SPOILER ALERT: The below is a shameless plug written out of love and respect - and is long overdue. 

If you had met me just a few years ago, you would have observed a very different person: a quiet, shy, reserved and nervous individual, unsure about himself, his opinions, his wants or his desires. Full of self-doubt, insecurities and fears, he struggled to be authentic around other people. He was unable to deeply connect to his friends, unable to express his love for the people in his life, and unable above all to love himself. Lost and confused, he had spent years jumping from city to city, from club to club, and from job to job in the search of some release, some hope and some fulfillment.



Nowadays, I am settled, grounded, happy and fulfilled. I Love (with a capital L) my work and my businesses, I have great friends to whom I am deeply connected  to and who support me in all my endeavors, and I have a fantastic loving relationship with my family. I am able to be my authentic self in all situations, and to express my true desires, wants and opinions. 

One person has had a huge impact on my transformation: my great friend, business partner and coach Tony Selimi. Here is our story:

HOW I MET TONY

When I met Tony, I had already began my journey. After a depressing few years, some little voice inside of me had guided me to finally settle down, and to start a work I could enjoy. I met Tony on the gym floor in 2010: he offered me a free healing in return for a PT session. Intrigued, I went along, with little expectations. 

Looking back on that first session, I remember how uncomfortable I felt. I felt prodded, nudged and gently wrestled into opening up and talking about myself, my feelings and my emotions. As a British passive aggressive introvert, it was my idea of hell. My ego kicked in with a vengeance: "Who was this man asking so many questions?" "Who did he think he was?" " How dare he make me feel so uncomfortable!" Part of me doubted and distrusted, another part of me was intrigued. But I knew deep down that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Tony was patient, and gave me the space to slowly feel more and more comfortable. Although part of me was screaming to run away back to my comfort zone, at the end of our session I chose to accompany him to dinner. As we chatted about spirituality, our lives, our dreams and our desires, something in me clicked and I knew that my life was about to take a turn for the better. 

After agreeing to provide Tony with some Personal Training in return for more coaching and healing, I left feeling elated, as if something in me had shifted, some hope had returned. There was light at the end of the tunnel.


MY INITIAL RESISTANCE

I would be lying to you if I said that I had jumped head first into my new path. Even though I could catch a glimpse of where I was headed, a big part of me resisted the process. The concepts of energy, of manifestation, of law of attraction etc were all new to me. Years and years of belief in the physical world as the only reality held me back, and it would take me many months before I could fully release my doubts and trust what Tony was talking about.

At the same time, I still held on tightly to my old destructive habits, my old thought patterns, my old conditioning. For over a year, I went through many ups and downs: one day feeling elated and on top of the world, the other back to the grey gloom and doom. I caught a glimpse of the happiness and self-love Tony talked about, and then found myself doubting I had ever experienced it.

In hindsight, these cycles matched the times when I listened and nurtured my inner voice, my truth, and the times when I blocked it out, doubted myself, and forgot my heart. Time after time I returned to see Tony, and at every single session, I opened up a tiny bit more, learnt a bit more about myself, and felt a bit more hopeful.


STEP BY STEP

Little by little, with Tony’s constant, loving yet patient support and understanding I started to see clearer and clearer. I discovered a new awareness of myself, my thoughts and my emotions. I began to understand my past behaviors, my day-to-day feelings and my future desires. And I embarked on a journey of tremendous change that has not stopped since. 

The fog slowly started to lift and I saw my life with a whole new perspective. I was able to see how for years I had avoided looking deeper into myself, always scared of what was inside. I was able to see how I had blamed my lack of love on everyone else but myself: my family, my friends, my clients. And I was able to see how much better my life was when I trusted and followed my intuition.  

It wasn't always plain sailing, I made many mistakes and put myself into many difficult situations. However Tony always empowered me to turn the situations around, to gain learnings and insights from them, to forgive myself and to move on quickly.

In doing so, I started to trust my instincts, and built a new-found respect and esteem for myself, my desires and my choices. I re-discovered love for life, for those around me and for me - for Will. My resistance dropped, and I became eager to learn more and more about the healing and coaching process, about our minds, our energies, our emotions - and how they all interact.

And as my inner world changed, so did my outer world. I stopped my old destructive habits, and began to nurture the parts of my life that needed me. My business began to take off, I attracted new wonderful friends, and re-connected with my twin, my brothers and my parents. My life slowly began to fall into place.


TONY'S COACHING

The job of a good Coach is to allow you to come to your own conclusions, make your own decisions, and choose what is right for yourself. And that is exactly what Tony did. His greatest skill has been to help me believe and trust my instincts to achieve my potential. We are all born great, with unique gifts, talents and personalities - however many of us suppress our true selves and forget our dreams and desires. Drawing on his learnings from many avenues including his own life story, Tony empowered me to push my boundaries, transform my mind and release my inner self. 

Tony has a positive energy and a love for life and for others that is contagious. He is a loving, warm and kind man, and keen to help everyone he meets. He has inspired me in many ways to do the same: to inject love into everything I do, everything I see and everyone I meet. He has become one of my closest friends, a trusted companion and a fantastic business partner. 

However, if I were to name one of Tony’s top strengths, it would be his integrated and in-depth knowledge of both Coaching AND Healing. Through my own experience, I have realized how important they both are, in conjunction with one another. Any healing of the physical body is far more powerful when one can understand the root of the symptom in their subconscious, and make changes to their mindset through coaching. And coaching is far more powerful with the understanding of energy, vibrations and manifestation. 

Tony has been an avid learner for many years, and has done all kind of certifications (each with different initials and abbreviations !). Rather than sticking to one particular school of thought, he happily uses the best bits of each one, and tailors his approach depending on the situation. This integration of the mind and spirit has really opened up my eyes to the world around us, and has helped me transform the way I see my business, my training and my relationships. 

Of course, it goes without saying that I would wholeheartedly recommend Tony to anyone. I truly believe that everyone could benefit from a bit of coaching and healing, and that the world would be a better place if we all applied just 10% of what Tony can teach. 


START YOUR OWN JOURNEY

For me, Tony has been a fantastic catalyst for change, a great influence in my life, and an astounding friend. Thanks to him I have learnt to love, be loved, to express myself, and to reach for the stars. I have kickstarted an incredible transformation and have found my true self. I feel authentic, fulfilled and content - and so very excited about what the future will bring.

Looking into yourself and committing to your own personal growth is best thing you could ever do. Yes it will require some work. Yes it may be uncomfortable at times. And yes you may have many layers and issues to unravel. But the long-term reward you will get is immense, immeasurable, and most likely impossible to even imagine.

Happiness and fulfillment is inside of you. It may have been locked up by fears, doubts and insecurities - but it is within your grasp. I dare you to go find it. 

Will Pike - 30 January 2013

On my recent visit to Macedonia for my mother’s 78thbirthday I found myself in a situation that was extremely challenging both emotionally and mentally. For the sake of the love, respect and not wanting to disappoint my family and people I love and care about I ended up setting myself into an autopilot mode by doing things that were expected of me and letting myself go with the flow.  I could not help but notice the changes in people’s behaviour around me as well as the anger that was being build inside of me. Whilst there were positive feeling being generated in the actions I was doing that were making other people happy, bit by bit I started to neglect my own wants and needs, as the time went on this started to build into more frustration and anger.

Doing things for others for sure is rewarding, ignoring our own needs, not listening to our own inner voice and not allowing ourselves to be who we actually are is NOT. Living in a straight men’s world where everyone is expecting you to be a well behaved, a respected son and a family guy if not managed properly can led to so much anger being stored inside of you.

How many of you have been told that anger is inappropriate?  It’s not good to be angry.  And so we’ve learned to ignore our feelings of anger, push them down, suppress them, and pretend they don’t exist.  In the long run, I realised that’s not any healthier for you than expressing your anger inappropriately. I now completely understand.  Having left my culture I made a decision a long time ago to stop being angry at my family, at the macho guys at school who bullied me for spending my time with girls and not playing football with them, at all of the people who started the war in former Yugoslavia that led me to loose friends, family and being forced to flee the country I grew up and new to be my own (at that time), at employers and friends who simply did not appreciate the hard work I put over the years. It was serving no one.

What I did not realize is that although I stopped expressing anger, I was also not honestly acknowledging how I felt, and so I was actually just storing the anger in my body.

One of the things I have learned through experience, working with healers, spiritual teachers, with many of my friends and helping clients move through relationship issues is that stored anger shows up in our life in many ways.  Often people who struggle with addiction, especially alcoholism have repressed anger.  Chronic pain has also proven to reveal hidden and stored anger.

Repressed anger is often disguised and sometimes it takes working through other emotions to arrive at the anger.

I’ve also discovered in both my personal and professional path that rather than acknowledging and expressing the anger we feel at other people, experiences, and life in general, we turn those heavy emotions inward and begin to blame ourselves, judge our feelings, and begin to want to justify or make sense of the feelings that dare to rise up and call our attentions. So we learn, to hide them, mask them, make excuses for them, and turn more judgement and pain inward at our own shortcomings and failings. I was the first to tell you, “ I’m not angry.” I would just as quickly jump in and justify why I should NOT feel angry, and make sense of the situation and talk myself right out of feeling what was real for me.  I had every right to be mad, and yet at some level, I did not believe that I did.  By the way, this did not stop the feelings from showing up.  I just got really good at “making sense” of it all – and totally dis empowering my real feelings and myself in the process.

Thank goodness, the work I have done over the years is helping me each time I go back to my roots, family and culture.  I have learned how to safely and quickly address what’s really causing the show of feelings, giving a voice to them, and letting go of the judgement and blame we tend to hold.

Addressing and releasing not only anger but other emotions and feelings that may be masking the real feelings of anger that you are holding is your first step.

It is your chance to move through the heavy, energetic emotions that are interfering with your happiness, and your living the life that you really want to be experiencing.

What I have found is that through combination of Chakra Healing, Life Coaching and tapping i work with clients on releasing the energy, the thoughts, the meta programming that causes this anger, it allows for more joy to come in.  You move the old, stuck, stagnant energy out of your system and make room for more of the new positive thoughts and energy to fill you.

If you are feeling stuck, lost or hopeless,

If you are at a crossroads and don’t know which way to turn,

If you are generally unhappy and just don’t know why,

If you know you want to make a change, and just cannot shift,

If you are chronically having accidents or experiencing pain and discomfort,

There’s a strong possibility that there is some stored, stuck, unexpressed anger (or other emotion) in your body, in your subconscious, in your energy body.  So get in touch as I would love for you to be anger free, you will be free to move forward to create the life and relationships you desire and to be all that you imagine.

To your love and joy,

Tony J Selimi ©HealOneSelf

 WE ARE OUR FAMILIES

It’s a fact: our families shape us. We spend our early years in wonderful awe of the world we have come into; we soak up everything around us and create our perceptions of the world based on what we are told, see and hear. Then as we grow up, our own experiences add a new layer of beliefs and truths about the world and ourselves, which follow us and determine our feelings and behaviours.

As gay men, the relationship we have with our families can be a complex one. Many a family has been torn apart by a son or daughter coming out. I have met several men who were completely rejected by their own parents for being themselves, and expressing it. Of course, these are extreme and (luckily) rare cases – yet they go to show how non-acceptance of individuals leads to negativity and the breakdown of some families.

Yet this non-acceptance does not always come from the family itself: it can also be internalized within us. We live in a society with a history of hatred towards anything outside of the norm, and a background of sexism, racism and homophobia. Although times have changed and the world (especially the UK and London in particular) is becoming a more tolerant and integrated place, at a subconscious level such widespread negativity has had a damaging impact on a lot of gay men. Many, including myself, have had to struggle with the nagging feeling that they are not right, that they do not fit in, and that they cannot be themselves. And if we do not fully accept ourselves, how can we expect others to?

As such, being gay can have an effect on the way we feel, on the way we communicate, and on how we interact with our siblings and parents. I have recently realised for example that I pushed my family away throughout my teenage years and my early twenties. I wasn’t accepting myself, and therefore I could not accept my family for who they were. At the time, I blamed them for not being the family I thought I should have, for not having the relationship with them I would like, and for not being the kind of people I wanted them to be. Why? Because it was easier to blame them and to focus on their own failings and defaults, rather than face myself and my own.

MY OWN STORY

Indeed, since the age of 15 my twin brother and myself started to grow apart. We went to different high schools, studied different degrees, and started hanging out with different people. At the same time, my communication with my parents and other brothers (twins as well) hit a low point. In reality, I was struggling with who I was, and could not accept or understand my own gay thoughts and feelings: I wanted to be left alone.

Over the next decade these subconscious feelings remained, and got in the way of any normal interaction I could have had with my close family, and even with my twin. My drama-free coming out at the age of 21 was a milestone, and gave me a hint of what I would realise a few years later: that I had come from a truly loving and accepting family. However, at the time I was only just beginning to understand myself, and was deeply lacking in confidence, self-love and acceptance. And so I carried on my years of drifting, of feeling lost and unable to be or express myself.

It wasn’t until I met Tony at the age of 25 and started my own journey of self-discovery with him that I finally began to see clear. I realised that my behaviour towards my family had evolved not from them, but from our misunderstanding and miscommunication. And I understood that the only person that could re-build a loving relationship and open communication with my family was myself. 

And so I made the conscious decision to try harder: to call them more often, to demonstrate my love for them at every occasion, to appreciate them and to connect with them at a deeper level. Over the past two years, I have expressed my darker secrets, my thoughts, my feelings and emotions to them, sometimes in writing, sometimes in person. And they have listened with unconditional love. They have accepted every single part of myself, with no judgment whatsoever.  It wasn’t always easy; my old, dark feelings sometimes crept back and stopped me from being myself. However I have persevered, and things have changed in ways I thought unthinkable a few years back.

At the same time, through my own self-acceptance and self-love, I in turn learnt to accept them and to love them unconditionally. I learnt to appreciate what I have, and to be grateful for what I have been given. And I have discovered what amazing people they are. I am extremely proud of my parents, my twin, and my two younger twin brothers.

My twin got married a few weeks ago. Throughout the last few months, our family has been drawn closer and closer as we got together for a Stag weekend in Budapest, a pre-party at our home in France and the official wedding in Wigan. I believe the whole process was very healing for all of us. As we united as a family once again we came to understand our love and affection for each other, and how we have matured into loving, fun and warm individuals. For me, there is no easier way to express this than by showing you a video we filmed for the bride, while away on the Stag weekend:

My family has now become a very important part of my life. I feel grounded, safe and secure in the knowledge that I will always have them to support me wherever I go and whatever I do. I have also realised that I want to someday start a family of my own, and have started to look forward to the future family get-togethers, each with our respective partners and children. 

YOU HAVE THE BEST FAMILY IN THE WORLD

I wrote this article partly to express my joy, love and pride at being part of such a special family, and partly to inspire other gay men to re-connect to their own. Until a few months ago, I never realised how special my own family was. And I never appreciated how deeply my own actions could influence our development and unity.

It is because of experiences like these that I am so happy and proud to be a part of The Velvet Journey. The learnings and discoveries I have made over the years of coaching with Tony have helped me create a life that is truly fulfilled in every sense. And I am extremely excited to be able to help bring his method, his awareness and his love for others to a wider audience.

I believe that anyone can improve his or her own relation with her parents and siblings. For sure, it may take time, effort, patience and forgiveness. But it is worth it. Love overcomes anything in the long run. Communicate with love, show your appreciation, and express your feelings. As you accept and love yourself you will learn to accept and love everyone around you, for exactly who they are. And what if they are not as accepting as you would like? Accept and love them regardless, and be patient. Be grateful for what you have been given: they have helped shape you, are a part of you, and therefore deserve your love.

As one of my younger brothers said, we have “the best family in the world”. However, you do too. So take a minute to think right now how you have affected your family over the years. What could you do today to improve your relationship with them? What steps can you take to expressing your love for them and showing them your appreciation? The grass isn’t greener on the other side; it is greener where you water it. So fill your watering can with your own love, and pour it over your family, your friends and above all, your dreams.

Will Pike – October 2012