What is Emotional Mastery?

And how to work with overwhelm

This post is made from scripts I also used to make videos on Instagram. Feel free to follow me there as well

What is emotional mastery? Most people think it’s the ability to control our emotions, but that’s not really how it works, because for the most part, we cannot control our emotions… though there is an exception I’ll address shortly.

With most emotions, we can only resist or accept them. We may think that resisting emotions is controlling them, but when we resist a feeling, it only becomes more stuck in us, and ends up lingering around for much longer.

You can think of your emotions like a flowing river, and resisting your emotions is like trying to dam up the river, but the water just keeps flowing and building up.

Instead of damming up the river, we want to dig deep trenches, so the water can flow more easily. Instead of suppressing our feelings, we can guide them to flow through us, and this helps us metabolize them as they arise.

So emotional mastery is actually being able to recognize your feelings as they arise and relaxing around them, allowing them to flow through us, without resisting them, or needing to act on them.

And this is the practice. The more we can fully be with what we are feeling, the better our mind-body system becomes at processing feelings.

I said at the start that there are some ways that we can control our feelings. We can’t stop uncomfortable feelings, but we can cultivate good feelings. We can conjure up a sense of compassion, which is helpful in pretty much every setting. Or maybe we can find a sensation of ease or joy, and focus on that, allowing it to grow.

I will explore more on cultivating good feelings and also working with feelings when they become overwhelming in the future, but for now, the best way to work towards emotional mastery is to simply practice feeling what you’re feeling, in each moment, as clearly and fully as you can.

Working with Overwhelm

Now we generally don’t want to resist or dissociate from our feelings, but if we are feeling emotionally overwhelmed, we actually do. To a degree.

There are two very effective approaches to work with emotional overwhelm. They became popularized by somatic psychology but they have started to catch on in the meditation world with trauma informed teachers.

The strategies are called titration and pendulation.

Titration is really just moving slowly into the feeling. Processing it bit by bit. A great mindfulness technique is to just pay attention to the outer edges of the feeling, instead of diving in the centre of it. There are many titration techniques, but it’s all about going slowly, feeling it bit by bit, so it’s not so overwhelming.

Pendulation is the other approach, which is moving your attention back and forth between the difficult feelings and something more stable. A common practice here is to feel the sensations in our feet, as this generally has a grounding and stabilizing effect, because we usually don’t have a lot of emotions in our feet.

So we move our awareness down, into our feet, feeling the sensations there, and once we feel a little more settled, we can move our awareness back into the centre of our body, and practice being with the feelings here.

The core idea in all of this is that being overwhelmed is scary, and that fear and disorientation just adds to the overwhelm. These techniques help us feel more safe to feel what’s coming up.

This is just a general intro to these approaches, but if this seems like it would be helpful for you to explore further, I’d recommend the book Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness by David Treleaven, and also books on Somatic Experiencing by Peter Levine… all of his books are great but Healing Trauma is a great starting point as it’s short, to the point, and comes with guided audio practices.