Emotions, What They Have to Tell Us

Before learning to calm them, we first need to understand why emotions are there, and what they have to tell us.

Emotions, according to yoga, are part of the movement of our mind, just like thoughts. They often arise from basic emotions, such as fear and anger, which create messages that let us act and understand what we need, what impact our environment has on us, and how we can respond to it.

If we manage to listen to them, they are states that create a temporary psycho-physical state, an experience that passes if we let that energy move through us. It is a way of understanding the impact of reality on ourselves, and knowing better how to interact with it. But the problem, according to yoga, is that we stimulate ourselves enormously: through the five senses, but also through the information running through our mind, including that of the past, once it has become memory. This stimulates emotions and creates habitual patterns that turn into automatic reactions.

Often, when we do not yet know how to manage emotions, how to live with them, see them and understand them, we feel somewhat overwhelmed by them, because they act automatically and place us in a state we did not always freely choose. It is exactly this automatic part, specific to each temperament, that the next article goes on to shed light on.