Becoming the Master of Your Moods

A prevailing mood is like a weather front. It can hit the lands of your consciousness in gentle waves or descend like a grey mist or arrive as full blown storm. These waves are made of emotion, sometimes one emotion, sometimes a mix of many.  Emotional turmoil is the price we pay today for our attachments yesterday. For example – if you lost someone or something important to you in the past, you would have created sadness.  You would then repeat your sadness every time you remembered your apparent loss.  Eventually you may become so familiar with your sadness that you become comfortable with being somewhat sad and sorrowful, perhaps even creating a subtle identity, “I am sad/sorrowful person”.  This pattern records itself in your subconscious, waiting for a trigger event to invite it back into your conscious awareness. Long after the memory of your loss has faded, this may become a ‘prevailing mood’ that moves through you and you don’t know why. 

This is why we often feel that we are at the mercy of our moods and it seems our emotions have become our masters. It’s only when we learn to become fully aware of our emotions, and consciously withdraw our energy from them, that we can restore our self-mastery i.e. the mastery of our feelings.

Here are some things you can do/practice to become the master of your state of consciousness…again:

1  Practice Meditation

The practice of meditation begins with the temporary withdrawal of your attention from the world around you.  Then the withdrawal or ‘detachment’ from the thoughts you are thinking and the emotion/s you are feeling. Then simply ‘observing’ the emotion/s that you are feeling.  All emotion dies under observation.  If it doesn’t, it means you are still attached to the emotion and probably even identifying with the emotion and thereby giving it life, so the mood will prevailUltimately the practice of meditation will help you to create a quiet, strong and stable mind.  It will gradually become easier to be in a state of stillness within your consciousness.  This then allows you to watch and see the precise source/cause/reason for the moods when they do arise. If you prefer not to be a regular meditator here are some other strategies to play with.