When people seek to take control of their emotional state(s), they often equate that control with suppressing their emotions. They think that directing and redirecting the mind means that one should ignore what is, and in their minds, that includes their emotions.
That can be an easy misunderstanding to fall into – so let’s revisit the interplay between acceptance, directing the mind, and emotions.
Let’s start with acceptance. Acceptance of the present moment means that you are not in resistance to what is. What it doesn’t mean is that you deny what is. Yes, you may be selective of the elements that you give your attention to, but you do not deny the emotional feedback that you get in response to what you are giving your attention to.
Why is this? Because being in acceptance is roughly the same thing as the emotional state of contentment. Denying to yourself that you are in an emotional state that is lower than contentment does not actually help you to be in acceptance, it simply suppresses how you ACTUALLY feel without letting your emotional state change as a result of reaching a place of acceptance in terms of your thoughts. Not only does that suppression not actually improve your emotional state, but denying where your thoughts are, and therefore suppressing your emotions, can also lead to unwanted physical manifestations, such as ulcers, high blood pressure, etc. As your emotions are indicators of your proximity to your Inner Peace, then ignoring those waypoints will only act to desensitize you to these signals over time, which means that you are ultimately not as much in control of your experience as you’d want to be.
When we speak about directing the mind, it is a steering of the mind in response to those emotional waypoints or signals that we just mentioned. In others words, directing and redirecting your thoughts should happen in response to the feedback that you get of how close you are to your Inner Peace (i.e. how you feel). Now, that redirection of the thoughts – which can also include a quieting of the thoughts or a releasing of thoughts – in turn leads to a feeling of relief or release of resistance. We have therefore not suppressed the emotion, but rather changed the mind activity to lead to a change in the emotional state. That redirection may include selectively focusing on some of the conditions of the present moment. So it may be that you are turning a bit of a blind eye to some of the elements that cause you to feel annoyance, distress, anger, anxiety etc. It does not mean turning a blind eye to how you feel – and that can be a tripping point for some when they turn a blind eye at the emotional level rather than at the thought level.
Lastly, let’s also consider the interplay of our emotions with the ‘creation loop’, which is when we continuously recreate the conditions of the present moment in future moments through our continued focus on those elements. For example, you may think of other people as always taking advantage of you, and therefore that is your perspective and experience, which reinforces that belief, which makes you experience even more situations where you feel that you are being taken advantage of. Thus you become stuck in a ‘loop’ that is continuously recreated.
Now, there may be circumstances where an emotional and physical response to thought can cause you to feel a certain way, and then your focus on that emotional reaction can cause an amplification of that emotional response. For example, if you have to give a talk in front of a lot of people which causes you to feel nervous, and then you notice that you are sweating or have a bit of a tremble, your focus is now on feeling nervous, which may make you feel even more nervous or anxious. Now you may wonder whether that is not an instance where you should ignore your emotions to get through the public speaking and calm down.
When you have an emotional and physical response following your thought pattern / offering, these are again indicators that you have an active thought pattern – consciously or subconsciously – that is causing you to have that unwanted reaction. In this case you can try to shift your thoughts and/or quiet the mind; practising being present or ‘in the now’ can help to soothe the active unwanted thought pattern. This redirection of the mind may look like softening your focus on the physical manifestation of the sweaty palms or the flush on your cheeks, and rather focusing on your breath, or interesting elements in the room, and soothing yourself by telling yourself that you have prepared for this.
Quite often when someone refocuses on the material that they are speaking about, the active thoughts causing the nervousness start to deactivate. That’s also why public speaking becomes easier over time for a lot of people, because those fear-causing thoughts are proven to be ‘what if’ thoughts, and with experience those ‘what if’ thoughts of insecurity are deactivated. In the meantime, quieting those ‘what if’ thoughts can be helpful when you get the emotional (and perhaps physical) indicators that a thought-pattern is activated which does not serve you.
However, where you find yourself emotionally is neither appropriate nor inappropriate, and there are no ‘shoulds’ or ‘shouldn’ts’. And yes, sometimes you will be in a state that you don’t want to linger in, but it’s not a failure of any sort to be in an unwanted state. But if you care about mastery of the self because you want to be in your Inner Peace predominantly, then you will use that feedback of your emotional state to make the necessary adjustments to step back into your power.
In summary, our emotional states, which are also indicators of how close we are to our Inner Peace, are really our friends. They give us valuable information on when we want to do some fine-tuning and directing when it comes to our thoughts. So don’t try to suppress the emotion, and rather seek to change your current emotional state through first changing your thought-offering, which is the actual relief that you are looking for; that is true change, and not superficial denying-where-you-are change. That’s really in the spirit of Jesus’ words when he said, “First clean the inside of the cup and dish, so that the outside may become clean as well.”. True change comes from changing the mind and the heart.