Can you master your emotions?

Early on in my own journey of healing and spiritual development, I ended up heading down a pathway that ultimately turned out to be one of subtle abuse and harm to my system. It was the pathway and trying to master my emotional and mental bodies. While this sounds like a good idea it really was not because the teachings I was following were rooted in a belief system that if you are truly healed or awakened you no longer have or indulge “lower level” emotions like anger, rage, disgust, fear, worry, irritation, disappointment, and so on. 

The Illusion of Control 

The teachings I was working with were heavily rooted in “brain science” and the latest mental health and wellness practices. They took the information we were gaining about the brain and neuroscience and mixed it with meditation teachings to produce different ways to hack our nervous system and “rewire” it. The goal was to separate ourselves from becoming personally attached to or experiencing troubling emotions and thoughts. That way you gained “control” over the negative emotions and thoughts and could remain connected to the inner states of the nervous system that were associated with the chemical responses of calm and peace. Again, these techniques are not inherently on the wrong track but the way they were accomplishing an illusion of mastery, not true resolution.

I wasn’t alone in the road I was traveling, over the last 20 years there have been a whole host of different techniques emerging that are based on “healing” and regulating the nervous system through mindset management and hacks. Emotional and mental mastery, taking charge of your system, and self-mastery have become buzzwords for mental health, wellness, and personal or spiritual growth teachings. Each technique promises quick access to the “system” that can create relief from being tossed around by the throws and struggles of lower-level emotions, stress responses, and limiting beliefs that ensnare us and rob us of our joy, happiness, and success.

Embracing Emotions as Messengers

While many of these approaches do often bring temporary success and relief, they also come with a huge backlash in the system. The long-term impact of approaching and working with our system through that type of doorway ultimately can create tons of hidden inner divisions, shame, and harm to us physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually because instead of seeking harmony and freeing up of the trapped traumas and survival fears in the system they move us deeper into separation, judging our system as good and bad, instead of creating more wholeness, harmony, and true balance. 

However, when we release the idea that negative emotions are the source of our problems and something to be edited out of our system, we can see emotions for what they are - simply messengers for all the different Parts of our system. Emotions themselves can’t do anything. They are not designed to create harm or havoc in our system.It is how we relate with them that can create harm and issues of imbalances within our system.

After a few years of traveling down the road of trying to transcend my emotional body and master my mind, I started to realize that many of the different interventions that I was learning to do in order to manage or delete “negative” emotions and thoughts were all simply creating smoke screens of detachment from them. In truth, I was exiling them into the corners of my system and as a result of that creating a HUGE amount of pressure in my system. Instead of true regulation and freedom of choice I was actually becoming more reactive and dysregulated.

Pema Chödrön’s Teachings

Luckily, I came across the teachings of Pema Chodron, an American Buddist Monk and teacher of Buddhist practices and also spirituality and personal freedom. She was the first meditation teacher I found who totally challenged the idea that meditation was designed to only help you feel happy, peaceful, and good. She teaches that this is not the goal of meditation. She debunks the belief that meditation is trying to stop the system from engaging in emotions or thoughts and instead teaches that meditation is designed to help you create a quality of presence needed to tend to the thoughts and emotions that we witness within meditation in healthier ways. Meditation to her is cultivating the ability and willingness to turn toward the system with love and compassion. This way, meditation is designed to help you develop the capacity and willingness to consciously choose how you want to tend to that which you were witnessing, not ignore it or avoid it.

She is quoted saying, “Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.”

WOW, this was a game changer for me having a teacher invite me into honesty! For 10 years I had been trying to master my system and to become untouched by emotions, pain, suffering, lower level thoughts and my body, mind, and heart were more distant from me than when I started. Her work was like a huge exhale in my system. I swear my whole system celebrated when I found her work and messages because they helped me wake up and realize that the current approach and help I was giving my system wasn’t help at all; it was actually incredibly abusive. 

I love her teachings and those similar to it because they give us permission to be a whole person. She helps us release the toxic expectation that through healing or personal growth work we will no longer feel negativity anymore - because we will. We will have feelings of sadness, anger, disappointments, confusion, rage, dysregulation, jealousy, unworthiness, fear, and/or anxiety because those emotions and thoughts are a part of the whole. The bigger question she invites us into is what do we do with those emotions and thoughts, how do we want to relate to them. Avoid them, blindly follow them, OR tend to them. To relate to them in a way that is balanced we need to “take a good look” at them and explore what reasons they have for being there and to tend to them without being squeamish.

Her work helped me move beyond the mind/body paradigm and open to a holistic approach of also valuing and enlisting the Heart and Soul in my Self-Work. As I opened to the Heart Being I saw emotions from a very different point of view.

Emotions are simply messengers, neither good or bad, right or wrong. They are messengers for different aspects of us. They are designed to help us interact with all the different needs, wants, and desires within our system.

Emotions can help us know what we want to move toward and what we want to experience more of. They help give us insights into things that we don’t like and want to experience less of. They help bring our attention to Parts of us that are nervous, confused, hurt, and want our attention. When we try to control them or tell ourselves what type of emotion we should or should not be having, that is when we stop allowing our system to clearly communicate with us and start being a dictator of what it should be doing - this is a tricky path to follow!

The wise question then becomes, what are helpful and healthy ways of working with emotions and thoughts?

1. To learn how to engage emotions with loving compassion and curiosity via healthy separation instead of being blending fully with that as “me”.
2. To cultivate a willingness to befriend emotions as messengers for Parts of us.
3. Being willing to allow emotions to help facilitate you directly engaging with the Parts of you that the emotions are the messenger for and tending to them from a place of true choice and empowerment. 

This simple approach does pull from different meditation techniques of being about to notice emotions as something separate from us and not who we personally are as step one.

Yet, it is steps two and three that creates a healing relationship with emotions. We can’t stop at just observing an emotion as not us because that step alone does not bring us to the place of understanding who and what that emotion is a messenger for. If we stop at just step one, it leaves unmet needs and the Parts of us that are seeking support feeling abandoned, ignored, and judged as wrong or unworthy of attention. Eventually that will “get the better of us” like Pema said in her teaching. 

I dive deeper into how to engage in beginning to befriend our emotions as messengers in a couple of different resources:

1. Free Resources: Episode 20 of Soulful Practices Podcast - Befriending Emotions (YouTube / Spotify)
2. Paid Resources: Season 5 of Connecting with Joy our online community and membership site. Season 5 of CWJ is dedicated to helping us connect with more joy in our lives in healthy ways and one of those ways is to befriend emotions.

I hope my own journey of shifting from trying to “master and control” my emotions to learning how to befriend them as messengers can help serve you on your journey of creating more joy in your life too!