and usually accompanied by certain physiological changes, as increased heartbeat or respiration, and often overt manifestation, as crying or shaking.

Emotion is often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation. Emotions are complex and are a state of feeling that results in physical and psychological changes that influence our behaviour. Emotions are not causal forces but simply syndromes of components, which might include motivation, feeling, behaviour, and physiological changes. How we relate to our emotion depends on the individual. Emotions can play an important role in how we think and behave.

Our emotions can be short-lived, such as a flash of annoyance at someone including someone we love, or long-lasting, such as enduring sadness over the loss of a relationship. But why exactly do we experience emotions? What role do they serve? Emotion express immediate valuations of events that factor in the totality of experience one had had. They both convey information and help in the ultimate valuation of all things and events. Emotions are very important to our everyday existence. We need emotions to survive.

Emotions help us to become aware of our needs. In order to take good care of ourselves it is important that we know what our needs are. Our emotions help us to know what our needs are through what we feel. When you respect your needs you feel happy. Emotions are designed to ensure that we are paying attention so we can respond to what is happening around us. All emotions can be reduced to two primary feelings—those of comfort and those of discomfort. Whether or not we are aware of it, every choice we make is based upon the expectation that the choice will lead to greater comfort.

Emotions give us motivation as well. It gives us the will and determination to succeed. At the end it is not just about the emotion but how we can channel these emotions constructively so we can benefit from them. The effect of your emotion depends on your mind-set. Your emotions are important in that they are very powerful.  They are very destructive in our lives when we are negative. They can elevate us when we are positive.

In order to protect ourselves we have to set boundaries with other people. If you feel uncomfortable with a person, your emotion is important because it will alert you about your feeling. Your emotion is a form of internal communication that helps you to understand yourself. You can then take the necessary steps to protect yourself and set the necessary boundaries. It is important to understand your emotions and not to take it for granted.

Our emotions have a major influence on the decisions we make. Emotions help us survive, thrive, and avoid danger. Emotions are adaptations that allow both humans and animals to survive and reproduce. When we are angry, we are likely to confront the source of our irritation. When we experience fear, we are more likely to flee the situation or threat. When we feel love, we might seek out a mate and reproduce. Emotions serve an adaptive role in our lives by motivating us to act quickly and take actions that will maximize our chances for success.

Emotions control your thinking, behaviour and actions.  Emotions affect your physical bodies as much as your body affects your feelings and thinking.  People, who ignore, dismiss, repress or just ventilate their emotions, are setting themselves up for physical illness.  Emotions that are not felt and released but buried within the body or in the aura can cause serious illness, including cancer, arthritis, and many types of chronic illnesses.  Negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, negativity, frustration and depression cause chemical reactions in your body that are very different from the chemicals released when you feel positive emotions such as happy, content, loved, acceptance.

Other people, places, and things cannot change how you feel. The only person who can change what you feel is you.  A new relationship, a new house, a new car, a new job, these things can momentarily distract you from your feelings, but no other person, no material possession, no activity can remove, release, or change how you feel. There are only two basic emotions that we all experience which are love and fear.  All other emotions are variations of these two emotions.  Thoughts and behaviour come from either a place of love, or a place of fear.  Anxiety, anger, control, sadness, depression, inadequacy, confusion, hurt, lonely, guilt, shame, these are all fear-based emotions.  Emotions such as joy, happiness, caring, trust, compassion, truth, contentment, satisfaction, are love-based emotions.

You cannot change or control your emotions.  You can learn how to be with them, living peacefully with them, transmuting them (which means releasing and converting them), and you can manage them, but you cannot control them. People spend much time talking about how they feel. They talk and talk about their feelings but they don’t feel their feelings.  They intellectualize and analyse their feelings without feeling them.  People are afraid to really feel their feelings, afraid of losing control, afraid of the pain involved in feeling their emotions, of feeling the sense of loss or failure or whatever the emotion brings with it.   People are afraid to cry.  So much of life is about what you feel rather than what you think.  Being strongly connected to your emotional life is essential to living a life with high energy and a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction.

When we have an experience that we find painful or difficult, and are either unable to cope with the pain, or just afraid of it, we often dismiss this emotion and either get busy, exercise more, drink or eat a bit more, or just pretend it has not happened.  When we do this we do not feel the emotion and this results in what is called repressed, suppressed or buried emotions. These feelings stay in our muscles, ligaments, stomach, midriff, auras.  These emotions remain buried within us until we bring that emotion up and feel the emotion, thus releasing it.  Emotions that are buried on the long-term are the emotions that normally cause physical illness.

Before you can understand your emotions perfectly you need to understand that each person develops specific emotional needs at his early childhood that are different than the emotional needs others develop. You can’t understand your own emotions until you become aware of your own emotional needs. Whatever the kind of emotional pain you are experiencing know that it’s just a method your mind is using to motivate you to pursue your emotional needs. If your mind found a way that can help you satisfy your emotional needs then it will motivate you to follow it. If your mind found that you are moving away from your emotional needs then it will respond with emotional pain in the form of sadness, bad mood or even depression. Until you can understand your personal emotional needs you cannot be in charge of your emotions.