How To Master Your Emotions

Juggling multiple, different, and new responsibilities in the face of unrelenting uncertainty requires a different set of tools and practices than those we currently have. Now, more than ever, learning to thrive in an uncertain, unstable world requires sustained emotional resilience and psychological robustness.

Very few of us have been taught how to appropriately express, manage, and regulate our emotions. Many of us feel that we are at the mercy of our emotions, when in fact we can master our emotions.

In this 10-day course, you will learn about the science of how emotions are made, the importance of being able to regulate how you feel, and a way to work with emotions that are both easy to learn and easy to use. You will be introduced to Shape of Emotion, a model, process, and tool of how we structure, store, represent and regulate our inner feeling states. You will be given an overview of the design of Shape of Emotion as well as how it works.

Each lesson is framed by one or two of the 12 principles that underpin this work. At the end of each day, a short practice will help consolidate the session and deepen your understanding and use of Shape of Emotion.

Leçon 1: Take The Step That’s In Front Of You

On this first day of learning how to master your emotions, you will be invited to start the experiential journey by taking the step that is in front of you. To feel. Better. The first step to learning a skill that will bring relief and build emotional resilience is to allow yourself to feel the emotions better.

To get better at feeling may seem like a curious outcome, and yet, if you are able to get better at feeling and by that, we mean more attuned to your emotions, then you can move on to learning how to regulate your emotions and build emotional resilience.

Leçon 2: What Are Emotions Anyway?

After a lived, somatic experience of the first steps to mastering your emotions, in this lesson, we delve into gaining an understanding of what emotions actually are and how they are made. We also learn what happens to initiate an emotion, whether it is a brain or a body response and what occurs in the body that is called an “emotion.”

We unpack the science behind how our emotions are made. We also look at the reasons why it is so important to regulate our emotions for optimal mental and physical health and wellbeing.

Leçon 3: Do You BAN?

Emotions are supposed to come and go but when we repress or deny our emotions they literally block the feel-good chemicals from flowing freely too. This results in an unhealed feeling, a difficult or negative emotional state, that we will go to lengths to escape from.

We say that we BAN - bury, avoid or numb, our emotions and explore in this session the many different unresourceful and resourceful strategies we use to attend to the way we feel at these times.

Leçon 4: So What Is Shape Of Emotion?

Shape of Emotion was developed specifically to work in groups, with children as well as adults to attend to the scale of the mental health and emotional wellbeing challenges that face us worldwide, but particularly in third world countries like South Africa, where poverty and unemployment are the norm, and access and finance to attend to the problem very low.

Shape of Emotion is a model, process, and tool of how we structure, store, represent and regulate our inner feeling states. Each of these elements is explored to reveal a comprehensive and complete tool for emotion regulation.

Leçon 5: The Structure Of Your Feeling States Or What Is The Shape Of Your Emotion?

Our outer experience of the world is perceived and filtered through our senses: sight, sound, touch, and to a lesser extent, smell and taste. We also use the sensory input or information to take the external experience and store or represent it internally.

The same happens with our emotions. Shape of Emotion works with the structure or shape of the emotion. In this session, we cover what this looks like and explore the first three steps of the Shape of Emotion process: feel, find, and observe.

Leçon 6: Regulating Your Feeling States

In order to be the master of our emotions, we need to know how to purposefully and consciously regulate them. Emotions are supposed to come and go but when we deny or repress unpleasant emotions they get stuck. This can negatively impact our emotional, psychological and physical wellbeing.

In this session, we continue to explore how we can regulate our feeling states, known to most of us as our emotions, by using the touchpoints of Shape of Emotion. We cover what and where the touchpoints are and complete the fourth and final step of the Shape of Emotion process.

Leçon 7: Putting It All Together

In this session we put together all we have learned so far, adding in a call and response element to keep us on track. We practice releasing a difficult emotion using all four steps of Shape of Emotion. Knowing that there is a way to regulate how you feel in the moment, on a regular basis or as a focused practice to deal with past, unpleasant experiences or traumas can be very empowering. It offers another option and more choice in any strategy to feeling better.

Leçon 8: Self Care Is Vital Care

Intrinsically, we are all perfect at our core. But our experiences, upbringing, society, and education all conspire to build plenty of evidence for us that, in fact, we are not. Some call it the path to enlightenment, we call it self-care.

Self-care involves a focused and consistent practice to clear what no longer serves you. This will bring you back to who you truly are. In order to make any changes in the world, we need to start with ourselves. In this session, we explore strategies to support self-care as a discipline and a daily practice to become who we are truly meant to be.

Leçon 9: Hook Me To Heal Me

We called this course "How To Master Your Emotions" because knowing how to deal with, work with, and regulate your emotions requires learning new skills and practicing them so that you become proficient. Because most of us arrived so late to the realization that doing this was really important for our physical as well as emotional wellbeing, and because we may have developed other less resourceful strategies and habits to manage how we feel, making real change will take effort, diligence and discipline.

Learning about Shape of Emotion is one thing, learning how to do it is another, and practicing how it can be used in real-life situations is something else altogether. This work is experiential, it is a learned skill that gets easier and better to use the more it is practiced.

In this lesson, we explore how Shape of Emotion can be used to clear the difficult feelings that arise when we get hooked (or triggered).

Leçon 10: Wings & Kaleidoscopes

We close out the course by recapping what was covered over the last nine days. We touch on some of the terminology and why we use certain names for certain aspects of the process. We then reflect on how you can now be the master of your emotions. Finally, we offer guidelines to building both a gentle practice while cultivating a disciplined approach to feel better now.

Reviews

I thought the course combined well a theoretical explanation with a very practical methodology. I found it useful and will practice it to help me moderate those emotions that are overwhelming.

Thank you Matthew and thank you Chantelle, these are really helpful, powerful techniques I will try to remember for the rest of my life.

Wonderful course! Will listen to it again and agsin, and keep practicing usung the wing and other techniques. Thank you!🙏🏼🙏🏼

This is a wonderful course. I would like to repeat it and share it with my daughters.

Dear Chantal, dear Mathew,
Thank you 🙏🏽 so much for your inspiring course, your gentle & clear guidance, your pleasant energies & the refreshing combination of your voices. I really like the concept and the fact that you also use bodiy experiences such as touching. A great discovery & more to explore. Bless !

Mathew and Chantal thank you so much for creating this wonderful course and helping me to help myself.

Wonerful class, I’ll probably listen again, for reference. Amazing teachers🥰

Thank you for this course. I’ll be using this somatic tool as a way to process intense emotions moving forward 💗

All this information was very well researched, well thought out and useful to help us feel motivated to practice:) The practice itself is also wonderful. I wish the practice was combined into each lesson.