Emotions are not always bad
While most of you may be facing a tough time controlling your emotions, you should know that not all your emotions are bad. Some of them crop up to make your realize something about yourself or about the world. Emotions like fear, anger, anxiety, depression, and loneliness are extremely challenging to deal with. But these emotions come up so that you realize that something needs to change outside. If you know how to channelize these emotions, you are unlikely to be affected by them.
Don’t beat yourself up if you are an emotional person. Feeling negative emotions is normal for people who have had unpleasant experiences in the past. It’s the presence of emotions that prevent us from acting like animals. But when disturbing emotions crop up repeatedly, you may want to take a look at them. It’s important because harboring such emotions can trigger sleeplessness, addiction, and physical and mental ill-health. This is where you age-old practices like meditation come into play.
Meditation: An Emotional Regulator
There’s no doubt that meditation calms the mind and reduces stress. The practice of mindfully breathing in and breathing out soothes the nervous system and helps you tackle better with stressors. But meditation is more than just a peaceful and calming practice. It brings about significant changes in one’s thinking patterns, making them more open and accepting to life’s experiences. The underlying principle, however, is mindfulness, which means being fully aware of the present moment without any judgments.
Our emotions in certain situations are triggered by the information that’s stored deep in the subconscious mind. Beliefs, memories, habits, self-image and personality traits are stored in this part of the human mind. Meditation works by helping you tap into your subconscious mind and become more aware of your emotions. By becoming aware of your emotions, you will be able to control them better. There will come a point where you won’t be affected much by negative emotions because your mind learned how to deal with them.
Mindfulness meditation requires you to become a mere observer of your thoughts and feelings. Negative emotions like anger, fear, sadness and jealousy can spiral up inside and debilitate you completely. But mindfulness meditation can help you deal with these emotions. By helping you step out of your shoes and looking at these emotions from a third-person’s perspective, you realize their impermanence. It gives you a chance to experience an emotion fully in the way it is and gradually overcoming it.
At the same time, meditation also fosters positive emotions like happiness, joy and love by rewiring negative thought patterns. It helps you to look at the problem objectively. It makes you realize that no problem in the world is so big that it can’t be solved. When you start looking at your problems objectively, you are more likely to respond in an appropriate manner and not break down emotionally. All you have to do is becoming a little more mindful of yourself and the world around you.
Whenever you feel an emotion coming, simply stop whatever you are doing and bring your attention to the feeling. Observe the emotion and give it a name. Simply to listen to your thoughts without engaging with them and allow yourself to experience the emotion as it is. After you identify your emotion, just take a few deep breaths and remind yourself that the emotion holds no relevance in the present moment. Affirm to yourself that you are no these negative emotions and thoughts. You are far better than them.
With time and regular practice, meditation will tune your brain to think positively and deal with negative emotions in a more constructive manner. All you need to intent, patience and the belief that you can do it.
