Hey Ljj7000,

Emotions can be a though nut to crack. You are not alone. Here are a few thing I do.

For starters, I define emotions as a reaction in the form of a feeling in response to an event. Something event happens and feelings get triggered. I see a cute puppy and feel happiness. I get smacked in the nose, I feel anger. Emotions just are.

1. I don’t have good/bad, negative/positive emotions, I just have emotions. By lumping all emotions into one class, the bring me down emotion (still a classification) hold less power over me, because they are like any other emotion.

2. I’ve come to realize that my emotions are much faster than I am. No matter how fast I run, they always catch up to me, those nasty buggers. Instead, I be with my emotions. If I’ve sad, I recognize it, acknowledge it, and sit with it. It usually only takes a couple of minutes to reduce the power of emotion has over me. Sometimes that process can brutally painful, but I find it to be worth it.

3. My body talks to me. I imagine if you saw someone with the corners of their mouth turned down, you’d say they are sad. I imagine if you saw someone with the corner of their mouth turned up, you'd say they are happy. Those are two examples of the body talking.

Here's some of my body talk:

tight gut - feat anxiety
chest - accomplishment
back of the neck - stress
upper jaw - anger
downturn mouth -sadness
tight checks - alternating between sadness and anger

With body parts; your mileage may vary. Perhaps you emotions will come from a different part of the body. Nothing wrong with that. You may also ask how I got to know my body parts. By just recognizing my body. I would feel anger and my upper jaw would, yet again, be tight. Emotional connected to body part takes continued recognition.

So, if I recognize my upper jaw being tight, I know I'm angry. I can recognize the event that caused to anger. Most importantly, I just be with the emotion. I often say, "Okay, is am angry." I then spend some time with it. The anger is trying to tell me something. Believe it or not, anger is just as much a friend as happiness. They’re each just trying to tell me something.

Yeah, emotions are hard. I think society, for the most part, has it wrong. We often learn to seperate and run from our emotions. That just makes us fearful tired. But by befriended our emotions, they can become the teachers they are meant to be.