Taking Control of Your Emotions

18. Taking Control of Your Emotions

After taking care of your body, the next step in achieving communion with God through meeting with the creator within involves the controlling of your emotions. This is a simple matter of understanding what emotion is. Emotion is, simply, energy in motion.

You can take this energy and give it a pro-motion, or a de-motion.

When you demote this energy—that is, move it to the lowest level—you produce a negative emotion. When you promote it—that is, move it to the highest level—you produce a positive emotion.

Exhilarating exercise of your physical body is one way to promote, or raise up, your energy. You literally increase the vibration of this ki energy, which turns it into a positive emotion that is expressed through you.

Meditation is another way to raise the energy of Life that is always present in your body.

The combination of exercise and meditation is extremely powerful. When this combination becomes part of your spiritual discipline, you create possibilities for enormous growth.

Using this combination reminds you that you can control, and therefore experience as you choose, both your body and your emotions. For many—indeed, for most—this is a startling remembrance.

Emotions are experiences that are chosen, not experiences to which you are subjected. This is not something that is widely understood.

The exterior circumstances of your physical life need not have anything to do with the interior experience of your spiritual life. It is not necessary for you to be pain-free in order to be free of suffering. It is not necessary for there to be a lack of disruption in your life for there to be peace.

Indeed, true Masters experience peace in the face of disruption and conflict, not because they have found a way to avoid it.

This inner peace is what all beings seek, because it is the essence of what all beings are. And you will always seek the experience of Who You Really Are.

You may achieve this inner peace in the face of any exterior condition or circumstance simply by understanding that you are not your body, and that nothing you see is real.

Remember that you are living the Ten Illusions. And then understand the truth about those Illusions—that you created them, and all the little illusions beneath them, so that you might decide and declare, express and experience, become and fulfill Who You Really Are.

I have said to you many times before, and I will say to you again: All of Life is a gift, and all is perfection—the perfect tool with which to create the perfect opportunity for the perfect expression of perfection itself, in, as, and through you.
When you understand this, you will remain in a state of continual appreciation. That is, you will be growing. Growth is the meaning of appreciation. When something appreciates, it becomes more than it was.

It is true that only are you able to choose, and therefore control, your emotions in the face of any circumstance, you may also do so before you encounter a circumstance.
That is, you can decide ahead of time how you are going to put your energy into motion—what your emotion is going to be—in response to any anticipated situation in your life.

When you reach this level of mastery, you will also become able to make these same choices in your response to any unanticipated situation in life.

In this way you will have decided Who You Are in concert with the exterior illusions of your life, rather than in conflict.

I have explained in detail in this trilogy, which includes Conversations with God and in Friendship with God, as well as through many other sources at many other times, how this may be done. This is merely a reminder of what is so.

After remembering how to care for the physical body and control your emotions, you are ready to move to next step in meeting with the Creator within.