COURSE

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.

Stress Stress & Anxiety Mindfulness Resilience Health & Happiness Mindfulness Meditation Acceptance Happiness Secular Connection Relationships Recovery & Healing Healing Secular Mindfulness

Meet your Teacher

Matthew & Chantal

Johannesburg, South Africa

Matthew & Chantal support the physical and emotional wellbeing of people by enabling them to regulate how they feel. They have developed a way to gently and easily release stuck emotions, which can lead to depression, anxiety, increased stress, and physical illness, allowing for a return to a centered and resourceful state. It's called Shape of Emotion and is used in their live session Emotional Fitness Classes here on Insight Timer. Matthew deeply engages with his work, his clients, and his desire to make the world a better place. A voracious appetite to learn and understand has allowed him to research wide and deep, building on his extensive knowledge of healing and human behavior. He partners with his clients to take them from good to great, offering a safe and held space to explore hidden, deeply held issues that lie at the core of their performance hurdles. Matthew focuses on offering specialized psychological services for high achievers, including tools and strategies, in the form of coaching and therapy for immediate relief from stress, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges. Matthew has been meditating since he was 10 years old, is a qualified aromatherapist, EFT practitioner, and coach. He's studied Waldorf education, NLP, and has been researching and working with human development potential for the last 29 years. His favorite maxim is: “If you don’t know where you are, how can you move to somewhere else?” Matthew is the co-founder of 5th Place and co-creator of Shape of Emotion. Chantal sees potential, works with possibility, and partners with her clients to become more. She focuses on balance and flexibility, building emotional resilience, encouraging curiosity, and nurturing self-care. Chantal offers a holistic, inclusive approach that is heart-centered, clear-sighted, and results in sustainable changes in being and behavior. She assists her clients to transcend their worn-out narratives, and helps ignite the inspiration to create a new story. Chantal challenges those she works with to look beyond what they believe to be true, to step out of drama and into humanity. She supports learning journeys, advocates for greater awareness about mental health issues and emotional wellbeing, and co-creates and facilitates personal, group and team change. Chantal is a writer and a speaker. She writes what's on her mind and close to her heart. Her poetry offers a window to her spirit. Chantal is a credentialed coach and registered coach supervisor with COMENSA (Coaches and Mentors of South Africa) and a past chairperson of the Research and Supervision Portfolio Committees. She is a qualified teacher, a Neuro-Linguistic practitioner, and has an MPhil in Management Coaching (cum laude) through the University of Stellenbosch Business School. Matthew and Chantal are the co-founders of 5th Place and co-creator of Shape of Emotion.

10 Days

2.7k students

4.9 stars

15 min / day

Stress

English

Lesson 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.

Lesson 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.

Lesson 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.

Lesson 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.

Lesson 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.

Lesson 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.

Lesson 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.

Lesson 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.

Lesson 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).

Lesson 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.

4.9 (47)

Recent Reviews

Elizabeth

February 12, 2025

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.

Veronica

November 28, 2024

Wonderful!

Marc

June 23, 2024

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

Wally

June 10, 2024

How to Master Your Emotions came to me at a perfect time in my life. Matthew and Chantal feel like friends after the 10 day course. I was really delighted that they responded to my feedback right away. Highly recommend to anyone that wants to take a deep dive into mastering their emotions.

Declan

June 10, 2024

Sooooooooo good your voices are so soothing would recommend!!!!!!!!!!

Elizabeth

April 5, 2024

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

Dan

May 26, 2023

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

Maccas

April 16, 2023

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 !

Tony

January 1, 2023

Very interesting concepts.

Michael

June 19, 2022

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

Nicole

June 2, 2022

This is an excellent offering that blends somatic awareness techniques with a combination of EFT touch points and Jin Shin Jyutsu finger holds. Personally, I prefer traditional tapping, or EFT, and a somatic awareness meditation. I took one star away for the intrusive, distracting music that accompanies most of the course.

maria

February 25, 2022

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

Kaitlyn

January 9, 2022

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

Jamie

December 13, 2021

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.

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