Battle Ready

by Ollie Ollerton

  Thoughts and feelings are energy. In fact, every living thing possesses energy. Look back at the jobs you enjoyed compared to those you didn’t; how much more effortless were the ones you liked, how quickly the day went by, and how productive you were, compared to the stop–start treadmill and poor levels of concentration in jobs where you were just going through the motions. When we do something we are passionate about it’s almost as if it happens by intuition, a sort of magic is at work, an energy that flows from our fingers and being into what we are engaged with. We often refer to this as being ‘in flow’ or ‘in the zone’.

  Negativity is also energy and creates a surge of power in the body. Some people become addicted to this energy and are the Dyson vacuum cleaners of positivity and joy.

  Whether it’s sports, painting, writing, soldiering, or whatever you happen to be in flow with, you not only possess an aptitude for it but it also makes you feel good when you’re doing it, and the act of concentration is less tiring. The work of a person with writer’s block who hacks away at their story despite not feeling connected with it, is a very different read to one written by someone who loves his subject and is lost in his work; the first is forgettable and sterile, the second flows, its fluid sentences perfectly lifting the subject matter off the page.

  BE WATER, MY FRIEND

  William Blake, the visionary poet who liked to wander around in the buff, once wrote: ‘The fountain overflows, the cistern contains’, believing that energy that is contained will go stagnant and perish, while that allowed to flow freely is alive and expressive. Centuries later, Dr Masaru Emoto wanted to test if crystals from different sources of water all looked the same. He discovered that water from free-flowing streams produced stunningly beautiful and unique crystalline structures that looked like snowflakes, while polluted or stagnant water created no crystals at all, just irregular structures that were black and sad-looking. He took it a step further by playing gentle classical music and heavy-metal music to water, discovering that the crystals broke down under stress and noise, but flourished with calmness. Next, he photographed liberating water from a dam; what had looked like a cockle shell with an irregular surface reformed into an ice-white diamond-shaped crystal. Finally, he wrote words on a bit of sticky tape and stuck them to the different petri dishes containing water. Words like ‘compassion’ and ‘love’ produced fine crystalline patterns, while negative words like ‘hate’ and ‘cruelty’ produced the predictable malformed, dark structures.

  To me this highlights just how powerful the energies we radiate are, and given that we are all 75 per cent water, then we need to think about the effect we are having on other people and be mindful of our thoughts, as thoughts generate feelings that produce corresponding actions. The way you feel about something or somebody governs the energy that flows from you to them. Obviously, if it’s a positive feeling you experience in their company or when replying to their email, this will be communicated in your underlying energy. When two people meet and there’s a block to this energy flow, when it gets stuck, one will often say of the other person that they didn’t ‘get them’, or they ‘gave off a weird vibe’. Their energies are just not vibrating together.

  Relationships, family, work, and personal interests are our building blocks of happiness, and we must be mindful of the energy we bring to all of them. If you are channelling negative energy towards your job, for instance, constantly complaining about it, your experience of it will only get worse until you resign or are made redundant. Then there’s the self-loathing when you get exactly what you’ve been thinking about. You’re never going to enjoy the success you desire at work if you’re constantly in a negative vibration with your job. The sooner we recognise that the energy we radiate changes the environment around us, the better. We are much more powerful than we realise.

  In life, we manifest what we think and feel strongly about; positive energy begets positive results and negative energy begets . . . you guessed it. When we think about relationships, there are certain couples who will never gel together and produce symmetry and light, because their energies are in conflict and not in vibration or, as some put it, they are ‘a square peg in a round hole’. A lot of people fear leaving a relationship because of their fear of the unknown, and so they end up existing but barely living in this unhappy energy. I was certainly guilty of this in my first marriage and it made me realise that you can’t live your life based on someone else’s happiness if you’re not happy yourself. You must be selfish about what you want in life and shift your energy to something or someone that allows you to express yourself and be in flow with them.

  Recently a girl who’d come on one of our Break-Point courses phoned me and said, ‘I need to thank you.’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Well, after the course and reading your book, I left my husband.’

  ‘Wow, is that a good thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘it is, because they made me question what I want in life, and it gave me the strength to be able to choose what I did and didn’t want.’

  She’d been courageous enough to embrace the opportunity of a new life: short-term discomfort for long-term gain.

  Remembering Blake’s quote on water, we should never sit on our laurels and be complacent with life, even when we have fulfilled our goals. Regardless of our situation, we should be continuous models of improvement, for we can always be more kind, patient and curious. Like people who stop taking their vitamins once they’ve attained a level of healthiness, I’m conscious of the fact that I’ve always delved into self-help wisdom when I was at a low ebb, and then as soon as I felt better I assumed everything was fixed and so stopped doing the things that fixed me in the first place. That’s when you end up on the constant rollercoaster of life as you fail to be consistent in what defines your motivation in the first place. We should never stop observing ourselves and our thoughts, checking the ego is not steering us, meditating, and generally investing in ourselves.

  Animals are satisfied because they operate within simple parameters. Humans, however, are limitless in their capabilities and should never be satisfied, because as soon as you’re satisfied, that’s when the rot sets in; if you’re satisfied then you no longer have a purpose or goal. When fresh rainwater hits terra firma and forms a puddle, its energy, which has travelled miles on its journey from the clouds, goes stagnant very quickly. We humans are no different. And that’s when disease, dis-ease starts, because there’s no flow . . . no energy.

  It’s safe to say that water that has no motion at all will become stagnant and toxic, and it’s the same with our bodies. Similarly, if you allow yourself to live in a state of anger, your body is in a state of dis-harmony, dis-ease. And that’s when it’s subject to more of the same, as you open yourself to negative energy and you become ill more often. Negative breeds only negative.

  I’ve been in relationships that have gone sour, and I know when I start to think, ‘Yup, I want to be somewhere else’, the Universe will take me away from that at some point because I’m starting to visualise not being there. When you start thinking like that, your energy towards that person has changed; you might be there physically, but energetically speaking you’re not there at all, you’re more like a hollow ghost. When my marriage broke down, it did so with good reason: we weren’t right for each other, and no matter what I might have tried, this harsh fact was never going to change. I was unhappy, restless and we brought out the worst in each other.

  This probably explains why I repeated the pattern of my father when I left my wife and went off to Iraq, though for a long time before that moment I had been dreaming of not being with my first wife. I got what I asked for at the end of the day, and luckily, I met someone else – who was immediately blamed for the break-down of our marriage – but in truth, the marriage was in ruins well before we met.

  EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON

  Remember those dot-to-dot puzzles you did as a kid? At first glance they meant nothing, ju
st random black spots against a white page, but then as you gradually joined them up a picture began to form. Just as in life, over time certain apparently isolated experiences gradually coalesce to form a narrative of meaning, and once you start to see the connections, those dots merge into explanations writ large and bright as constellations. Looking back at my life, those dark moments that at the time seemed unfair, pointless and due to bad luck, were part of my evolution (if only I’d known that at the time!). I’ve learned that the closer you get to your inner self, the easier it is to see these dots connecting together to form a reassuring and beautiful plan amid what to others seems like random chaos. Each time I felt lost, angry or depressed it was because the inner me knew I needed to be somewhere different, but in order to shift me, it produced these uncomfortable symptoms. The most important incident in my life is also the most disturbing thing that ever happened to me – yes, you guessed it, the chimp attack – and its reverberations continue like aftershocks from an earthquake up to this day.

  So, remember there were three of us that summer day at the circus: me, my brother Justin, and my pal James? After the attack I lay there motionless like a ragdoll with the stuffing pulled out, looking up at the sky. Next to the horror-stricken circus worker who had found me was my friend James, his eyes wide with disbelief. He ran all the way back to my house to tell my mum what had happened. End of story (or dot, if you’ll indulge me)? Fast forward a few decades to Afghanistan and my best pal Troy is a Colour Sergeant for Alpha Company, 40 Commando, desperately trying to requisition some new vehicles as many of their fleet had been blown up. He goes to the military transport officer, a bloke called Major Stafford at Camp Bastion and receives less than a warm welcome, in fact, he’s all but thrown out of the office by the major, who randomly asks as he leaves, ‘You wouldn’t happen to know a Marine called Ollie Ollerton, would you?’ Troy goes on to tell him he does, we’re best mates, and then has the chutzpah to ask him why. It turns out the major is none other than my childhood friend James Stafford, who was witness to the chimp attack and has been trying to reach me for years after I’d disappeared and joined the Special Forces. Naturally, Troy got the vehicles he wanted!

  Pure random chance or celestial design? There are many such ‘coincidences’ like this throughout my own story which make me believe there is a Universal intelligence at work, and the sooner we submit to its system and start to play by its rules, the sooner we can achieve whatever we want and lead fuller, happier lives. Everything happens for a reason, it just doesn’t seem like that at the time. Admittedly, it’s a hard pill to swallow when you’re in the shit, things have gone south and somebody tries to comfort you with: ‘There’s a reason for this happening, you’ll see.’ ‘Why? What’s the point!?’ our ego screams outraged.

  When we begin to trust the process of the Universe and submit to its intelligence, the difficult moments life throws at us can be reframed as events sent to us for a reason. We have choice how we react: we can either feel targeted by life or learn from hard times, using them to grow into a better, wiser version of ourselves. The worst, most frightening of these dots for me was the chimp attack, but again when I look for the positives in that fateful afternoon, it proved to me at an early age that I possessed the necessary grit and strength within me to fight back at the moment of my imminent death. This experience, for all the shit that it subsequently threw up in my path, helped me succeed in passing selection for the British Special Forces, arguably one of the most physically and mentally punishing tests a person can submit themselves to.

  I honestly believe everything happens to us for a reason, even bad times in our life are trying to teach us something, leading us to make a necessary change towards a more positive place. Sometimes someone is delivered to our path who will later bring us to that which we want, but at the time we’re usually unaware of this because life is too busy happening around us to take pause. However, in hindsight, many personal meaningful coincidences – or ‘synchronicities’ – as coined by the Austrian psychiatrist, Karl Jung – have been happening throughout our life, even in times when we were stuck in a rut and didn’t know things would get better.

  If you’re struggling to get your head around this idea of things being connected, let me tell you another little story. For as long as I remember, my best mate was a guy called Denny. We met him in Chapter 1 while I was in Brisbane. He’d always been my best mate and we’d got into a lot of trouble together. We’d speak sporadically when I was in Iraq, as he was there too. After I left, when I was living in Australia, he called me out of the blue one day and announced, ‘I’m moving to Oz.’ ‘Whereabouts?’ I said. It turned out he moved just down the road from me. That’s a coincidence. And when I went to a party at his place, he introduced me to Simon.

  When I met this guy, I realised within minutes of talking to him that he seemed familiar to me, and then it clicked – he was involved when I went through Special Forces Selection! But here we were on the other side of the world, in Australia, and many years later, and I’m being introduced to Simon, the guy that took me through my course. I was like, ‘Holy fuck!’ and he too was amazed at the mysterious synchronicity we were experiencing. All the hairs on the back of my neck stuck up like spikes on a pufferfish. There are around 7 billion people on the planet, and I just happened to bump into him!?

  Because of Simon, I started working for the Grey Man, and in doing so began to rediscover myself. All these are stepping stones, dots that join to other dots to form that constellation or bigger picture that can only be viewed later with hindsight.

  Consider the word ‘coincidence’ for a moment. What does it mean? Most dictionaries define it as a situation in which separate things happen by chance at the same time or in the same way. This doesn’t really gel with my experience. It was more of a chain of events rather than two things happening at the same time. One person led me to another, who I’d already met on life’s path, and through him a path opened up to my epiphany. When I examine this it still astounds me how magical the thread is that was shining all the while through my dark times. If only I’d known back then to trust it, that and the capability we all have of ordering from the Universe what we need, then I might not have been so despondent. The old adage, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears’ could almost be referring to the Universe opening itself up to us and revealing more of what we can achieve once we’re ready in ourselves to start believing there is something at work much bigger than us. Interestingly the old Medieval Latin word coincidere translates as ‘to fall together’, which is what the dots do – they connect, even if they are separated by years or decades, to form a story and shine a light on our darkness.

  EXERCISE: TRUST IN COINCIDENCE

  Take a moment to look back on your life for coincidences. Write down people who have been instrumental in your success or happiness, when they came into your life and what led you to meet them. The more you start spotting these helpful leg-ups the Universe provides us with, the easier it is to trust the magic. In future don’t brush it off, call it coincidence and forget it. Use this experience to question why it happened and ask yourself what does it mean? It may be nothing but more likely you’re simply not connecting the dots.

  Person:

  When did they come into my life?

  How did they help me? What insights did they help me reveal?

  What led me to meet them?

  WHERE YOU ARE IS WHERE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE

  So, if you’re in a bad place at the moment know that you are on a journey with a path and however tough or unfair it might seem, by looking on your current hardship as something that can be learned from, you are taking the power back from it. Whether you’ve lost a loved one to cancer, your child is ill, or you have only weeks to live, even then there is a message we can take from the most difficult moments in our lives. You are exactly where you’re supposed to be; our greatest breakthroughs often come from our biggest breakdowns. We have the freedom to choose how we resp
ond and to relate to anything happening to us. We need to look at difficult situations in our lives and tell ourselves, ‘This is paving the way for something new and exciting, the death of something old and the birth of something new.’

  When something does come crashing down, and that might be the end of a relationship or a job, you’ve got to look back and ask yourself, ‘What’s my thinking been about this?’ Because nine times out of ten, you’ve been thinking negative thoughts about it for a long time and you are simply getting what you thought about; if you feared the loss of it, you will attract the loss of it.

  The critical moment of re-birth is also the most extreme moment of trauma and hell, because the old is going to try and take you down with it as it tumbles into the trash pit. For example, consider a toxic relationship you’re trying to leave; once your partner realises they’re not going to stop you, it can turn ugly. And this is a break-point moment, an opportunity to make a break for it, a pause in which you can either stay in your malnourishing ‘comfort zone’ and put an ineffective Band-Aid on it, or push through and upward to where life is trying to take you. Remember: we weren’t born to be miserable. There will be many little deaths in your life that you must let go of, giving way to new change. No wonder people who come out of bad relationships begin to blossom and do things that they’ve never done before. And remember, when any energy source is dying it will scream the loudest and fight to stay alive.

  STOICISM

  If you think the term ‘stoic’ means someone who just grins and bears the hardships of life but keeps going anyhow, you’ve got them all wrong. The Stoics of third-century BC Athens, and later still, the Roman stoics, were a wise and hardy bunch who believed that even though their fate was already predetermined they still possessed freedom in the way they were free to respond to whatever misfortune and good fortune was thrown at them. Very much like we saw with Viktor Frankl and his choice to remain kind and human in the Nazi deathcamps. The Stoics were also great planners who used to meditate on anything that could possibly go wrong in order that they could plan a contingency in the event of it actually happening. Instead of using the word ‘failure’ they substituted it with the word ‘outcome’. And if an outcome was negative they tried to see it as an opportunity to learn something. To them your character and your reaction to blessings and misfortune was what mattered – accept the blessings without arrogance and treat the setbacks with level-headedness. The four pillars of stoicism are: wisdom, justice, temperance and courage. Not a bad bunch of mates to back you up in a firefight.