“The more the angrier,” smiles Julia Neumann as she welcomes participants to her workshop. The Nelson woman has been working with the topic of anger for about 10 years.
The premise of conscious anger is that you are aware of it and can acknowledge it in a healthy way, rather than supressing or immediately reacting to it.
“I care about humans returning to their humanness,” she explains. “I want human hearts to thrive and inform life.”
Julia held a free workshop in Motueka on Friday, following on from another event in Nelson, which gave the 15 participants the opportunity to discuss anger – where it sits in our bodies, what triggers it, and how to harness it.
Born in Germany, and formerly a lawyer, Julia explains how as a child she longed for a block of wood and an axe to expend her anger.
“My name in Julia Neumann,” she greets the group, “and I’ve been angry for most of my life.”
Together with Alice Belz, Julia has created a workbook entitled “Her Conscious Anger” – aimed primarily at women because of the societal messaging around emotions; namely that anger is okay for men, but sadness is not. The opposite message pervades for women, she believes.
“It comes in a different shape.”
Like the book, her workshops are aimed at women, but everyone is welcome in the space. The participants expressed that they were drawn to attend out of a sense of curiosity, a search for clarity, and a desire to learn how to use anger without it using them.
“How to tickle it out and use it as fuel” was how one person worded it. Julia speaks of anger being one of the four base emotions, alongside sadness, fear and joy, with all other feelings mixing from these “like primary colours”.
There is a long-standing perception that anger is bad, she says, but she wants her workshop participants to learn how to look at things a little differently.
“Anger is neutral energy and information that can serve you,” she explains.
For further information, visit www.radicallyalivewomen.com
