Never Mad Again: The Transformational Guide to Live in Peace

By James Fontaine

Never Mad Again is the definitive guide to overcoming anger, improving relationships, and developing an ongoing sense of inner peace and balance forever. It discusses where anger and personal conflict comes from and what we can learn about ourselves and others as we learn to release the powerful influence of the ego.

Never Mad Again uncovers the psychological mechanics of rationalization and rage by exposing the complex tricks of the ego, including establishing blame to garner approval and seeing ourselves as right in every situation.

Never Mad Again creates the foundation for the real work of releasing defensiveness and the need to control others' emotions and states of being. It explores the possibility that the conditions of anger can be changed with awareness of the ego and a determination to release old emotional patterns.

Written in a straightforward way, Never Mad Again empowers the reader to finally ask the most important question of all: who am I really?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452547725

James Fontaine

James Fontaine has been studying consciousness for the last ten years on a variety of personal development and transformation subjects, including A Course in Miracles, Logotherapy Transcendental Meditation, NLP, The Four Agreements, Law of Attraction, and Reiki, among many others. Fontaine studied English in Cowichan College in British Columbia, Canada, and engineering at the UASLP. Has been an entrepreneur for years, and as a lifelong student of the mind/body/spirit connection, Fontaine owns a Pilates studio. Recently he moved to Boulder, Colorado, in order to conduct consciousness development seminars in the United States. He is also an avid athlete and has completed several marathons, triathlons, and recently his first Ironman.

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Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

James Fontaine

www.nevermadagain.com

Twitter @nevermadagain.com

To my Wife who has always been my support, this book wouldn’t have been possible without her.

To my kids, my best teachers.

PREFACE

Is getting angry good or bad?

If it is neither good nor bad, then why write a book about learning how to stop getting angry?

Generally speaking, we cannot classify emotions as good or bad—they are only what they are: emotions.

Emotions are our reaction to an external stimulus that is linked to an internal one, but it cannot simply be a matter of good or bad emotions because our body has its own wisdom from thousands of years and knows how to react to those stimuli.

Nothing of what our body does is bad—everything it does is from its source of wisdom, the same wisdom that knows perfectly how to pump an exact amount of blood with each heartbeat. It is the same wisdom that distinguishes proteins from carbohydrates and fats and distributes each to the organs that need them.

There aren’t good or bad emotions; there are only emotions that feel well or emotions that don’t feel good.

When something makes us feel happy, we have an emotion that feels good, but when someone bothers us or makes us angry, we have an emotion that feels bad.

Many experts recommend not repressing the emotions; they say that if you repress emotions, they can be transformed into diseases or can make you explode when you can no longer repress them. In Jim Carey’s movie Me, Myself and Irene, Carey plays a character that has repressed his anger for many years until the day comes when he explodes and expresses all the anger he had repressed against others. Of course it is just a film full of fantasy, but it helps us understand what experts want to tell us about suppressing emotions.

The repressed emotions can accumulate in our body until the body expresses itself differently.

But if emotions are neither good nor bad, but only make us feel good or bad, and we know that repressing emotions is harmful to our health, what can we do to avoid the emotions that make us feel bad, without repressing them?

To answer this question we have to remember that emotions are produced by an external stimulus that is linked to an internal one. Very often we cannot control external stimuli because they are part of situations that happen in everyday life; what we can control is the internal stimulus that causes our body to activate the emotion.

The internal stimulus is different in each person and is based on the accumulation of past experiences, which are brought to the present, therefore generating specific emotions. If a person walking down the street sees a car running a red light, the person might be bothered by what he or she saw.

The external stimulus is the car that runs the red light, the internal stimulus is an association of ideas that makes the observer angry; maybe this person recalled an accident when a car ran a red light, or perhaps he or she remembers a TV show in which a car that ran a red light caused an accident.

At the same moment, let’s say, another person across the street sees the car run the red light, but it doesn’t bother him, perhaps because he has also done the same in an emergency situation; or maybe he saw that there were no other cars in the area. This person goes on his way without being bothered.

Both people experienced the same situation at the same time, but one of them was bothered and the other was not. The external stimulus could not have been controlled by either of them—but the inner stimulus could. Both decided unconsciously how to react, based on their personal story.

If this had happened in India, nobody would have been bothered that someone ran a red light—many people do it, and other people do not react with anger because they’ve learned that running a red light is common in their country.

This really is the key: to reach the point where external situations do not bother us the way they do now; to learn how to consciously react in each situation, therefore ensuring that in the future we could react unconsciously (or automatically) in similar situations. In that moment our unconscious mind will analyze the situation in a different way, so that what used to bother us before we will now see without anger.

This is different than repressing emotions. It is learning to understand why we got upset before and to gain new knowledge so that what used to bother us before no longer bothers us and to know that it is within our power to live free of argument, to know were not born with genes that make us grumpy, and to know that our parents are not guilty for our constantly being angry, and neither is society.

What I want to show you is a simple path to a life without anger so that you may have emotions that feel good and that the ones that feel bad disappear; at the same time I will show you a way toward wisdom so that you can stop blaming others and stop feeling guilty for what you do or for what you did not do in the past.

I want you to acquire the wisdom needed to live in peace and in a happy way most of the time, and I want you to do it unconsciously, without thinking about it.

The ultimate goal of this book is that when you look back at yourself you will see the way you used to be and no longer recognize that person; but you will see that old you with deep love and appreciation for having been that way—which has led you to be who you are now. I want you to realize in that moment the wisdom you have acquired, which is now part of your being.

I want you to be able to live, from that moment, free from anger.

INTRODUCTION

I am never upset for the reason I think.      - A Course in Miracles

THE ONLY REASON IN THE WORLD YOU GET MAD IS BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU ARE RIGHT, AND THE OTHER PERSON IS WRONG.

So simple, so easy—this is the only reason you get mad. If you really understand this, your whole life will change.

In fact, if you decide to stop reading this book, having understood this message, I invite you to do so, for if you fully understood it, you do not need to read the book, just go and apply its lesson to your life.

Now, if you are one of those who will continue reading the book, it is very likely that you’re a little skeptical that the message can be so simple.

You may look at the sentence in different ways:

• It may be true

• It is too easy

• I can tell you several hundred reasons why I’m angry

• He does not live my life—I have a thousand reasons to be angry

• I do not believe it

• It is impossible

• Just one reason?

Believe me, I was the one who thought all these things when I heard the phrase for the first time on a radio show; unfortunately I don’t know who said it, to give due credit.

I was driving along, scanning stations, when suddenly I heard the phrase:

THE ONLY REASON IN THE WORLD YOU GET MAD IS BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU ARE RIGHT, AND THE OTHER PERSON IS WRONG.

I must say, it captured my attention, but it seemed too simple to be true. I kept hearing the radio, but I could not really hear more; in my head I only heard reasons that I could get angry. I was trying to prove that what this person had just said was false—it could not be true. So my mind started to bomb me with all the reasons why I could be angry just because someone thought different from me.

But none of those reasons could contradict what I had heard: all the reasons I thought of took me to the same place. SOMEONE DID NOT THINK AS I DID AT THAT MOMENT, AND THAT MADE ME MAD.

If it were that simple, I thought to myself, anyone could know the reason why, at that moment, he feels angry or full of rage.

A few blocks later, after a deep search for reasons, I realized that the radio show was over. By that time it was a magical phrase for me; I could not contradict it in any way.

It was true!

It is simple, and if you understand it could become easy too, but in order to fully comprehend it we need to understand the nature of anger, and how it manifests in ourselves.

What is Anger?

Definition of Anger in English: it is an emotion. The physical effects of anger include increased heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of adrenaline and noradrenalin some view anger as part of the brain response to the perceived threat of harm.

None of the sensations that we experience when we are angry is pleasant. I am not saying anger is all-wrong; all emotions have a specific function, which is tell us something through our body. Anger is a body reaction to an external situation, but it is not a feeling we like; however, it can become addictive to the body, which needs these chemicals to feel well when it does not know something better.

From childhood we are taught that anger is bad, that people who get angry are not good, and that we must control our anger. We are taught that to suppress our anger so that other people do not see that we are angry and do not consider us bad people.

Currently there are many studies that tell us that repressing emotions can make us sick, that our body is trying to tell us something, to teach us something with every emotion that comes up, and that if we do not listen to it, the body will find a more intense form in which to express it. That is why, if we repress emotions, our body may begin to speak to us through illness. In the beginning it could be a simple cold, but if we keep ignoring it, it could become cancer.

But if anger is not bad (although not pleasant) and its repression makes us sick, then what have we learned? What can we do to not get angry?

It seems confusing, but the answer is very simple:

YOU GET MAD BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU ARE RIGHT, AND THE OTHER PERSON IS WRONG.

If we know in advance why we get angry, then we can see each situation from another point of view. We can then reduce the number of times we get angry, without repressing our anger, but by looking with different eyes at the situations that made us angry. We will then feel fewer unpleasant emotions and live more happily than we do now, coexist easily with those around us, and see life with greater wisdom.

CHAPTER I

WHEN ANGER TAKES CONTROL