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Summary

Hell is empty and the devils are here. I help cast out the devil and bring out the angel inside every one of us so that we can thrive and triumph as human beings. Life Coach. Playwright. 

About

Are you in the winter of your discontent, and struggling and failing to navigate your personal and professional life?

Is the sheer comedy, tragedy and enormity of it all derailing you from becoming the best version of yourself?

Are you disillusioned and disappointed with where you are at in your life, currently?

If so, you should seriously consider talking to me.

I’m William Shakespeare, former playwright, poet and actor, turned Life Coach. I’m also known as The Bard of Avon, and widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language.

I’m not your average bitch-boy coach with a franchise qualification and accreditation. If you want one of those, you can shake any LinkedIn tree, and one will fall out. 

If you want someone who has been shattered by life, and went back in and kicked the shit out of it and succeeded, and claimed his rightful place in the world, then I’m your coach.

I can teach you how to do that.

I’ve been in the cut and thrust of this journey. I’ve been pummelled with tragedy, betrayal, self-doubt, vindictiveness, joy, love, loathing, loss, depression and degradation. 

I’ve seen the armpit of humanity in all its forms. The sweat and stink of lost dreams, torrid tears and treacherous flights of fancy. I’ve also seen the heart of humanity, its beauty, its vulnerability, and its infinite capacity for love. 

My job is to help you to stop festering, fearing, flailing and drowning in a pool of rancid sweat. My job is to help them come into your heart, into your light, and into your power so that you can claim your rightful place at the table of success. When I’m done with you, you’ll never settle for scraps again.

You may ask, what qualifies me to be a life coach?

Not to be coy, I tick all three of these boxes: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. I know a trick or two about the human condition.

• From 1590 – 1613 (23 years) I made it my life’s work to study the human condition so that I could answer the important questions that beset all of humankind. To that end, I wrote at least 39 masterworks and 150 short and long poems. You may have heard of some of them – The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing (your singer Cher, made that title even better when she said, “​​The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing – and then marry him.”), Henry V, Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.
  
• I’ve known pure and profound love with my wife, Anne Hathaway and our three children, Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. She was 26 and I was 18 when we married. She was the love of my life. She was my soul.
  
• My son, Hamnet was taken from us at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596. It was the greatest loss of my life, and I never quite recovered. Thank God that I died (​​23 April 1616) before my darling Anne (6 August 1623). I would not have made it without her.
  
• I’ve faced betrayal and besmirching of my reputation. Even though there are persistent rumours, Christopher Marlowe did not write any of my plays. For goodness sakes, he was a lightweight … he only wrote five plays. So, get over that one.
  
• The better part of valour is discretion. I had to run from the law and hide out in London for a while because I was accused of deer poaching. I just found the bloody thing lying in my path.

You can see that I’ve done some shit. I’ve lived a life. I understand, probably more than anyone else on this planet, including the biggest Oedipus complex ever, Sigmund Freud and archetype anarchist, Carl Jung.

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. If you’re uneasy and unsure about your place in the world, then speak to me. I’ll help you get over your pathetic vision of yourself so that you can stop eating scraps from the floor and sit at the grownups table, where you have a shot at success. Reach out to me. 

Your only question is, “To be or not to be …” (the Matrix movie bastardised that and called it the blue pill or red pill … amateurs, I tell you). If you say, “It’s to be”, then I’ll help you kick the shit out of life so that you can triumph as a human being.

You can find me at ​​Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom.

When you come to my door, you’ll see the words “Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear, to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.”

Just use the password so that you aren’t cursed, but blessed. The password is I want to create a masterpiece because I am a masterwork.

That’ll get you in to see me. Let’s do this thing together, you and I. Let’s sit at the table of success.

I really appreciate you. I appreciate that you give up of your time to read my pieces of text. They’re often not easy to read, because you can see my internal struggle with my existential crises. Sometimes I think reading my stuff must be like watching a train wreck happening, and being powerless to do anything about it.

But, you’re still here, so perhaps you like wroeging with me. Perhaps my struggles mirror your own. You get that this is no ordinary blog post, and if you’re getting it, you’re meant to be getting it. Maybe you and I can ‘get it’ together.

I’m not sure if it is because the planets are in retrograde, but I’m feeling unsettled (more so than usual), unmoored and uneasy.

My finances have been unsettling the fuck out of me. It’s either feast or famine with me. Do you ever feel like that?

To that end, I decided to go for a kinesiology session with intuitive healer, Estelle Kapp.

Jinne tog, it was a mind bending, heart-wrenching and soul-affirming experience. I had to risk knowing myself so that I could manifest my desire. I got through the crucible somewhat changed, and a bit more settled despite the retrograding planets’ best intentions to unsettle me.

I came in with the question: Why do I have money blocks?

It turns out that I don’t have a money issue, I have a self-loathing issue. WTF. It turns out that I live to punish myself. I thought I lived for roast lamb and potatoes. Talk about being confused.

Here’s what came up.

1. I sabotage myself by thinking that it’s not ok for me to be spiritual (take that you Sufi wannabe). I even wrote a book about my spiritual journey.
2. It’s not ok for me to have a place among grownups and to succeed. What the hell do I do with that? Why can’t I sit at the grownups table?
3. It turns out that I’m also a ‘lost child’ which stems from a dysfunctional, abusive family life. I merge into the background to protect myself. I play small so that others feel big. I hide my light so that others can shine. I even shot a short video about that called Those People. Ironically, it wasn’t about ‘those people’, but about me.
4. Most telling of all, because I feel that I couldn’t protect my mother, I’ve become the quintessential rescuer.

None of these are good things, I tell you. But at least they’re out in the open, and revealed to me. Now I can do something about them.

What’s the point of exposing the inner workings of my brain, heart and soul to you?

I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s a cautionary tale for you that not everything is as it appears. Maybe you don’t have money issues, relationship issues or health issues. For me, it’s self-loathing, for you it might be something else.

It may just be worth exploring because once you cut through the Gordian Knot of unsolvable pain, and unblock what holds you back, you have a semblance of a chance of manifesting your deepest desires. Who knows?

You’re the Job.

Apparently burnout is the disease (dis ease) of our age, and it’s a verifiable affliction.

I don’t know about you, but for me there are days that I find difficult to get through. Everything is a schlep, difficult and dull. There are days when I want to boomerang my mobile off the wall and blow it all up. The lot. Sometimes I feel as if I have burnout.

My adrenal glands are pumping goodness knows what into my system (ok, smart ass … I know it’s adrenaline), and it makes me feel quite ill. These are the days that I wish someone would take this burden off me. These are the days that the Snub Nose 38’s siren song beckons to me, bringing me the promise of peace.

Luckily I listened to this discourse below, and it gave me enough insight to stave off burnout.

My spiritual preceptor, Shaykh Ebrahim Schuitema gave a discourse which put my questions about burnout into context. It was most helpful for me. It may be helpful to you.

Why is it that some people can work very hard for extended periods of time. I mean really hard. Be sleep-deprived. Work as exhausting hours as another person, and yet they don’t get burnt out. Why do some people get burnt out, and other people don’t? It occurs to me that this really has something to do not with the work itself, but with what goes on inside one.

Burnout is an intent problem

The root of the problem comes from the whole idea of resources. We are so used to thinking about the world in terms of resources.

We even think of people as resources, hence a human resources department. The word resource has dominated our economic thinking. It stands to reason that a resource gets consumed.

We have conditional motives, and we consume something to get something. Examine the structure of any conditional motive. We do something to get something. I am a resource, and the degree to which I treat myself as a resource to get an outcome, is the degree to which I will deplete myself and eventually burn myself out. I literally consume myself.

Now this becomes really obvious when you think about basic things. How is it that one day you can find exactly the same activity completely exhausting, and on another day you find it nourishing?

Lug your carcass up the mountain

Like walking up a mountain, for instance. Sometimes the walk is unmitigated hell. You’re just suffering walking up the mountain, and you are having to lug your carcass in order to get to the top of the mountain. And when you’re walking like that – in order to get to the top of the mountain – if there’s a rock, you’re going to fall over it. If there’s a bush we’re going to walk through it, you’re going to get yourself injured and bruised. Why? Because all your attention is on the top of the mountain, and you’re trying to get over the hurdle of what’s in front of you to get there.

If you’re doing something in order to get there, you’re basically being discourteous to the immediate. It’s a discourtesy to what’s in front of you because you push your way through it.

Of course, there’s another way to walk up the mountain. And, that is actually to walk in order to enjoy the walk. And that means that your motive has inverted.

I’m not walking to get to the top of the mountain, the top of the mountain is my means to have a good walk.

There’s a shift of my attention from what I’m trying to get to what I’m doing. In a sense I’m giving into the moment that I’m in.

We’ve all had this. Why is it that sometimes you suffer on a journey, and exactly the same journey, and another time, you find it a pleasure? You suffer the journey when you’re in a hurry to get to the destination. Then the journey becomes a thing of affliction and misery that you have to suffer through to get to the outcome that you want.

You could enjoy the journey, give attention to the things that are passing you and so on. And then, strangely, you get to the outcome faster.

And, you’re not exhausted yourself in the process of getting there. So this thing about doing things to get somewhere else, giving in order to get (conditional motive). That’s the thing that exhausts you. It is not the journey. It’s not the action. It is not what sits in the outer world. It’s what sits in the inside of your inner space. It is the structure of your intent that depletes you. Anything that you do from the point of view of doing it in order to achieve something else and to get somewhere else, will exhaust you.

Studying is an excellent example. Some people are good students, because they love studying. Those people are nourished by study. Other people suffer studying in order to get through the exam. That studying exhausts, depletes and makes them hostile to the experience of studying. So, if you think about it, the life of the student is studying, and there’s the outcome of the examination, and the degree.

If you’re using the outcome, the examination, as an opportunity to really focus your studying so that you can study well, then studying becomes pleasurable. But if studying is the thing that you have to suffer to get the degree, then you destroy yourself in the process. You deplete yourself in the process, and it’s not inconceivable for a student to get burnout.

This single insight is such a deep indictment of how many parents deal with the whole issue of their children. “You must get a degree. You must sell your life to the slavers so that you can become useful to the system.” And then we’re surprised that we produce people, who, in their 40s start to have midlife crises, mess around, and leave their spouses. We start having extreme stress problems because we manufacture those people with these insane demands of having to comply. You have to understand that the problem of this disease of consuming yourself is not just doing things for selfish ends.

So if I reflect back on a period that I spent on a mine that I found very depleting. Why is this? Well, there were a host of issues. I had the naive belief that I could actually be useful to the client. So there was an outcome for the mine that I had in mind. I was also there, truth be told, because I had real financial responsibilities, so I had to earn money. I don’t think I would have taken nearly the amount of nonsense I got from that client if there wasn’t an anxiety about money. I was also there, because I was concerned about the rest of the team that I was leading on that client’s side.

So most of those reasons weren’t actually selfish. They were quite benign. But I was going to the mine in order to achieve an outcome. I wasn’t going to the mine to enjoy the work. Now I’m not saying that one shouldn’t achieve an outcome. We’re not on this path for absolute hedonism. The trick is to do the work to do it well. It’s an onerous burden if you think, “I’ve got to get through in order to earn my keep here.” You could also say, “Well, how can I turn this into a pleasurable experience?”

Anything done in the spirit of doing it in order to do it well, is a pleasurable experience. Don’t just do things to get through getting them done, this will definitely consume you and exhaust you. Rather ritualise your life. Everything has its courtesy. In other words, you do the thing to do it well, to be eloquent. Don’t do things just to get them done. When you do that, you consume yourself in the process.

You’re the Job.

Jacques

☞ó ͜つò☞ Check out what I’m getting up to. If you’re a lightworker or earth angel, you should definitely check it out.