HOW TO CONTROL ANGER OR ANY UNWANTED EMOTION

Good day and I hope you are having a great week. This is going to be a very important blog post, because as you may know I have struggled with my temper all my life.  Recently in my study of Buddhism, I have come to a conclusion that should have been  obvious, and yet beyond my perception at the time.  Let me set this up by referring to what Anthony Robbins teaches in his seminars.  He said “that your state, your body’s state, dictates your emotion”.  We also see this decades ago in the works of W. Clement stone where we read that in his classes for his sales people when he wanted them to be excited he would bring them in front of the class and have them repeat the mantra “if you want to be excited, act excited”.   We know that we can send out emotions with our bodies, our voices and our emotions.  In this particular post I will use anger as an example, but you can use it for any negative  habit. I have noticed that right before I get upset,  my voice starts to get louder and as I start to get more and more worked up, or face more resistance, I start to yell. In fact I actually sometimes work myself up by increasing the volume of my voice or tensing my muscles and this is usually a precursor to getting angry.  All of these, I want you to realize however, are tools that we can use if we know how to control them. 

I have been doing a little experiment.  Whenever I start to get angry or upset with someone, I actually decrease the volume of my voice.  If I have the presence of mind I will try to relax my body, but that is a rarity.  I can however, decrease the volume and cadence of my speech more easily.  At first it may not stop me from getting angry but it shortens the duration of my temper significantly.  It helps me get back from that amygdala hijack, where my animal brain has taken over and completely bypassed my thinking brain, to the cerebral way of thinking and actually realizing that what I am doing is not productive. This way I can bring myself back to the present and start to do some productive techniques like segment intending, and visualizing to remedy the situation. 

Being a public speaker I naturally relay on the power of my voice to get my message across. I change the tone and inflection of my voice when I try to get attention or make a point.  Unfortunately that has back fired for me when I get angry, since I am usually projecting my voice.  That is more in line with getting excited, and in my case getting upset and angry when the stimuli presents itself, prolonging the negative emotion.  I have to work harder in keeping my volume down.  You should try it. When you start talking in a lower volume of voice, the excitement goes away and you start to calm down.  You don’t see anybody meditating by screaming out loud.  Even when there are chanting a mantra, it is usually a calm and soft chant like “ohm”.  So all these physical vibrations that you send out can affect your emotions, and being the deliberate manifestors that we are, we can control our emotions with the control over our physical tools like our voices, and our muscles. 

I want you to try to this experiment for the next 20 days.  Whenever you are getting upset or angry try to decrease the volume of your voice. If you notice that you are tensing your facial muscles, specially your jaw, consciously relax it.  We have allot of muscles in our face and during stress those muscles tense up and contribute to the loss of control.  But the most important and easiest thing to do is to decrease your volume.  Try to whisper while angry.  It is funny when you think about it.  It will significantly aid you in coming back and gaining the control of your thoughts and eventually subdue the anger.  Eventually you will be making this a habit and you will be more in tune with your emotions and can divert it even before it starts. 

If you are dealing with depression or some other sadness by contrast, you want to increase the volume of your voice and the pace of your talking.  Getting yourself excited to come out of the negative emotions.  Essentially what you want to do is to use your tools to go the opposite way of what the emotion is causing your body to do.  In anger we are excited and are charged so we want to bring ourselves down a level. When we are sad, we are in the low vibration and we want to get ourselves high on the vibrational level.  The voice is a really easy and simple tool we can control to achieve control over the less obvious tools like our emotions and feelings.  Try it one step at a time and leave messages on my Facebook page and my twitter on how you used this technique and how it turned out.  As always feel free to share this blog with anyone who may need it and I wish you success until next week.