is not even conscious). From this decision what is your action? Probably anesthetize yourself, do anything to get rid of the anger. Implode or explode. Punch, run, write, cry, scream, eat, have sex, smoke, bite your nails, meditate, breathe, curse.
Anger, like any feeling, is an energy. It is not possible to get rid of energy, only to transform it. The fact of numbing it and pretending it is not there does not make it go away. It remains. In the body. Search on the internet about somatic diseases and you will see how much cancer and autoimmune diseases are caused from anger repression, especially in women.
But then what to do with this blessed energy? What else is possible?
Think about a knife. What determines whether a knife is used to kill someone or cut up a pineapple?
The knife? No. The purpose of the person using the knife? Yes.
The knife is a knife, just as anger is anger. What determines the way you use anger or a knife is the purpose.
The purpose determines the story, which determines the decision, which determines the action. But nobody taught you this in years of school. You didn't learn to distill the purpose behind your actions.
The people you witnessed in your childhood using their anger to rape, beat, curse, and assault, they didn't learn to use this energy consciously. The people you were present laughing while burning inside, or who swallowed years of violence and abuse, have not learned to use their anger either.
You have a chance to change your mind. You have a chance to experience other stories. You have the chance, here and now, to try on another outfit and see how it looks. What changes.
It is a journey. It involves learning to feel consciously and use the information from your feelings to navigate life. This may seem trivial, but it is not. It is a journey of initiation, which is painful, sometimes it feels like dying.
It takes courage to feel anger, sadness, fear and even joy and show that to others. It is scary because the whole world acts and says exactly the opposite: suppress your feelings.
Learning to feel is incredibly powerful. Your body was made to feel your feelings up to 100%. You won't need to feel them so loudly often. Great changes are possible when you learn to feel the low intensities of even 10%. With 10% conscious anger, for example, you are able to center yourself, be present, decide, have clarity, vitality, action.
It may sound simple, but it isn't, because it requires another scary thing that is contradictory to the stories you grew up with: to dare not to look good, to allow yourself to be imperfect, to make mistakes, not to be the standard or a cool person.
"To me anger was a negative thing. Whenever I thought or felt anger I saw my mother. I didn't want to be like my mother. By denying this anger in me I was denying my mother. I would do anything not to feel anger, therefore not to be my mother. I find out that I blocked for 40 years my strength, power, presence and my clarity"~ from a participant in the last Rage Club
Reading these words may even bring insights to your mind, but practical change only happens with experience in all your bodies.
For the vine to grow you need trellises. And to build the internal trellis on which consciousness can grow and apply itself requires practice plus distinctions. The good news is that there is a space designed for just that: Rage Club.
In the coming months I offer two possibilities for you to experience transformation from updating your stories about feelings. These are:
Rage Club in Portuguese- 5 meetings, starting March 29, Wenesdays, from 5h to 7h pm PT
Rage Club in English- 6 meetings, starting April 11th, Tuesdays, from 7 to 9:30 am CET timezone.
Rage Club in Portuguese- 4 meetings, starting May 8th, Mondays from 6:30 am to 9:00 pm BR
To register, text me here
Love and Rage,
Gabriela