I’d like to share a personal experience that is related to my healing my denied anger and rage and issues and the need to move it in private, in the form you feel you need to.

In early 1997, I began working with R.U.O.W and I also met a young woman named Jen that also began working with R.U.O.W. We began helping each other work on healing our emotions and issues and on healing my inner and later, my outer child. With Jen’s help, I began doing regressions during which I had deep emotional and physical releases but it wasn’t until the fall of 1997 that I began working on healing my anger and rage.

I had been working on my issues with my mother and the bullies at school and I was feeling a lot of pent-up anger and rage building up in me, so much so, that I felt like I was going to explode and was doing so at Jen, who I perceived to be the problem. Jen was feeling my denied anger and rage and suggested that I just go and release it by smashing a pumpkin. I thought her crazy for suggesting that, but I also trusted her guidance. Being late autumn, I went to the local market and picked up one of the bigger pumpkins that was about 18 inches (45 cm) high and maybe 20 inches (50 cm) wide.

I took the pumpkin and set it in the vegetable garden that I had at the back of my property and then I went and got my baseball bat. I returned to the pumpkin and rested the end of the bat on the top of pumpkin thinking this is silly and stupid as I don't have any anger. Jen had told me to think of all the times when I was angry but couldn't express it. I flashed back to grade school and how the kids used to pick on me and beat me up right from day one. I flashed to my mother and wanting to hit her. I flashed to other times of being threatened and harassed. My mind began to race. I could feel my anger beginning to rise and I just kept adding fuel to the fire. I picked up the bat and had it poised over my right shoulder. The thoughts and feelings of anger and rage were now flashing through me like lightening and then suddenly I felt my anger and rage ready to lash out and I let it go. I swung the bat with all the force I had within me.

The first strike shattered the pumpkin into a million pieces and buried the bat deep into the garden soil. I couldn't believe it! All that was left of the pumpkin was a piece around the stalk, a little bigger that the size of a coffee cup. The rest had exploded in an orange pulp that encircled me in a good fifteen foot (five meter) radius. My shoes were covered in pumpkin pulp as were the front of my pants and shirt. The biggest pieces, that I later found, of the entire pumpkin, were five pieces of shell about the size of a quarter (2 cm), the pumpkin had just disintegrated.

I pulled the bat out of the ground, took a deep breath, refocused and took another swing at the remaining piece. The second blow shattered that piece, burying the bat even deeper into the ground than on the first strike. That was it! Two strikes and the pumpkin was gone. I was shocked at the power I had unleashed. I also felt lighter and freer and felt that a huge weight had been lifted off of me. I also remember crying after the second blow and just standing there in the middle of the garden with the bat still resting in my right hand and the other end of the bat buried in the Earth.

I didn't cry much but there were tears and a silent feeling of release and relief. I felt better afterwards, but I also had guilt over destroying the pumpkin. I went back to the house, changed my clothes and slept for a few hours.

What I just described is what I feel was my first emotional / physical release of my anger and rage, that was brought on and triggered as a result of doing my inner and outer child work. It was not "the" healing experience, but rather another step in healing. Healing my anger and rage was to be a lengthy and evolving process. During the next few years, I would also be going through numerous regressions with both emotional and physical releases including anger and rage, although none as dramatic as the pumpkin experience until the one that I had in January of 2005, where I was to experience expressing my true anger and rage in love, and in the moment. That experience was totally the opposite of what I had experienced whenever I had expressed my denied rage.

Shenreed,