Living at Peace with Your Emotions
Learn how to stay centered in the grip of strong emotions and use them to deepen the understanding of yourself
How we feel at this moment often shape the way we perceive the quality of our life. Ask someone who is feeling stressful about her quality of life and you are likely to get an answer that is weighed down by her heavy emotion. But ask the same person again after she has received a promotion and a pay raise, and you’ll get a completely different answer.
If emotions play such an important role in our lives, shouldn’t we learn to live at peace with them? Instead of being constantly driven left and right by our moods, how can we stay centered no matter how we feel, especially in the grip of strong emotions like anger and fear? Perhaps, you have heard or read of ways on how to manage your feelings in the past. But today, let us explore a less common way.
No bad feelings
If we look at our emotions closely, we will come to realize that there is no such thing as a bad feeling. Your anger and despair are the same as your joy and your excitement. They are all inner experiences with accompanying sensations that you feel in your body, usually in response to some external or internal trigger.
When we label our feelings as good or bad, we create the tendency to hold on to our pleasant feelings, while at the same time develop the compulsion to resist the unpleasant ones. But, emotions and feelings by themselves are harmless. Every feeling tries to tell us something that we need to deal with, or something that we need to know about ourselves.
So before we begin to look into how we can live in harmony with our emotions, we have to stop labeling our feelings as good or bad. From now on, treat all your emotions as equals, no matter how much you like or dislike some of them.
In addition, we also need to first understand how emotions work. Here’s one suggested approach: See emotions as special messengers. Every messenger has its unique characteristics. When it comes knocking, you will feel a certain sensation in your body. Some may quicken your heart beat, while some may slow it down. Some will make you feel heavy, while some makes you feel as light as a feather. No matter how it feels, when the job is done, the messenger will eventually go away.
But, what happens when the messenger knocks and there is no answer? The ever-responsible messenger will try again, again and again until it gets an answer. Same goes with our emotions. You will find yourself getting worked up, depressed, or fearful over similar issues when you fail to face up to them. Only when we consistently suppress or run away from our feelings do they start to play havoc on our body and mind, leading to illnesses and diseases.
How then should we manage these special messengers?
Living with Your “Special Messengers”
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Acknowledge
The first step obviously is to acknowledge your feeling. Don’t deny, suppress or pretend that it’s not there. Be fully aware of your feeling. Call it by its name. If anger is brewing inside, admit that you are angry. If guilt is what you are going through, then tell yourself you are feeling guilty. -
Receive unconditionally
Now that you’ve opened the door to acknowledge the messenger, the next logical thing to do is to receive the messenger. When you receive a guest, you don’t receive only the part that you like. It’s impossible. You accept the entire person as a whole. And that means you accept your feelings unconditionally.Own your feelings. Don’t belittle or beat yourself for feeling a certain way. In whatever forms they take, your emotions are part of you. Stop any form of self-judgment and self-bashing. If you are tempted to judge your feeling, say something true about it instead, like “I am upset and it feels like a clump of energy stuck in my chest.”
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Be fully present
After receiving the messenger, you let the messenger do his job. You don’t slam the door in its face without waiting for it to finish what it has been sent to do. That means you need to stay with your emotion.But, this is not the same as asking you to watch the messenger as if it is doing something that has completely nothing to do with you. That will be equivalent to detaching from your feeling. To detach yourself means you keep a distance between you and your emotion. Detachment is also a form of resistance to what is. Instead, stay with it and experience it fully. Be interested and curious about it. Don’t keep any distance between you and your feelings.
Yet at the same time, don’t get carried away by what the messenger is doing and joins in its act. Be aware of your feeling without being dragged down by it, experience it without getting entangled within its stories, stay with it without trying to control it. Feel the you who is experiencing the rage, the exhilaration, the sadness, the shame, or whatever that you are going through without trying to resist it or to dwell in it.
Let the message reveals itself
By practicing the three steps — acknowledging, accepting and being present with your feeling – you allow the message within the emotion to unveil itself. If the message is clear, the action to take is usually self-revealing. Then, act confidently, even if it means inaction. But, when the message is not clear, be patient. Some emotions may contain many layers of history that will take a longer time, as well as patience and perseverance, to reveal their true message.
Why some emotions are more complex than others? One of the reasons is due to long-term suppression of our feelings and a refusal to face the message behind them. The more we ignore the message, however, the fuzzier it gets, as it intertwined with other unresolved messages over time until we can no longer recognize the original message. That’s why sometimes we can’t put a finger on why we feel or respond in a certain way as the layers of history are too thick for us to see through clearly.
However, not all feelings have complicated hidden messages. Some are straightforward and simple. While others may look deceptively obvious when in reality they are anything but.
In the course of your practice, do not beat yourself up if you find yourself still resisting or trying to hold on to certain emotions. Everyone of us has emotions that we face great difficulties with and they will take time and courage to face up to. By being aware that you are trying to manipulate how you feel inside is itself a good sign. It shows that your awareness has increased and you are conscious of the inner struggle to let go of controlling your experience. Continue to pay attention to such emotions. See what sort of feelings and images do they invoke within you. Notice how they change when you give them your unflinching attention.
Regardless of how complicated a particular emotion is, the good news is, there is really nothing else you need to do other than the steps mentioned earlier. By giving your inner experiences your fullest presence, you will dramatically transform the relationship between you and your emotions — you will not be propelled by your emotions to speak or act carelessly any more. You will no longer be a slave to your emotions.
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Loved it. I am on an emotional roller coaster at the moment and this article helped me see things more clearly . Thank you.
You’re most welcome, hind. Personally, whenever I’m on one of those rides, I also find it useful to remind myself of the quote “this too, will pass”. I’m sure you’ll emerge a little stronger each time you finished a ride. Enjoy.
Hi there! If the recommendation is to accept, receive and be present with the emotion, how would one deal with emotions in the presence of others? For example, if one feels nervous during a business presentation, wouldn’t being present with the emotion reveal the person’s fears and jitters?
Thanks for taking the time to write, Andrew. Below are some of my thoughts on your question. Please feel free to comment on them.
When I first wrote this article, it was meant to help one to come to terms with complex emotions, usually recurring, that have been consciously or subconsciously suppressed or denied. Running away from these feelings only serves to limit our potential as human beings as we’re also avoiding the messages behind those emotions that we need to deal with in life. In short, this article can be summarized into 5 simple words: “Be honest with your feelings”.
And to do so requires us to be truthful to the way we feel on a day-to-day basis. By that, I don’t mean we become inconsiderate to the feelings of others, or insisting on nothing but our way because that-is-how-I-feel-about-it.
It also doesn’t mean being a crying baby, a nervous wreck or expressing whatever you’re feeling inside indiscriminately.
What we want to do, instead, is to honor our feelings without getting overwhelmed or sucked into them, so that we gain deeper insight into ‘Why am I feeling this way?”.
Is it an overemphasis on loss and gain? Is it an irrational fear of failure? Is it a symptom of my chronic worrying trait? Or is it because I’m just not well-prepared enough for this presentation? Only by owning up to yourself about the way you feel, will you be on the path to knowing yourself better.
Being present with our feelings also connects us to the present moment instead of reliving past mistakes or fabricating an imaginary future, giving us the wisdom to do what is required of us at the moment.
This bring us back to your question. How do we apply this approach in the presence of other people? My answer is, with or without the presence of others, it doesn’t matter. It all depends on how honest you want to be with yourself.
When you choose to honor and be present with your emotions, you will act in a way that’s congruent to your principle, even if that means exposing your vulnerabilities.