Have you ever been so filled with rage that you don't know how you could ever express its fullness? You feel the rage bubbling up into all aspects of your physicality; shaking, clenching teeth, fists, and stamping feet? Do you wonder how you could be filled with so much emotion – questioning; 'what's wrong with me!?' Or letting the rage flow over into angry tears spilling down hot cheeks because: 'it's not okay to be angry.'

I have.

I remember the excruciation of not knowing how to express my anger until it comes out sideways; Destructive. Explosive. Volcanic. 

I grew up in an angry household, the energy palpable, penetrating my being. I decide to shut down my feelings at a young age and give my shadow, my gremlin, the job of feeling for me. He did a good job of masking my feelings – so much so that I forgot how to feel. Emotions build in my body, rage finds a crevice in my left lower sacrum to call home and nest, expanding over the years, difficult to extricate.

Two weeks ago, after the second week of rage club I experienced some intense unconscious rage: blowing up at my partner for his usual crimes, my back pain flaring with the anger followed by myself bursting with anger because my back pain was flaring – a vicious cycle. I broke a wooden spoon in the kitchen flying into a rage and hitting another object with it – it wasn't my hand that hurt this time... The following day I got so caught up in emotion that I flew from rage to blubbering tears back to rage, my partner holding space for my eruption. 

Then I come to realise that this could be my experience of the liquid state – that place of transformation – the caterpillar morphing into butterfly – a radical space where reality shifts into something different. A place of utter chaos, existential breakdown, out-of-control meltdown. Yes. This was it. Change cannot happen without it. The breaking down of my structures of existence in order to make way for the reformation of new perspectives, a new way of being. This realisation helped my experience a lot – feeling like the feeling of going insane was completely natural and part of this process. 

Now as I come to navigate the liquid state I recognise more and more what is happening and wonder 'what on earth is going on' less and less. I think back to two years ago when all I seemed to do with my left big toe was stub it – even waking me up from my sleep one time – and realise that yes that was a big time of growth and transformation. 

This time round as I discover that there is a difference between an authentic liquid state with the purpose of change, evolution and becoming more conscious, and a liquid state with no purpose i.e. a gremlin feeding ground, I come to the next phase of my experimentation: distinguishing the purpose of my liquid state. 

This weekend I felt a shift – a sliding of my being into a new form, with new thoughtware. Last week I set up an experiment for myself: to clean up after myself consistently and immediately, to not complain when others do not clean up after themselves, and to clean up after others. Ambitious, much? I failed to adhere to the rules of my own experiment. And in noticing myself throughout the week I was able to reach a point of more acceptance for where I am at, myself and for others. This week, I will attempt the same experiment and see what happens differently.

It is thanks to the existence of rage club, thanks to Tristan and Aralyn as spaceholders and all others present in the space with me that these shifts and my transformation is taking place. And I thank myself for choosing to commit to the entirety of the course – knowing that there is something beneficial here for me... 

...and as I am writing this, a recent realisation crystallises – my newfound clarity through changing my relationship to anger, using my conscious rage work is allowing me to write so much faster than before. I could have spent hours in confusion and doubt about what to say, rewriting and editing many times. Now, the words flow with ease and precision, a feeling of freedom elates. 

I look forward to continuing my commitment to anger work with Rage Club 2.0 and 3x3x3 and surfing the liquid state from expansion as opposed to defence.