Empower Yourself In The Face Of Injustice

Do you struggle to stand up for yourself? Do you find it difficult to set boundaries to protect yourself from harm or exploitation? The goal of this course is to awaken the energy of fierce love to help respect and protect yourself. You will learn to transform healthy anger into clear seeing and wise action. You will work with inner parts that disempower you, using methods derived from Internal Family Systems Therapy and practices of mindfulness and self-compassion. To benefit from this course, you need to feel reasonably safe and stable, as well as have the skills for regulating distress. This course is intended for self-study and cannot replace any otherwise necessary psychotherapeutic or medical treatment. Please make sure that you feel stable enough to dive into this experience.

Lección 1: Debunking Myths Around Compassion & Anger

Compassion is often misunderstood as being weak and passive, because many people practice goodwill in the face of suffering without wisdom. “Submissive compassion” can lead to people condoning or failing to stand up to harmful behaviour of others. To train in fierce and wise compassion, we need to utilize the energy within anger. Anger driven by care serves to protect us without being aggressive or submissive.

Lección 2: Resolving To Protect Yourself

It is normal to be clueless about how to act in a wise way when we still feel stressed by the situation. What you do know, is that you wish to learn to protect yourself in a wise way. In this meditation you are invited to evoke your resolve to learn how to care for yourself in a powerful way. This intention can become an anchor to return to as you go through the course.

Lección 3: The Many Faces Of Anger

To tap into the wisdom contained within anger, we need to connect with the emotion directly. Most people, however, censor their feelings of anger and resist them consciously or unconsciously. This leads to anger manifesting in a variety of other unhelpful ways. This is not our fault. It's an opportunity to become aware of our own conditioning with regards to anger.

Lección 4: Your Relationship With Anger

After describing what anger can look like, when it is resisted, you get to explore your relationship with anger. In this exercise, you are guided to get to know the various parts within you that might judge, suppress, or feel afraid of anger. By simply seeing and acknowledging them for the first time, we create more spaciousness.

Lección 5: Safe & Grounded In The Body

In this session you are guided through a nurturing body-focused practice. This practice is intended to strengthen your sense of groundedness by fully inhabiting your body with kind awareness. It is also intended to evoke a sense of unconditional trust and support from the earth and the sky. Feeling safe in and being grounded in our bodies prepares us for working with sensations of anger later in the course.

Lección 6: Your Role Model Of Fierce Love

In this session you are guided to visualize a person who embodies strength, wisdom, courage, calm, justice, and kindness to you. This role model has experienced disempowerment and inspired others to empower themselves. Visualizing and emulating this role model over time will help you to activate those qualities within you.

Lección 7: Activating The Energy Of Fierce Love In Your Body

Inner empowerment shows on the outside as a calm, grounded, and dignified posture and expression. Empowered postures help to feel heard, seen, and respected by others. They involve neither aggression nor submission. In this session we will explore how posture, embodiment, and music can help to activate this loving force in the body. You will be guided through a body-focused visualization.

Lección 8: Believing Your Truth - Step 1

Whenever someone is mistreated, the natural response is outrage. People, however, often stay silent because they fear the consequences of being punished, disbelieved, discredited, or have it turned against them. We may have internalised parts that block us from believing our own experience of hurt when it was important for our survival.

Lección 9: Believing Your Truth - Step 2

In this session we start to work directly with parts that disempower us by invalidating our truth of being mistreated. These parts are the first in line to block us from connecting to the loving force of healthy anger. After having discovered the fears and function of this invalidating part, you may continue by bringing compassion to the fearful part beneath.

Lección 10: Strength Through Solidarity - Step 1

In this session, we draw on findings from social psychology that help us understand the mechanisms that are at play when suffering of others - and maltreatment of others, in particular - is being ignored or even rejoiced in. This provides us with the rationale for actively building networks of support.

Lección 11: Strength Through Solidarity - Step 2

When we are faced with injustice, we easily feel isolated and powerless. To gather strength to persevere, we need to connect with peers who are affected in a similar way. When we stand united, we feel stronger, more resilient, and more supported. In this session, we evoke common humanity and solidarity in a guided practice.

Lección 12: Recharge In The Circle Of Care

In this guided imagery practice, you can get an extra boost of love, care, and support by imagining several compassionate companions offering you what you need right now. This nurturing practice helps to ensure that the developing fierce energy stays loving and therefore, balanced.

Lección 13: Understanding Shame & Exaggerated Guilt

As soon as we have woken up to the full scale of the hurt and harm, many of us automatically blame ourselves instead of getting angry with those who have hurt us. This is an understandable safety mechanism, which also blocks us from connecting with healthy anger. We will talk about how to welcome the discomfort of waking up and what role forgiveness plays in the overall process.

Lección 14: Detoxing From Shame & Exaggerated Guilt

In this session we will work with the emotions of shame and exaggerated guilt that often show up and get in the way of protecting ourselves. You will be guided to discover the fears and functions of the shaming or guilt-tripping part and to meet any underlying fearful parts with compassion.

Lección 15: Self-Compassion For Grief

In the context of injustice, we may feel sad about not getting the protection or support that we would have needed or for losing something or someone significant to us as a result. If you have not yet had the chance to mourn this fully and sadness naturally arises at this point, then this practice might support you. You are guided to comfort yourself whilst letting the sensations of grief move through your body.

Lección 16: Wrath Wakes Us Up

The fiery energy of anger may burn us up or burn us out. When we learn to contain the fire to keep it burning steadily, we can harness its energy to wake us up and to stand our ground. Mindfulness of the body, a caring intention, plus courage are the components required.

Lección 17: Transforming Health Anger Into Clear Seeing

In this session, you will be guided to connect to your resolve to care for yourself and to feel into the sensations of anger in your body. By sensing into anger, you can use its energy to see the situation more clearly. This may lead to insights about this situation that are the foundation for wise action.

Lección 18: Letting Loving Action Emerge

Witnessing healthy anger by listening to its messages can give us important insights. When we linger with these insights in our hearts, minds, and bodies, a manageable step of wise and loving action can arise. Wisdom is pragmatic and leads us to take action that supports our wellbeing in the long-term without exposing ourselves to unnecessary risks.

Lección 19: Transforming Clear Seeing Into Wise Action

In this session, you will be guided to work with the insights gained in the previous exercise. You can transform them into ideas for wise next steps to take to actively protect yourself in the challenging situation you find yourself in.

Lección 20: Empowered & Connected In Relationship

Fierce love can help us to build a culture of genuine dialogue and democracy. Our goal becomes agreeing to disagree and staying connected in the disagreement, instead of cutting the person out of our life or giving up our viewpoint to keep the peace. In this session, you get to practice sticking to your truth and values in a relationship without getting aggressive, defensive, or submissive.

Reviews

Vielen Dank für die wertvollen Einsichten und die gefühlvolle Begleitung!

Excellent course with a lot of practical tips to apply in various situations. Really helped to feel empowered!

This was a very empowering course. I learned a lot. Thank you very much.

Fantastic course! I feel I have an amazing set of tools now, so I can deal with situations from a place of calm and control rather than fear and anger. I've learnt so much, it was an amazing journey. Thank you for sharing your gifts! 🙏💜

Excellent course, thank you. I have already repeated many of the sessions and will keep coming back to them as I need to.

This course was fabulous! Very useful and timely to my life. Thank you so much, Dr. Christine!

Alchemizing anger into clarity and compassion into justice is brought to us by a sage. This course is brilliant and highly transformative. There is kindness and patience in Dr. Christine’s voice as she inspires the listener toward a higher path. I am so grateful for the calm assertive energy that I am experiencing that can be fierce and free.

AMAZING! Would recommend to anyone and everyone that would listen! Christine did a great job at keeping the content broad enough to be applied to multiple situations, but also gave great specific examples most could relate to. Thankyou 👏🏻

This was a wonderful course. I could see myself taking it again at some point. Thank you. 🙏🏽

Amazing course. I have learned so much from your sessions. Thank you.
Learn to be a safe container for our own feelings ( such as anger, fear, shame & guilt); channel anger through a transformative lens to something that can, in turn, bring me clarity, positivity and growth. These are the vital two key points.

I feel incredibly grateful for your enlightenment. Appreciate your help.
Happy holidays!

May

This course had been truly life-changing. Thank you!

Deep gratitude. You’re lovely calm and caring voice helped the message root for me. There were a good number of things I guess I knew in theory but which shifted to a felt sense of knowing. Incredibly grateful to you for making this teaching available and your wisdom. Blessings

I have just completed this potentially life changing course. It has taken me in directions I could never have imagined and I have discovered things about myself I had no idea about. I am sure that these insights will help me to be more authentic and brave moving forward. This course is ideal for anyone who struggles with confrontation and dealing with injustice. It will empower you to be confident in your own truth. Thank you so much for this wonderful course. 🙏

I have to say this was pretty amazing if you follow it through which is the key. There is an order which reaches a point of conclusion that came as a surprise in the last few lessons but you had to walk it through to get there. It was amazing. I wish dr. Braille was my councillor..will run through this again. Thanks for all your work.