Welcome to the first module of The Gentle Art of Emotional Mastery 7-day audio course. Get yourself nice and comfortable and then click on the audio file below to get started.
Be sure to sign up at the bottom of this page to receive free updates to this course and occasional related news.
In this module: Introduction. How would you like to feel? Embracing your desire to feel good. Feeling good about wanting to feel good. Your true nature is joy. Being really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always. A thriving mind.
Guided Embodiment Exercise: Embracing the desire to feel good.
Additional resources:
Is enjoyment the purpose of life? Were you made for enjoyment? Listen to a provocative discussion of this topic here.
One minute meditations are now live. Get inspired in less time than it takes to check your instagram. Thirty different flavors of nourishment on offer. Snack here.
Do you know someone who would enjoy this course?
Share the info page with this link: https://tinyurl.com/59vrmpyf
Click here to go to module two.
Module one
Module two
Module three
Module four
Module five
Module six
Module seven
Full transcript of Module one:
I’m Justice Schanfarber, and this is day one and module one of the gentle art of emotional mastery seven day audio course.
Emotional mastery is the ability to create preferred emotional states from the inside out, regardless of past history, current circumstances, or other people.
By preferred emotional states I mean the way you want to feel.
How would you like to feel?
Content, satisfied, eager, excited, peaceful, relaxed, confident, loved and loving. What else would you add to this list?
The ability to create these kinds of emotional states for yourself isn’t very hard, in fact it’s mostly a result of removing obstacles that you’ve innocently put in your own way, and allowing yourself to be closer to your true nature.
Your true nature is joy. Your essential wish, and your essence, is to enjoy your Self. Your purpose for being is enjoyment, and you, your Self, your body, your mind, is the perfect vehicle for this enjoyment because you have been designed to enjoy and to be enjoyed.
I’m going to talk about some amazing possibilities, some leading edge ideas, and some actual first-person experiences in relation to the gentle art of emotional mastery, the ability to create preferred emotional states from the inside out.
Everything I teach in this course moves you toward a more expansive experience of your Self, and your own enjoyment. As you move into a more expansive experience of your Self, you will come to know your Self differently, in more satisfying ways, and you will discover more and more choice, more of your own creative power in determining who you will be and how you will feel.
This course is personal for me. It reflects something of my own journey. And it is professional. It is a distillation of the methods I have developed, and the insights I’ve gleaned over many years helping clients, first as a therapist and counselor, and more recently as a specialized coach and consultant.
Rather than save the best for last, I’ve decided to deliver the prize at the outset, and then demonstrate how everything else I teach is connected to this prize. This prize is the organizing principle, the touchstone, the personal insight, and the professional foundation for all that I offer.
It is summarized in a statement.
I will be really, really nice to myself and gentle with myself always.
Being really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always is the transformative element that paves the way for your emotional mastery, allowing you to fulfill your life purpose and your reason for being, which is to feel good simply because it is your desire to feel good.
We’re going to talk about some fascinating and illuminating topics that reach in all kinds of exciting directions, but if you practice just this one thing, being really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always, you will be on your way to emotional mastery.
I’ll talk in detail about what this means in practice, and there’s a lot to it, but I wanted to bring it up really early in the course to get you thinking in the right direction from the very start, and to show you how essentially simple the gentle art of emotional mastery can be.
Sometimes when people think of “mastery” they think about being forceful or in some way hard on yourself. That’s not it.
Here’s what the gentle art of emotional mastery is not –
It’s not forcing.
It’s not suppressing or repressing feelings.
It’s not pretending or faking or being dishonest about how you feel.
It’s not expressing every feeling that comes up.
And it’s not hard work.
The kind of emotional mastery that I value, that has improved my life so much, and helps my clients improve their lives, is primarily about aligning with your deepest desire to feel good. It’s about joyful engagement with life and enjoying your Self.
It’s not about forcing. It’s about allowing. It’s about allowing yourself to want what you want, and to feel good about wanting what you want. Emotional mastery is simply about feeling good, and this must start with feeling good about wanting to feel good.
Take a moment right now and do a little self-inquiry. Do you want to feel good? How willing are you to feel good regardless of the circumstances, some of them probably unwanted, that you might observe around you in any given moment?
Do you feel clear and easy about your desire to feel good? Or is the desire clouded with doubt or uncertainty about whether it’s possible, about whether you deserve it, or if you are capable?
Start to notice how you think and feel about your desire to feel good. How you think and feel about your desire to feel good matters a lot. You’ll need to tune this up. Some of my clients have told me “No one has ever asked me how I feel or how I want to feel.” If this is new to you that’s OK, you can let yourself move quickly into this new awareness of how you feel and how you want to feel. You’ve been getting ready for your whole life.
Feeling good about your desire to feel good is the nicest, kindest, gentlest, and most supportive way to relate to yourself, to know yourself, and is a pre-requisite for enjoying yourself in a stable, easy, and unencumbered way.
Indeed, feeling good about your desire to feel good is the foundation of loving yourself and trusting yourself, two ideas that get promoted a lot but rarely explained in such simple terms.
Loving yourself and trusting yourself begin with allowing yourself to feel good about your desire to feel good.
And while it’s not hard work, because it’s actually about letting yourself be true to your essential nature, it does require focus, and it does present some unfamiliar and new ideas that will expand your mind.
The gentle art of emotional mastery is self-love and self-trust in action. It’s the befriending of the desire to feel good. It’s the decision to be really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always. It’s the knowledge that feeling good is not something you earn, but rather your essential nature, something that comes easily if you stop placing obstacles in the way. It’s the creative control that allows you to shape preferred emotional states, from the inside out, regardless of past history, current circumstances, or other people.
It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s gratifying. And it’s available to anyone who wants it. That’s the only caveat. You have to want it. And you have to feel good about wanting it. The gentle art of emotional mastery is simply the ability to feel good more easily, in more ways, about what you want, in a variety of circumstances.
For example, when someone you love is dying. When you’re getting divorced. When you’re sick. When a species of animal you care about is going extinct. When your team loses. When you accidentally delete an important document. When you get ghosted by someone you were dating. When your stock plummets.
Emotional mastery makes you less conditional in your sense of well-being, which is the same thing as being more unconditional in your sense of well-being.
Would you like your sense of well-being to be less conditional, less contingent upon outer conditions and circumstances? Would you like to feel mostly good, most of the time, regardless of this or that or the next thing?
If the answer is a resounding yes, you’re going to love this course and you’ll get a lot out of it because you’re ready to learn what I will teach you.
If you’re not sure yet, that’s fine. You’re figuring out what you want and the clarity will come.
This concludes the introduction to this course. My intention with this introduction has been to set the tone, define some terms, and give you the opportunity to determine if you are in the right place.
Now we’re going to change gears and get into what we’re here to learn.
For just about as long as human beings have been experiencing emotion, they’ve been attributing it to external forces. Something happens “out there” in the world, and it makes you happy or it makes you sad. It makes you worried or it makes you interested. You want more of it or you want less of it.
We feel emotionally subject to the events we observe happening around us. When the events and happenings going on around us are agreeable, we tend to feel better. When the events and happenings going on around us are disagreeable, we tend to feel worse.
There’s a survival instinct and functionality involved in this relationship between what we observe around us and how that translates to a feeling state within us.
Our five physical senses are always giving us information about our environment, and our brain quickly determines whether what is being sensed is agreeable or disagreeable, wanted or unwanted, and in the next fraction of a moment, a conditioned emotional response is generated, and experienced, in the mind and body.
That’s how most people conceive of the relationship between outer reality and inner reality, that our inner emotional experience is a result of what we are observing and experiencing “out there” in physical reality.
The implication of this is that the best way, or the only way, to improve how we feel is to make outer conditions more agreeable to us. We do this in innumerable ways, constantly exerting our influence, our force, our intelligence to create better feeling conditions in which to live.
We do this through all of our interpersonal relationships too, trying to get people we care about to see us favorably so that we can feel good. We do it through politics, trying to get our favorite candidate elected so that we can feel good. We do it with the food we eat, the clothes we buy, the house we live in, the work we do, the car we drive.
We do it with the causes that we contribute to, we do it in our family life, we do it in our communities.
Some people do it through religious practices or mystical rituals, believing that a god or spirit or the universe or forces of nature are controlling how we feel.
In every single way that we attempt to shape our lives, the desire to feel good is on display.
And this is all a good thing, a natural thing, a beneficial thing, and I would never recommend trying to stop shaping your world to fit your preferences.
But all of this world building does have its limits, emotionally speaking. And the evolutionary relationship between the outer physical reality that we observe through the five physical senses, and the inner emotional reality that is reflexively created by each of us is subject to change, is changing, evolving, for those of us who can imagine more emotional freedom and creative control, for those of us who want to feel good regardless of past history, current events, or other people.
That cause and effect relationship that seems so hardwired between our observations of our outer world and our subjective experience of our inner world is a survival function. If a lion is coming at us it is to our benefit to feel fear. Fear doesn’t feel great, but it beats getting eaten.
That’s a decent enough summary of the story of the emotional conditionality that we’ve inherited through an evolutionary process that has benefited our survival tremendously.
But most of us are not fending off lions. Most of us are not contending directly with survival issues any longer. Some of us are thriving or getting ready to thrive. A mind oriented around surviving is very different from a mind oriented around thriving.
A surviving mind is older and is set to certain defaults, including a strong and reflexive emotional response to all that is observed in the outer world.
A thriving mind is newer, more flexible, and is beginning to set new parameters for itself, even creating itself, based on desire and imagination, especially the desire to feel good regardless of outer conditions, and the imagining of this being possible.
The inner individual move, your personal move, from a surviving mind to a thriving mind is an evolutionary move, and a move born of choice, and of desire. At this juncture in human history, you get to choose whether you want to default to a surviving mind, or make the developmental leap forward into a thriving mind.
What an exciting time to be a human being!
A thriving mind is synonymous with a mind that is practicing the gentle art of emotional mastery.
It starts with desire, so let’s do a guided embodiment exercise on your desire to feel good unconditionally. This will help you connect with this desire, and align yourself with it so that it can guide and inspire you.
Embodiment exercise – The desire to feel good unconditionally
We’ll do the embodiment exercise now.
Turn off your phone so you won’t be disturbed.
Take a moment and get comfortable in a seated position. You want to be alert, not sleepy, but relaxed and open.
Close your eyes if that feels OK, and as you close your eyes, let that mark a shift in your attention. Feel your attention move from the outer world to your inner world.
I’m going to speak more slowly as we proceed, with more space between my words, to help you feel more deeply into your inner world moment by moment.
Start to notice the natural rhythm of your breath, and as you notice the quality of your breathing, make adjustments based on your desire to feel good. Maybe a slower breath would feel better. Maybe breathing a little more deeply into your belly or chest would feel better.
Start making whatever adjustments feel good in relation to how you are breathing.
As you make these adjustments, however big or small, notice the improvement in how you feel physically. Notice the improvement in how you feel mentally. And notice the improvement in how you feel emotionally. You can also just notice the improvement in how you feel very generally.
Keep going with this for a few moments. Let your desire to feel good guide you as you improve and adjust the way you are using your breath. There’s no limit to the refinements you can make.
As you improve and refine your breathing to feel better and better, let yourself feel the satisfaction and enjoyment of actually improving your life experience in this very moment. Now and now and now.
Let the sensation of breath feel good. Do what you need to do to enjoy it.
Now enjoy yourself enjoying it. Let yourself be aware of who is wanting a better feeling experience in this moment, and who is creating a better feeling experience in this moment, and who is enjoying a better feeling experience in this moment.
It’s you and you and you.
It’s you wanting to feel good. That’s such a wonderful thing to want.
It’s you creating a good feeling for yourself. That’s such a wonderful thing to be creating.
It’s you enjoying this good feeling that you want and that you are creating for yourself.
That’s cause for appreciation. Let your appreciation for yourself flow. Thank yourself for wanting this. Thank yourself for creating this. Thank yourself for enjoying this.
Let your appreciation flow as energy or sensation within you. Feel the pleasure you get from you appreciating you in this moment. It really is a moment to moment thing. You are either allowing it and taking pleasure and nourishment from it in each moment or you are not. In this moment see how much appreciation and pleasure you can allow yourself.
Come back to your desire to feel good. Really notice the desire. Notice the quality of the desire. Can you allow the desire to be strong, and also to feel good, never tipping into gripping or grasping, just nice and easy?
Wanting to feel good is the most basic and natural human desire. Let it flow in you, animating you, and let it be agreeable, pleasurable, easy.
Keep noticing and adjusting your quality of breath to give you more pleasure and a better and better feeling experience.
Now let this noticing and adjusting include your whole body. Notice how you are holding your head, your face, your neck, your shoulders. Where can you bring more ease, more comfort, more allowing? Where can you make adjustments and refinements to allow a better feeling right in this moment? Your body will tell you if you listen.
Notice too, are you telling yourself stories right now, in words or images, thoughts or memories? As you focus on bringing a better feeling experience to yourself through adjustments in your breath and body, what is your mind doing? Is it aligned with your desire to feel good?
Can you let your mind relax in a similar way to how you are letting your body relax? Can you make adjustments in your mental posture, similar to your physical posture?
Keep moving your attention through your body, and bringing softness, relaxation, ease to every part that wants it. Let your breath be the vehicle. Breathe softness and ease into every part of your body that is asking for it.
This is the desire to feel good being expressed and fulfilled at a very basic level. It’s a beautiful thing to connect with your basic desire, and to fulfill it, just like this.
Keep letting appreciation for yourself rise in you. Feel appreciation for yourself for wanting to feel good, for finding ways to feel good through your breath and your body. Feel yourself as both the appreciated and the appreciator. This part is important, to appreciate yourself as both the giver and the receiver of good feeling experiences. This appreciation, from yourself, to yourself, bridges the gap between you and you. It completes a circuit and provides, if you allow it, the deepest connection with yourself, a homecoming, real belonging. Notice how unconditional it is. It depends upon no one else. It’s only about you. It’s by you, for you. It’s the best kind of self-centeredness and self-satisfaction.
If you’ve been taught that it’s bad to be self-centered, think again. This is basic nourishment, basic fulfillment, basic satisfaction. Be self-centered in this way. Give yourself the gift of your own attentiveness and loving presence and appreciation.
This is easy right? But it doesn’t do itself. You have to actually do it. This exercise that we’re doing here, that I’m guiding you through, it’s real, it’s powerful, but only if you do it.
The nourishment and satisfaction of being in presence with yourself, of simply adjusting your breath and body and mind to feel better and better, of appreciating your desire and your ability to feel good, for your own selfish benefit and pleasure, all of this is an in the moment thing. It doesn’t work to just remember that time you did it, or to think about doing it later, you have to actually do it if you want to get the benefit.
So use this guided embodiment exercise often. This is how you create a life experience that is satisfying and loving and fun and whatever else you want it to be, from the inside out.
If you continue to do this exercise often, I recommend daily, you will find that you bring the essence of it wherever you go, and that you drop easily and quickly into this self-satisfying space where you are making refinements and adjustments to your body and mind, in virtually any circumstance.
But first you need to practice it quite a few times. Fortunately, practicing it is far from a burden. It’s one of the best gifts you can give yourself.
This concludes our guided embodiment exercise, and is the end of module one. Tomorrow I’ll share a very simple way that I use my power of focus to keep me moving in my preferred emotional direction, and we’ll do a really enjoyable guided embodiment exercise.
If you’ve enjoyed this first module, invite your friends to join.
Want to share this page? Use the buttons below.