Manage your mind, manage your feelings

A calm attitude preserved at all times
bespeaks a man of culture.
Buddhist saying

Unwanted emotions are caused by unhelpful perspectives and thoughts. That's where it all begins. As long as the negative thoughts persist, so will the emotions to which those thoughts give birth. Amongst the most common destructive emotions are anxiety, guilt and shame. The sorts of thoughts that give rise to anxiety are concerns about safety and avoidance of shame. Think about it for a moment - when do you get anxious and why? Guilt is generated by fears of being judged by others in the way you are judging yourself. Consider the situations in which you feel guilt, and you will recognize that self-judgment is at its source. Shame is an intense version of guilt in which the judgment of self and others reaches fever pitch.
Some emotions arise because old thoughts have created reactive patterns. Fear of spiders, for example, requires no thinking at all. The fear seems to be immediate. However, a negative thought or two about spiders in the past has created a reactive pattern that now kicks into gear as soon as a spider is sighted. Such negative emotion may then generate negative thought, in which case we've come full circle. Thoughts have created emotions, and emotions are now creating thought.

Negative thoughts of old,
created old emotions
which arise again
when those old memories are triggered.

Allowing yourself to maintain negative emotions for long periods of time is, in addition to being extremely unpleasant both for yourself and others, also very compromising on your health. Prolonged experiences of negative emotions can double your chances of getting a whole raft of illnesses. The likelihood of everything from headaches to heart disease increases when you allow toxic emotions to become entrenched. In fact, so damaging are they, that the health risks from toxic emotions can be as serious as smoking and high levels of cholesterol.

To indulge in toxic emotion
is to age your body and invite dis-ease.

The way out of this self-created problem (no-one can make us feel anything - it is all our own doing), is to allow yourself to feel what you feel, and notice what those feelings are telling you about yourself. They may be telling you what you are believing about the situation that has created the feelings, but will also be inviting you to take action on your own behalf in order that unacceptable behaviours from others are stated to be just that.

Thus, give yourself time to feel what you are feeling. Best do this in a non-confrontative situation, where you can focus on what's going on within, rather than have to deal with other people whilst you are stirred up. Dealing with unwanted feelings is never easy, and requires that you make an effort to listen to yourself rather than react as you might once have done. Once we've settled down, we can always converse more usefully about what is going on inside.

Excerpt from The 12 Choices of Winners, Book 1 in The Spiritual Life Mastery Series, by Jeffery Saunders. The associated cartoons cannot be displayed.