Thought for today:
"To hold on to one's anger and hate is like trying to endure a fiery furnace that refuses to be quenched. Anger and hatred are weapons of emotional destruction. Wield them at your peril, for while you hold on to these negative emotions, you will allow all the good things in life to fall away from your grasp and your mind will not know peace. The pain of your body shall experience ever-increasing darkness of spirit, leaving behind a desolate soul to slowly smoulder in a furnace of harsh forgiveness.
Hatred is an emotion that ultimately leads to the extinction of all positive values. It is a form of inveterate anger; it gives you nothing, but destroys everything! There is no greater human waste than a passionate hatred that is being used to give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Hatred is the gravest of all self-punishments. It eats away at the will to live and destroys the core of one's compassion. It can only be dispelled through a love of self that refuses to hold on to it any longer.
Throughout my life as a former Probation Officer and counsellor working with many people who were unable to control their anger or dispel their hatred, I was left in no doubt that these twin emotions have the potential to destroy the person holding them. Through observing their devastating consequences, I became determined in myself never to allow another to pull me down so low as to hate them. I also came to understand that love is given, but hatred is acquired. We cannot hold hatred because of another's actions, but because of our desire to possess it. It is an emotion that we take unto ourselves, often in response to a perceived wrong we incurred; and because we take it on, only we can dispel it!
Two of the most important things I learned throughout my lifetime have been, 'I make me angry and I choose to take on hate...me and not anyone else!' My work and research into the field of 'Anger' essentially led me to conclude that the emotions of anger and love cannot simultaneously reside within the same body as they are diametrically opposed, and that the only way to get anger out of one's body and keep it out, is by putting love into it! This finding was to become the theme of my most popular and best-selling children's story for the 7-11 year old reader entitled, ‘Douglas the Dragon.'
My greatest of all life achievements was to found the process of 'Anger Management', from which countless people have benefited across the English-speaking world. It will not be this work however, what I will be remembered for when I am dead. What I will be remembered for will not be for the Anger Management 'process' I founded in 1972, but a children's book I wrote about an angry dragon in 1990 called 'Douglas.' This book came to prominence and received national media and press coverage, not because I wrote it, but because the late Princess Diana read it to her children, Princes William and Harry when they were aged 7 and 9 years at their bedtime! I know this because HRH approached me and requested I send her a copy for this specific purpose.
The words on one's gravestone may be chiselled out after one's death, but I strongly suspect that one's epitaph is determined during one's lifetime. If I were to select only one of the children's book I have written above all others of mine, which I consider to be the most instructive and helpful to a developing child, it would be, 'Douglas the Dragon.' This book was read in over two thousand Yorkshire school assemblies by over eight hundred and fifty famous names between 1990 and 2002, and which along with my other published books has raised over £200,000 for charity through their sales.
'Douglas the Dragon' is available in e-book format from www.smashwords.co.uk and in hard copy from amazon and www.lulu.com. All profits go to charity. All four stories can also be heard for free in the audio section of my website and have been recorded by professional actors. In addition, any school musical drama group can find the 'Douglas the Dragon Musical Play' on my website which I wrote, accompanied by six origional songs and backing tracks that were professionally recorded. This musical play can be read, heard and dramatised free. The musical play was paid for by the National Lottery for the benefit of one thousand schools and libraries in Yorkshire, along with amateur drama groups worldwide. The stories and musical play reinforce the theme that to get anger out of our body, we put in love." William Forde: August 23rd, 2015.
http://www.fordefables.co.uk/douglas-the-dragon.html
future.
