The only way to control your emotions is to own them. Taking responsibility is the first and the most important thing about it. If you say “person x made me feel this way”, “the weather made me feel this way”, “the world situation made me feel this way”, you are demonstrating no responsibility for your emotions, and, as a result, you have no control.
The first thing you need to do in order to turn off an emotion, is to make it stronger. Amplify it, be in it completely. Ooops, apparently you’re not a mere victim of things that make you feel this or that way, because you can obviously crank it up. Now that you see that you have control over it, observe it from a distance. This makes you, the observer, separate from the emotion, and you can see it wind down.
That’s all you need to start. Sure, there’s more – perceiving the connection between thoughts, emotions and spiritual energy, learning the vipassana or inner space, learning how to use Kundalini up-stream kriya in order to release emotional energy without being overwhelmed by it, and so on, but what you need to start is the understanding that you in fact keep your emotions rolling for long after they would have naturally wound down, and if you can do that, you in fact have control. It’s just that you’re doing a poor job, and there’s room for improvement the size of a universe.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but yesterday I got a really efficient lesson on the subject 🙂
I was quite annoyed about general situation and how everything I try to do to remedy the situation seems to fail, all that while I was walking to find the spot without tourists to swim, and as I failed to wind down my emotions, I fell and almost broke my ankle 🤦🏼♂️ so yes, being a jerk who has no control of his emotions does hurt 🙂
The most important thing to understand is that all kinds of things have an effect on you and cause emotional responses. The thing is, those emotional responses last a few seconds, or minutes at most. Anything longer than that is your doing.
“The thing is, those emotional responses last a few seconds, or minutes at most. Anything longer than that is your doing.”
It’s a strange situation, dogs and animals in general function like that. It’s a strange evolutionary mechanism, of course, beneficial for them, because they couldn’t live with constant emotional stress in their psyche and go around.
When it comes to humans, capable individuals (practicaly the yogis) who notice this mechanism can consciously use it to step into a new way of responding and also observing one of the problems of the world.
But I see indivisible relation between a stable body energetic system and the psyche.
Humans have a unique mental laboratory, a mental space in which they can conduct experiments. As in the example given by Danijel, they can artificially and deliberately intensify emotions to the extreme and then see where it leads. Animals cannot do that, I doubt they think about the past and the future and combine ideas and observe and plan the results.
Humans can also get trapped in a quagmire of what-if scenarios where they torture themselves with projections of their fears and delude themselves with false hopes. All of it is part of the suffering/attachment cycle of samsara, which is why emotional control and detachment is so hugely pronounced in Eastern spiritual practice.
However, this doesn’t mean that the point of this practice is to pretend that things from the world that cause emotion are to be treated as illusory and that one should basically treat all outside stimuli as illusory and strive to end any reaction to all of it. In fact, the point is to stay grounded in the reality of the situation and not run away into fantasy world of projections where you perpetuate your legitimate emotional responses long past the point of their relevance. Instead, your actions should be calm, level-headed and guided by the perception of dharma – basically, do what God would do in your place.