Tonya Dawn Recla

The Importance of Mastering Emotions in Transformation

By far the biggest obstacle thwarting transformation for folks is the third step of the Transformation Process, Mastering Emotions. By far. And this is THE persnickety piece keeping people from achieving personal POWER. For whatever reason, we completely grasp the first two steps of Spirit and Mind. We understand on some level the law of attraction and that thoughts become things. But then we like to skip over step three entirely and move right into Body, cellular memory and energy work.

It’s as though we’re fine talking about what our spirits envision and what our minds think. And we’re even fine admitting that we might have residual energy stored somewhere (especially since energy practitioners can take care of that for us).

But for some reason, we do NOT like dealing with our emotions.

Mastering Emotions is the very epitome of taking responsibility for what we create and most of us simply aren’t interested in that level of self-reflection. Here’s the catch though, nothing will change without mastering that step. NOTHING. You might experience temporary successes and be able to fool yourself for a bit, but you’re stuck until you face the feelings.

When I first started seeing this phenomenon I thought maybe as a society we’re simply too out of touch with our emotions to be able to deal with them. But more and more I’m convinced that the problem isn’t so much that people don’t want to deal with them as they don’t know how. Most of the therapy-type processes around emotions involves more cognitive work than emotional work. We just don’t do a good job of addressing this particular piece of the growth process.

Unfortunately I discovered that our inability to Master Emotions becomes much more complex than simply skipping a step.

What happens is that the second we’re triggered emotionally our self-preservation mechanisms kick in. We immediately move from feeling the emotion into controlling for the fallout before we even consciously acknowledge we felt anything. This becomes exponentially more detrimental because then we move into dealing with whatever our go-to mechanisms are for self-protection and the emotion itself is forgotten altogether. I call this the cognitive trap because most of us go to our minds instantly once we’re triggered emotionally.

This is our Ego’s quirky little way of distracting us from the emotional trigger. You see the Ego’s job is to protect us and keep us safe. It knows that when we felt emotions like that before and we got hurt. So Ego will do ANYTHING to keep us from getting hurt again, to include distracting us from the heart of the problem to begin with. The compounded issue with this cycle is that if we can catch the emotional trigger as soon as it happens, the problem is tiny, itty-bitty, and completely manageable. But once the Ego takes hold — holy cow, watch out!

Now we’ve got a BIG problem. Because now we’ve managed to convince ourselves that people are wrong, situations suck, we screwed up, our past life karma just cashed in, or our parents didn’t love us enough. It doesn’t matter what our favorite stories are about why bad things happen because all of them are cognitive. All of them take us right back to the mind.

But we can’t resolve emotional issues from our minds. All that happens there is more distraction from the tiny, itty-bitty, and completely manageable emotional issue.

So why do we engage this process? I’d imagine it might be different for different people, but most of what I see is that once we Master Emotions, we’re free. The process of transformation moves quickly through any cellular blocks and POOF true intentional manifestation occurs. Then we’re left with the whole other issue of accepting how POWERful we are and that we truly are responsible for what shows up in our lives. YIKES!

Stay tuned for how to Master Emotions…