By Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
In this Weekly Wisdom, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar shares beautiful insights on how to master your storms of emotions. Find out.
We’re often caught up in storms of emotions. We aren’t ourselves when in the storm. We may not know what to do. We may fall out of balance. Such situations arise in everyone's life. Is there a way we can be prepared? How can we master these emotions that seem to overpower us?
Anger and sadness
Anger is a reflection of one’s weakness and sadness is the result of it. You get angry and then you’re sad. Because you’re sad, you get angry again. Because of this cycle that people go through, an education about our emotions is vital. It can help one to be centered, to be calm, to manage.
You see, a child gets angry and starts crying, but it doesn’t last too long. A child snaps back from it quickly, and comes to the present moment and starts giggling. But for adults it can take months and sometimes years to get rid of and overcome these emotions.
So, one thing is very clear here. There’s something we’ve lost in the process of our growth that we already had as a child. If you’ve noticed a child, a child is crying and there’s still a drop of tears on her cheek and she starts smiling. The tears haven’t yet gone. She can just snap back from any emotion. But what prevents us from doing that as adults?
When we look at this, we see that our emotions are stored at certain points in our body. Then, any outside event is just a trigger for these emotions to come into play. Now, if we do meditation and observe the sensations, then we can master our emotions. We can overcome being a victim of our own emotions.
I would say being centered, calm, and observing our breath, emotions, mind and its patterns, and breathing in rhythm with them, are all ways to become stronger. In this way, we can control our anger and we won’t cry for nothing. Even some big event can give you strength, and not make you feel weak or victimized.
How to nurture emotions and respond but not react
First of all, broaden your perspective, your perception. It’s very common that we’re impulsive, we react, when we’re not attending to our own mind or our own inner strength.
Now, for inner strength, again I’d say meditation is the way. Through meditation, we can get so centered that we don’t get carried away by the events all around us. This doesn’t mean that you’re dry like a stick and have no emotions.
You have emotions! In fact, you can experience much more refined and intense emotions. But you don’t lose your intellect or your ability to perceive the consequences when you express those emotions. In reaction, what happens? You’re blind to the consequences of your actions. But when you choose to respond, your sense of reasoning is still alive and intact. You’re still expressing your emotions the way you want.
So, here it’s not your emotions which rule you. You have a say. You have a knife to cut the vegetables. It isn’t that your knife tries to cut your hand instead of cutting the vegetables. You can use your emotions for your advantage, rather than being carried away by them.
We need to pay attention to two opposite ways of looking at emotion. No emotion is very fresh in you, on the one hand. On the other hand, every emotion is fresh all of the time. Today's anger is today’s anger only. It’s fresh this moment. Not today, even, but this moment. When you’re angry, this emotion is right now. But, you’ve had the pattern before also.
Rivers, like the Mississippi or the Ganges, are very old. But the water is very fresh in them. Every moment there’s new water. In the same way, when the emotions are there in you, like anger, this isn’t the first time. It’s an old pattern.
How do you snap out of the pattern? Breathing. Breath comes to your help. SKY Breathing Meditation techniques will help you understand the rhythms and the patterns that we have cultivated over a period of time in ourselves. So you can snap out of the pattern.
Emotions are there every moment, every day. Either there’s love or anger or frustration, positive and negative emotions, and that’s what makes up life. We cannot say that these shouldn’t exist. They can exist, but they shouldn’t take over. I mean, you can be in a swimming pool but you can’t drown in it. You know how to swim through it.
In the same way, spirituality or meditation are those ways in which you can enjoy the richness of emotion and yet not get carried away where you end up regretting it later on. That can be avoided with wisdom and meditation.
Fear of rejection
Again, you go deep in meditation. When you’re centered, you know you are the light. You are the love that you’re seeking from others. You don’t need approval from anybody, I tell you. If people reject you, remember they simply don’t know who you are.
This will help you. Suppose somebody rejects you. They’re rejecting you because they don’t know who you are. Once they know who you are, they can’t but love you, because inside of you, there’s so much wealth. You’re so precious. You have so many good qualities. Pay attention to the good qualities.
No doubt, you may have temporary weaknesses. But your strength is there with you forever. Your strength is your nature. So when you move away from your weakness, focus on your own strength, go deep within yourself, and discover how beautiful and lovely you are, you don’t mind if everybody rejects you. Got it? And that type of inner strength is what makes you stand up in the world and achieve what you want.
Just do it for a few days and see. Just do this. You know you’re a precious life, a human being on this planet. Nature has put you here. God has made you a very precious human being. If someone doesn’t recognize that preciousness, it’s their fault. There’s a diamond lying there, and if someone doesn’t think it’s a diamond, or thinks it’s just a marble, it’s their blindness, isn’t it? That’s what you should say.
If someone has a runny nose, they can’t smell the fragrance, even though you’re such a fragrant flower. A rose doesn’t lose its fragrance. It’s always there. But someone doesn’t feel it and they reject it, because their nose is blocked.
So, you must pay attention to yourself. You look for others to appreciate you or approve of you. That approval you’re seeking from outside doesn’t come. It doesn’t come because you’re rejecting yourself. This is the basic issue. From right now, today onward, resolve that you won’t reject yourself.
Mood swings and hormones
Because you understand this is because of hormones, that puts a brake on it. You understand, “Oh, I’m feeling this way because of my hormones.” This very thought has already helped. Instead of getting completely sucked into the emotion, you’re standing up above it and you realize what’s happening.
Every emotion has a corresponding sensation in the body. It’s connected with certain endocrine glands and hormones, no doubt. The secret is that your mind and your breath can also create antidotes for those emotions.
Breath is the link between our mind and body. Our emotions and our sensations are all linked to our breath. So, doing breathing exercises with breathing and meditation together, what happens? It has an impact on our endocrine system. So it has a big impact on our hormones. So instead of taking pills day and night, you can overcome the negative emotions and increase your positive emotions through your own breath.
It’s the breath that’s keeping us alive! You can pop in any amount of pills and stop breathing so that none of the pills are of any use. So, good sleep, an active, joyful, enthusiastic mind, proper food intake, exercise, all contribute to our well being.
Emotional well being can’t be achieved without paying attention to our breath and our state of mind. State of mind again, in turn, depends on the wisdom that we have. How we perceive our own life, people around us, the world, and events. If our intellect is clogged with prejudicial notions and we keep projecting the same notions into the future, we continue to reel in fear, anxiety, and negativity.
So we need to free our mind, and that’s being here and now. These techniques of breathing and meditation help us to be in the here and now. Even happiness is a habit. Sadness is also a habit. You cultivate a habit to be miserable. But nobody wants to be miserable, wearing a long face, seeing only negative things, and focusing on what doesn’t work all the time. Then, our mind gets adjusted to such a pattern, and continues to reel in it.
The proponent of yoga, Maharishi Patanjali, said contentment or happiness (santosha) is something we have to practice, like cleanliness. Saucha is cleanliness. You have to practice cleanliness. It doesn’t just fall on you. You have to brush your teeth, you have to take showers, and you have to change your clothes. Like we clean our bodies, we have to take care of our minds also. Mental hygiene is what meditation is all about. Meditating a few minutes keeps our slate clean.
Similarly, with emotions, I say if you want to get angry, your anger should be fresh. Not the stale anger. Don’t pick up all that which happened 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 5 years ago. Be angry at what’s happening now. It’s okay. But that anger can’t last too long. It should have a short shelf life. Your anger comes and it should just disappear and not be like a stone. It should be like a fresh vegetable that doesn’t last one day or at most a few hours. It’s healthy.
So when the storm of emotions is coming, be solid like a rock. It doesn’t do anything to you. And be solid like a rock so it doesn’t carry you away. When emotions are coming up like sunshine, smile and spread them all around you. You’re very precious. Don’t forget the fact that there’s light inside you and you’re the light.
Fear of failure
When fear of failure surrounds you, just give in. Know that you’ve already failed. What next? What’s the worst that could happen? You’ve already failed. But will you choose to sit back and do nothing because you’ve already failed? No, you’ll make a second attempt, right?
Whenever your fear comes, you’ll know you’ve failed and this is your second attempt, once again. Just have this thought and see what will happen. The anxiety about failure will go away because you’ve already failed!
Every failure is a stepping stone toward success. Take it from me. Every single failure is one step towards success.
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