How To Manage And Transform Your Emotions In Life

Emotions are powerful, and they have the power to make us feel elated or take us to a deep dark place.

Everything we interact with influences our emotions. The people we see daily, the music we listen to, and the media we watch influence our feelings. We can go from feeling inspired to very discouraged all in one day.

If they have such power over us, shouldn’t we spend much time learning how to deal with them? But unfortunately, we are not taught how to deal with thoughts and emotions as children.

It is just not given the same amount of importance as sciences or math. If we can’t figure out how to manage and control emotions, it can lead to stress and anxiety in our daily lives.

Types Of Emotions

Humans experience a wide range of emotions in their daily lives. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, renowned spiritual leader and author of the book, The Joy Of Living, writes that there are three categories of emotions: positive, negative, and neutral.

Positive emotions are things like love, compassion, friendship, and loyalty. They strengthen the mind, build our confidence and enhance our ability to assist those in need of help.

Fear, anger, sadness, jealousy, grief, and envy are negative emotions. These emotions weaken the mind, undermine our confidence and increase fear.

Neutral feelings are the feelings we might have toward a pencil, paper, etc.

How We Relate To Emotions

Most of us are taught to push our feelings and emotions down and hide them with busyness. Mingyur Rinpoche, in his book, shares that he suffered from panic attacks as a child.

His father pointed out that disturbing emotions are expressions of the mind in the same way that intense heat is a product or expression of the sun.

Through meditation, young Rinpoche learned to watch his thoughts and emotions as they came and went. As a result, he began to understand how overwhelming thoughts and emotions were expressions of his mind.

Over time he found that his relationship with these experiences has shifted. Instead of being overwhelmed by them, he welcomed the lessons they offered.

Every mental affliction is actually the basis of wisdom. If we get caught up in our afflictions or try to repress them, we just end up creating more problems for ourselves. If instead, we look at them directly, the things we fear will kill us are gradually transformed into the strongest supports for meditation we could ever hope for.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Dealing With Emotions

Every significant encounter in life has the power to take over us if we aren’t careful. Let it be a job loss, a breakup, or a loss of a loved one. Each one can have an equal amount of impact on our life.

If we don’t learn how to manage them, these events can send us spiraling for days or months. We can learn how to deal with them and not be overwhelmed through practice.

Through emotions meditation, we can learn to pay attention to our emotions. We can learn to notice what is happening in our bodies when experiencing a challenging emotion. For example, we can watch our bodies’ reactions when experiencing emotions such as anger, fear, restlessness, etc.

When experiencing anger during conversations, you may notice that your voice is elevated, your facial muscles tensing up, your jaw clenching, and your breath becoming shallow.

By becoming aware of these sensations, you can interpret and react in a different way to situations. This awareness lets you relax your facial muscles and pay attention to your breath so you can deepen it.

Meditating Using Emotions

In his course, The Joy Of Living, Mingyur Rinpoche teaches how to practice emotions meditation. The primary purpose here is to bring awareness to emotion. To practice the emotions meditation, follow the steps below:

Maintain your meditation posture and rest your mind as it is.
Watch your emotions. Watch the bodily sensations caused by the emotions you are experiencing.
Now rest the mind as it is.

Watching emotions is just like watching thoughts or listening to sounds. It does not matter which emotion arises — anger, hatred, desire, or anxiety. Do not try to control it. Just allow emotions to come, be in awareness, and allow them to dissolve.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Benefits Of Managing Our Emotions

Learning how to manage and transform our emotions can be a life-changing skill. Knowing that we can manage, change and course-correct our emotions is liberating. Some of the benefits that I experienced include the following:

Managing our emotions in difficult situations allows us not to be hung up on proving our point but on bringing ourselves back to normal. You can pause and pay attention to the emotion in the other person. You can listen to the other person whole heartily without waiting to jump in when you notice a gap.
We can consciously decide the kind of day we want to have. We can choose not to be bothered by someone who wasn’t in the store or someone who raced past us on the street.
We can realize that we are upset and angered at the moment and let it go. We can label our emotions, see what they did to our bodies, and set them free. We can get back fresh to whatever is next on our plate.

Life gives us plenty of opportunities to practice a wide range of emotions. Some are pleasant, while others aren’t. Naturally, we deal with the pleasant ones with ease. However, the difficult ones are the ones that need the most practice.

We can practice working with emotions through regular meditation and understanding their impact on us. Once we do, we know that emotions, like thoughts, come and go. We learn to make peace with them and carry on without letting them overwhelm us.