It feels ironic I am writing a post on emotional mastery. If I’m honest, I still have more moments than I’d like to admit where my emotions get the best of me. But, I do realize, like all things in health, perfection doesn’t exist.
Emotional mastery is not about never feeling but acknowledging how you feel and controlling your feelings so they don’t control you. It’s here your entire biology shifts from stress to health by learning how to manage your emotions.
Your feelings run your biology.
Understanding your feelings run your biology makes a lot of sense if we look at diet history or even health history. Perhaps it even makes sense of what hasn’t made sense. No matter how many ‘right’ things you do, if you’re working from a negative emotional state, doing things doesn’t have the same impact. Because the negative emotional state has more hold over your biology than simply trying to eat better, making it nearly impossible to change when you feel terrible about yourself.
Of course, food matters, and it can change the way you feel. It’s why we eat emotionally. A pint of ice cream can ease the pain. Food can change how you feel. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t come back to it.
The problem isn’t emotional eating. It’s exchanging your power, giving it to food rather than holding the power to choose food based on how you want to feel. It’s using food to dictate how you feel rather than understanding the power you hold to change how you feel.
Emotions hold a massive amount of power.
The key to a healthier life is working for the long-term good, not the temporary feeling. Working to achieve a place where you do it when you feel like it and even when you don’t because you know, in the end, it is good.
Emotion is the power driving the outcome of what you do.
Inside this podcast, we dive into the emotional component of biology and how to create emotional mastery. I teach you the art of re-parenting yourself, sitting in hard feelings, and creating confidence even when you don’t like where you are.
All of you is emotional.
You are emotional. It’s what makes you human and the force that drives you. Arguably, everything you do is emotional. Biologically, emotions act as a sense supplying vital information to the body, shifting how it will respond. Like your other senses that take in information, how you feel emotionally is perhaps the most powerful in determining the safety or threat level of the body and the action your body takes.
When your body doesn’t feel safe, it ignites a stress response that shifts energy to self-protection and away from thriving. It shifts your biology to protect energy rather than using it, shutting down critical functions of a healthy system like digestion while overhauling your hormones.
Instead of feeling energized and vibrant, you might feel sluggish and overwhelmed. Always on the alert, guarded, and lacking connection. All because a lack of safety becomes one of your greatest threats and reason enough to shift your entire biology accordingly.
Safety is required to get healthy. And this happens to be an area we often overlook. We often dismiss how we feel, chasing an image of how we want to look.
But how you feel matters perhaps more than anything regarding how you look. Your negative, harsh, and critical feelings about your body and yourself lead you deeper into unhealthy places, no matter how hard and desperate you are for something to change.
It feels cruel that the body would respond this way. But it’s an act of protection for your inner biology. The parts of you that are only concerned about surviving, not how much weight you have to lose.
Your emotions control your biology.
Contrary to popular belief, your emotions are not independent of your life. They are your life. They make up the partnership between your brain and body that interact with various chemicals, hormones, and nerve pathways that shift how your biology communicates.
Energetically speaking, emotions change how energy is altered, making you feel energized or sluggish. Think about the last time you got into a fight with someone you loved. It’s exhausting, almost more so than most forms of physical exertion.
That’s because emotions shift your body’s energy in positive or negative ways, changing the outcome you experience based on the frequency of that emotion (which directly changes your energy field).
A low-frequency emotion, like shame, diminishes your energy, decreasing the energy level running through your entire system. In the process, it ignites the stress response to preserve energy shutting down basic functions necessary for vibrant health.
Likewise, a high-frequency emotion, like joy, enhances your energy, increasing the flow through your entire system. This higher-energy state brings energy to heal, nourish and rejuvenate your body.
Like everything inside the body, the goal is to create and maintain homeostasis. Emotionally, that means a homeostatic frequency optimal for healing and nourishment.
Achieving a state of homeostasis, or balance, a state of thriving expresses itself emotionally as a feeling of well-being and joy. Happiness, love, and deep connection are expressed as you move into higher frequencies and deeper healing.
Healing your emotions to heal your biology.
To get well, you must first know that all things are emotional. Second, you can change how you feel. Understanding how to regain control of your feelings is easier when you understand the difference between emotions and feelings.
Emotions are short-lived, intense, and uncontrolled responses to specific stimuli. They are sensations inside the body based on specific experiences. Generally speaking, humans have the same fundamental emotional experiences.
Feelings are long-lasting and somewhat controlled because personal experiences and thoughts shape them. Technically, they are a perception of how we interpret emotions generated from our thoughts about the emotion experienced.
Emotions come first, and feelings come after.
Neither feelings nor emotions can be escaped or ignored. No matter how much we’d like to believe you can shove, suppress and dismiss your feelings, those feelings are always there unless you deal with them. The goal is not to stop feeling; it’s learning how to use those feelings for good.
The only way forward is to deal with what you feel.
And by that, I mean acknowledging and sitting with your feelings, no matter how much you hate it. Then shift your story and perspective of it.
Get comfortable sitting in your feelings without being consumed by them while changing the story to something better.
It’s not perfect, nor will it ever be. But emotional mastery is necessary for living a healthy and vibrant life.
6 Steps to Create Emotional Mastery
Emotional mastery is simply controlling your emotions so they don’t control you. The goal is to use your emotions positively to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. It won’t be perfect. Nothing good is. Rather emotional mastery is awareness of what you feel and understanding you hold the power to influence how you feel, releasing your need to find comfort in external (and often unhealthy) sources.
Mastery is a way of life, not an arrival. Here are six steps to help you get there.
Step 01: Decide You Want It
I know you think you want it. But what we think and what we do often don’t align. No matter how great your intentions are (most people’s are pretty great), we’ll often repeat old patterns because they’re safe.
For many people, the survival pattern is the only thing they know. No matter how much you hate it and want to change it, it’s kept you safe. It keeps you repeating the bad habits you desperately want to change. But you can change, and it starts by questioning if you even want to be well. Do you want to change?
All change, even good change, comes with a cost. It’s not easy, and it will take pushing you out of what’s comfortable for the sake of what’s better. You have to decide if you want that.
Step 02: Acknowledge What You Feel
Step two is where the rubber meets the road. It’s easy to decide you want it. It’s harder to sit in the outcome of what that brings. Sitting with your feelings is never easy. It’s uncomfortable and triggering, leading many people to revert to old patterns that allow you to shove, stuff, and ignore your problems (no matter how temporary that may be).
When you choose to do the work, you’re choosing to sit with the uncomfortable feelings. But one important factor making this process less painful is remembering that just because you feel it, it doesn’t mean it’s true or part of you. Acknowledging how you feel is not the same as accepting it as truth. The key is learning how to feel what you feel. Living aware of it without accepting it and appreciating your emotions, knowing they support you.
Step 03: Get Curious About What You’re Feeling
Sitting in your feelings allows you to understand what you feel. When you understand your feelings, you can question why you feel that way. Engage with the feeling or the perspective of that feeling. Why are you feeling this way? Where did it come from? What does your inner child need? Is this an accurate perception of the emotion?
When you know what is triggering you and why, you can do something to shift it. YOU can do it. Not food. Not the addictions or another person. But you can go back to the truth and change it. Re-writing the story you’ve told yourself, shifting your feelings regardless of the emotions. But first, get curious about what and why you feel what you do.
Step 04: Fill that With Truth
When you know why you feel the way you do, you can begin to filter that perspective through your lens of truth. This step is the one I want to emphasize most because it happens to be the step most miss in the emotional mastery work that is becoming more and more popular.
It’s also the step I missed when attempting to do this work years ago while failing to see results. The answer was that I didn’t know what truth I landed on. I didn’t have that grounding force in my life that directed everything about my life. I was like a balloon, untethered and floating around, never complete, never satisfied, never grounded. Just never enough.
It wasn’t until I dove into the deep soul work that my soul (beliefs) was the filter of all my thoughts and emotions and, subsequently, how my body reacts. We like to keep the soul separate. But your soul controls everything through the intricate connection to the mind and body.
The part you can’t miss is having a solid foundation, a rock that grounds you in truth. And this truth becomes the filter of your life. That is the work of Jesus, the cross, God’s intimate creation of you, and the work he wants to do through you. The firm foundation is living planted in Christ. It’s living as a child of God.
Your truth can only take you so far. Your truth has a brokenness that leaves you seeking something else. But Christ’s truth is always and forever faithful. It’s unshakable, never-ending, unwavering, forever, and able to live within you. Christ is the solid rock on which we are called to stand.
It’s here, and only here, that it becomes possible to change.
“See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone,
Isaiah 28:16
a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation;
the one who relies on it
will never be stricken with panic.
But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.”
2 Timothy 2:19
And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades[b] will not overcome it.
Matthew 16:18
Step 05: Live Confident In Yourself
Holding firm in your truth should ignite confidence to withstand any feeling you encounter. Truth ignites confidence to get through any storm, releasing the power from the emotion and putting it back on yourself.
You can also use this step to remember times and places when you successfully handled your emotions. What you did in the past, you can do again. Have confidence in yourself. You are capable of more than you give yourself credit. Now go live!
Step 06: Build a Mantra
Speak life over yourself. Speak goodness. I’m not saying that’s what you’ll get 100% of the time. Part of being human means experiencing various emotions, even negative ones. But what you give attention to, you give the energy to grow.
To break this cycle, get into the pattern of speaking life over yourself. Create a daily mantra of words and reminders of the truth you want to live by. Keep these truths at the forefront of your thoughts, giving your energy to the good things that will help transform your life.
Want to learn more?
How You Heal is an 8-part podcast series devoted to understanding and healing the mind-body connection to create wholeness in your life. Continue following along and listening to the remaining five podcasts, creating a new understanding and implementing healing practices.
Join The Weekly Fill as we dive deeper into the topic of emotional mastery, inner child healing and practical tips on how to heal. Join The Weekly Fill Here!
Check out these additional resources to help you heal:
- How You Heal: Shifting Your Perspective on Health
- How You Heal: Regulate Your Nervous System
- How You Heal: Healthy Ego + Self-Love
- How You Heal: The Human Energy Field
- Does God Care About Your Health?
- How Healthy Are You? Take the quiz to find out…
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