How are you? How are you experiencing your emotions? How we perceive our emotions is how we perceive ourselves. When we experience difficult emotions we feel like we are doing poorly. When we experience enjoyable emotions, we think we are doing well. Our emotions though, change moment to moment, depending on what we are thinking about. How we deal with this constant change is how we manage our emotions.

There are two approaches to managing emotions. Everybody uses both. The first is to take emotions as they come, reacting to whatever arises as it happens. This is the default response because we always have to deal with whatever emotion we experience at any time. The second approach is to intentionally generate the emotions that we want. We also do this constantly, as we scheme to create enjoyable experiences for ourselves. However, creating enjoyable situations, does not address the source of our emotions, it only gives us circumstances that we may react to with pleasant emotions.

To address the source of our emotions we have to work directly with our minds. We have to pay attention to the flow of our thoughts and emotions and see how we currently manage them. Recognizing our emotions as they arise is the first step in proactively managing them. When we feel angry, we notice that we are angry. When we feel sad, we notice that we are sad. When we feel anxious we notice that we are anxious. When we feel happy, we notice that we are happy. At any time, we can take our own emotional temperature and see if our feelings are positive, negative or neutral. When we notice this tone, and name the emotion, then we can see what thoughts come with it.

Negative thoughts give rise to negative emotions, and negative emotions give rise to negative thoughts. It is the same with positive thoughts and emotions. No matter how much emotional training and mind work we do, we will always have both positive and negative thoughts and emotions. Training ourselves helps us not to get too carried away by the inevitable ups and downs of life. No training will create perpetual happiness, but it can create more regular happiness, and more bearable sadness.

The first step in training ourselves, as mentioned above, is to notice our emotions and thoughts. The next step is to inhabit whatever feeling we feel. Without judging or hoping to get out of the feeling, just be with the feeling. Notice how our bodies manifest the feeling. For example, sadness may feel like a heavy heart. Anxiety may restrict our breathing. Intentionally dwelling in a difficult emotion, challenges our natural habit of avoiding painful feelings.

After recognizing and dwelling in the emotion, the third step is to compassionately respond to it by thinking about what might help and doing that thing. A compassionate response can be big or small. A thoughtful, intentional response to a mood or feeling represents a new approach and creates a sense of agency. Doing this regularly leads to a habit of proactively, productively working through emotions.

The habit of recognizing, feeling, and responding compassionately to emotions gives us a sense of separation from our moods. With practice, our emotions start to seem more like something we create than something that happens to us. Moods become something we participate in rather than fall into. When we consistently respond to our emotions with compassion, they become more fluid, coming and going more easily and not doing so much damage while they pass.

When we get really good at managing our emotions, we put ourselves in a better position to respond compassionately to other people’s difficult emotions. That is a whole other kettle of fish.

It may seem like the world is driving us mad. However, if we are mad, we have to wonder, who is driving what? Anger does not lend itself to introspection. Once we are angry, it seems that some external thing is making us mad. That may be, but there is also some internal thing that boils our blood. Anger is something we manufacture. It is generated in our bodies, and subsides into our bodies, hopefully before causing too much internal or external damage. Every time something makes us mad we practice manufacturing anger in response. With a lifetime of practice, we are pretty good at getting angry and lots of things will tick us off. All that anger takes a toll on our body, on our relationships, and on our quality of life. To stop the world from driving us mad, we must understand that we are the ones driving.

Taking full responsibility for our emotional responses means that we can no longer blame the world for making us mad, we can’t blame the people who push our buttons, and we can’t blame global affairs. All we can do when we find ourselves getting mad is to own it and recognize that we are manufacturing anger again.

By owning our anger we interrupt our habit of blaming outside stimuli for our internal responses. When we get upset, instead of lashing out at those who made us mad, we feel what the anger feels like, notice what we are thinking, and drop all the stories of blame. It is hard to keep blaming the world once we know that our anger is our own creation.

We work with our anger because it is a destructive emotion. It may mask other emotions like fear or sadness, but when anger arises, it tends to hurt those exposed to it, including the ones getting mad. Because anger makes us certain and prone to rash action, the best time to work with anger is in times of calm.

In meditation, people trying to sit peacefully and quietly will get angry at the birds making noise. In meditation though, we don’t get up and quiet the birds, we quiet our mind, sit with the anger, bring our attention back to our breath and let the birds and the anger go.

Anger is not the only emotion we manufacture. We make each of the emotions we experience all day, every day. We give lots of credit to external sources for inspiring all these compelling experiences that make up our lives. When we accept our central role in driving our emotional experience, we can make more of an effort to learn how to drive. As we learn to spend less time seething in anger, we can use that time to practice generating positive emotions, like gratitude. We can be grateful for the world, even if that gratitude is our own creation.

People are a loving species. We need to love and be loved. Love and attention are essential to our survival as babies and then throughout our lives. Fortunately, love is in our nature and abundant in the world. We can love anything. We can love other people, ourselves, animals, food, art, ideas, activities and so on. Generally, the more we love, the better we feel, because loving feels good. It is the most powerful positive feeling we have, and if we allow ourselves to indulge in the feeling, good things happen. If we try to stifle the feeling or ignore it, problems arise.

Because love is so strong and so prevalent, it is confusing. Although it is always there, always a part of us, it seems to come and go. When somebody dies, or a relationship ends, we feel like we have lost love, which can hurt immensely. In those situations, it is not the love that hurts, but the loss. The pain of loss comes from our attachment, which is a natural byproduct of love. It is what happens when love encounters ego.

Our egos are what we think of as ourselves. We tend to define ourselves by what and who we love. When we lose something we love, it is ripped from the ego, and as we try to hold onto it, we suffer. It is completely appropriate to suffer in this way when grieving all the things we lose day in and day out. However, all that loss and grief can wear a person down. As we get worn down, the ego gets more assertive and dwells on all the negative things leaving us scared, angry, and closed off to love.

Despite our loving nature, it is easy to get sucked into the negative habits of our egos. It is a fine line between who we are and who we think we are. Our egos think we are a construct of all the things we’ve done, thought, and have, but we are really something more like that pure feeling of love. So when we catch ourselves getting caught up in all those things that bring us down, we can invite a moment of awareness, conjure up a feeling of love, and connect with our true selves. Tapping into our loving nature can be done anytime, anywhere, alone or with others. All it takes is putting down our thoughts, accepting love from the world and offering love to the world. This can be done with a conscious breath by breathing in love from the world and breathing out love to the world. One breath is all it takes to connect with our loving nature.

Tapping into the power of love can change your mood, change your day, change your life. Our egos like to attach to things, even bad moods, so they will resist early attempts at loving awareness. Keep trying. The lifetime work of making peace with our egos involves letting go of old ideas and learning to love. The love that is our most basic nature makes us want to hold onto things, but gives us the power to let go. When we can let go of everything, all that’s left is love.

There is one giant impending doom that we all live with, which we mostly manage to ignore. The absolute knowledge that we will each die someday, although terrifying in itself, is about the only thing we can know for certain about our futures. Given our precarious mortality, a sense of doom is a reasonable thing to have. However, most of the time, when we sense impending doom, it is not about an actual threat to our lives, but any of the innumerable imaginable threats to our egos.

Egos are what experience all of the threats to our personal existence. They inhabit an imaginary world where they are the central character to whom everything happens. Because egos are imaginary entities, living within imaginary worlds, it is easy for them to imagine all kinds of ways that they might cease to exist. Egos are a product of our minds. They are what we imagine to be ourselves, we who live and breathe in a real world and have real world problems. Any one of those problems or a complex combination of many of them can leave us with a sense of impending doom.

The feeling of impending doom is stressful and painful, so it is not a feeling we want to endure for long. Recognizing when we experience a sense of doom, a credible fear of the future, gives us the opportunity to work with the feeling and turn it around. The natural instinct with difficult feelings is to turn away from them. When we do that, the feelings will persist and eat away at us. The thoughtful response to a difficult feeling is to feel into it and see what it’s about. With those feelings of impending doom, we can use our absolute impending doom to help create perspective.

Relative impending doom is when we have to take a test that we haven’t prepared for. Absolute impending doom is that we are mortal. Generally, with our everyday senses of doom the gap between the relative doom and the absolute is huge. Doing poorly on an exam will not injure us physically, but it would be a blow to the ego. Taking a deep breath to affirm that we are alive and well, is the first step in addressing a sense of dread and creating some space for a new perspective to emerge.

The practice of engaging thoughtfully with a sense of impending doom is an act of self compassion. Taking time to be with the uncomfortable feeling, and doing what we can to help it pass, can upend the habit of living in fear and foster a sense of appreciation for being alive. The idea that the relative threats are to an ego entity may not help as much the deep breath, but when the ego goes away, so does the sense of impending doom. Until then, we can feel the fear and be grateful to be alive to feel it.

The world is currently at war with itself. People are killing people. The suffering that all this killing creates touches us all. We all find ourselves taking sides with the killers and the killed, and we stew in hate, anger, fear, and grief. You would think that with our big brains, meta awareness, and basic morality, we would come up with a way to stop all the killing, but we’re not there yet. Even in these violent circumstances, each of us has the ability to create inner peace. By working on our inner peace, we can help our big brains deal with those violent and painful feelings that leave them so confused.

Our complex brains operate in a state of general confusion, which makes it possible to trick them into being at peace. Just as our confusion can make us believe that everything is horrible, it can also make us believe that everything is wonderful. In our confusion, whichever feels more true becomes the truth to us. When we feel horrible, things seem horrible and when we feel okay, things seem good. When we are able to relax and feel peaceful, we can find hope in the midst of an awful situation.

Tricking ourselves into a moment of peace, does not require doing anything mystical. We do it all the time. We behave politely in public around strangers. We hug people we know. We buy ourselves things we want and eat food we like. All of those little pleasures we enjoy bring us moments of peace. In those peaceful moments, we stop focusing on what is awful about the world and enjoy some of the nicer parts. The outer world remains the same, but inner peace emerges here and there.

Our natural habit is to fool ourselves into moments of peace with material things and circumstances, but we can get there with things just as they are by breathing intentionally, compassionately. That is not a mystical thing to do either, but mystics do it. An effective way to relax, in any moment, is to take a few deep breaths. The deep breaths send a signal to our big brains that everything is manageable. It seems like a trick, because we may not actually believe that everything is manageable, but our confused brains fall for it every time. As we breathe and relax, the laser focus of our anger, fear and grief, diffuses and our awareness opens to new possibilities.

When we are in the heat of the moment, it is not easy, and sometimes impossible, to find our inner peace, but despite our outer situation, the more often we try, the better we become at peacemaking. The better we get at making peace with our own anger, fear and grief, the better we are able to deal with other people who are suffering and in need of peace. Whenever we are able to cultivate and share our inner peace, the world becomes a more peaceful place.

Life will always have challenging and truly horrible circumstances to deal with. When peace is scarce around us, inner peace is all we have. Even when things seem peaceful around us, that is because of our inner peace. Our desire and need for peace and our ability to generate it is humanity's great hope. The way things are going though, it is unlikely that humanity as a whole will figure out peace in our lifetimes, so we can’t afford to wait for outer peace. If we want to enjoy peace in our lifetime, we need to make inner peace, now, so that we can live to stop fighting another day.