What does it feel like when all is right in your world?  When you are happy, content, satisfied, energized, at peace?  Contrast this with what it feels like when you are angry, sad, frustrated, worried, impatient, upset, envious, anxious.   What is so interesting about the latter states is how determined people often are to hold on to them!  “Oh, no!”,  you protest, “it’s not me.  I’m not holding on to it.  Someone (or something) is MAKING me feel this way.”

Oh, really?…  So sorry.  It doesn’t actually work that way.

Often, the reason the emotional state persists it that it IS working for you.  One way it sometimes works is by giving you an excuse to continue staying snug in your comfortable little ego box.  It’s a lot easier to continue to stay angry or sad or whatever it is, than to do the work of seeing where, within you, something might shift.

Here is good place to start with this:  The next time you catch yourself in the midst of an emotion that you claim you do not want, ask yourself “how is this working for me?”  If you are honest in the answer to yourself, you might see some surprising things.  When you can see how that emotion is protecting the “you at this moment”, you can start to see how your mindset might shift to allow the “you of the next moment”.

Then you can ask yourself  “Am I ready to let this go?”  When you can answer “yes”, there  are a variety of techniques that you can try to let it go.  One of the simplest is just to sit still and breathe into that emotion, and let it release out with every exhaled breath.

After a time of practicing this process of letting go, another shift often arises naturally – being non-reactive in the first place.  Events, people, situations that once catalyzed an unwanted emotion now produce no reaction.  The stimulus rolls past.  But that is a topic for some other time.