Mastering Your Emotions

This session sets the landscape for the course, providing a broad overview of the nature of emotions. We'll introduce the metaphor of the Guest House from both an intellectual and embodied view. We'll move through guided practice to help connect with the experience of witnessing and observing sensations and the body-mind dialogue.

In this session, we delve deeper into understanding the nature of emotions and our automatic responses to them. We will explore how emotions move through the body and what happens when we resist them. We'll enjoy a guided practice to experience this process in the body.

Anger is a powerful emotion that often brings up a great deal of resistance or conflict. In this session, we get to know our first guest: anger—and its frequent companion, wonder. We learn about the nature of anger, its messages, how it appears in the guest house of the body. You will move through a visualization and breath practice to help move from anger to a place of wonder where you can return to a place of aligned action rather than reactivity.

Fear and its siblings of worry and anxiety are familiar to many of us. In this session, we'll invite and welcome fear, and its balancing companion, courage. You'll learn about the hidden gifts of fear, as well as how to recognize its knock on your guest house door. You will move through a guided practice to support a transition from the grip of fear to a present-moment sense of grounded connection where you can access the emotion of courage.

In this session, we'll look at the often overlooked emotion of disgust. Disgust is more often described by its more subtle forms, which we know quite well: shame and depression. In this session, we'll get to know disgust, and its balancing emotion, love. You will learn the subtle ways in which disgust shows up in your guest house and learn strategies to help move through this heavy emotion. You'll also be guided through a gentle practice to soothe the nervous system and create space for the more expansive emotion-experience of love.

The pain that we experience with sadness is not something we can think away. In this session, we will welcome the visiting emotion of sadness and, through compassion, open the door for joy. You will learn how to receive the invitation to let go and release and be guided through a gentle self-compassion practice.

In this session, we will welcome grief, our final visitor in the guest house of emotions. Grief is an experience that we will all encounter in our lives. We will introduce the 5 Gates of Grief, the doors through which grief enters our guest house. You will be guided through a gentle practice of self-nurturance to support us in the process of moving through grief by compassionately connecting with the body.

In this session, we go deeper into an exploration of the process of healing our relationship with our emotions. We introduce a 6-step process that we can walk through with each of our visitors when they arrive to learn to master our emotions—to understand what they are communicating to us and fully integrate the essence and core of our experiences in this life. You'll be guided through the first 3 steps with a practice that you can do at any time.

We are reminded that there is no such thing as a bad or wrong emotion as we move deeper into the 6-step process of healing our relationship with our emotions. The session closes with a guided exploration connecting with emotions in the body and identifying clear actions that you can take at the moment to help restore balance in your whole being.

In this final session, we take in the awareness, insights, and skills that you've cultivated through this journey and move toward cultivating a state of calm—an abiding sense of ease. This stage is about flowing through these 6 steps of healing our relationship with our emotions. We close with a guided practice to invite calm and clarity as we revisit the guest house, bringing gratitude to the emotions that offer guidance in our lives.