By Laura

Negative energy within ourselves is destructive. Emotional suffering is a barrier to personal growth. We all want to get rid of drama in our lives. Painful emotions like resentment, grief, and self-pity are big causes of suffering. None of us like to feel this way. But how do we get rid of this emotional suffering?

Emotional suffering is difficult to deal with because it's so basic. Our emotional reactions all are some variation of the two basic emotions, pleasure and pain, which come from needs we have. The ego is what interprets things as being pleasurable or painful. It attempts to protect us from pain and increase our pleasure but it often is misguided and fearful. That's why we have to learn ways to get out of our ego's turbulent emotional swings. Balance is what we really want. When we have emotional suffering we upset this balance and can't grow personally or spiritually. There will always be emotional suffering in the world, there will be things in your life that cause pain, but we can learn to avoid getting stuck in one emotion.

The first step to changing our emotions is to take responsibility for them. In order to do this we must recognize them. Try these steps:

• Take responsibility
• Explore the suffering
• Pinpoint the suffering
• Release the suffering
• Reprogram your response
  

Explore it

What is happening right now?
Do not use your rational mind to justify, intellectualize or interpret. Just give the facts-who, what, when, where and how.

What specific emotion am I experiencing?
Tell yourself what you feel, not what you think. Use words like: anxious, harried, bored, lonely, shy irritable, frustrated, confused, sad, disappointed, afraid, angry, jealous, grief-filled, guilty, tense, nervous, embarrassed, antagonistic, bewildered, irate, lazy, lonely. Don't use words that require someone else to "make" you feel that way. For example, betrayed. You can't feel betrayed by yourself. You're not taking responsibility for your emotions and your response when you use words like this. Other examples are attacked, coerced, misunderstood, overworked, unheard, manipulated.

Pinpoint it

Again, don't intellectualize, analyze or rationalize your response. Think of yourself as a news reporter, just reporting facts. Pinpoint the "facts" of your emotional response.

Ask yourself:

• What am I telling myself right now?
• How do I feel? What pain or tension is in my body? How is my posture? Is my face tense?
• What is my mind saying to keep me in this emotion?
• What do I want to change in the outside world instead of doing inner work and changing my own responses?
• Have I suffered enough?
• What am I rejecting about myself?
• What threat does this person or situation represent to me?
• What is the worst that could happen?
• Could I accept this and still be happy?
• What am I defending?
• What am I hiding?
• What is it about me that I think people can't love?

Release it

Place you hand on the part of your body where you feel the feeling. Say, "It hurts here." Our reactions to events get stuck in certain parts of our body, which cause us pain. Acknowledge the pain and take responsibility for it. Then you can release it. Place your attention on the part of the body where you are holding the pain. While breathing, have the intention of releasing the tension that you are holding. Use your breath to let go of the pain and tension. Let it go, breath it out.

Reprogram your response

Reprogram your mind. Use will and determination to give clear and firm instructions to yourself. You want to process similar events in a different way in the future. Become conscious of the cause-effect relationships between upsetting emotional situations and the resulting unhappiness. You can learn to get better control over your emotional reponses with practice.