"Emotional intelligence is a relationship with your emotional system, not a strategy to override it." Curation of practical, proven ways to build and maintain a healthy relationship with emotion.
Evidence-based teachings on working with feelings can benefit every student and client.
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It’s Not About Being Calm All the Time, Controlling Emotions Through Force, or Being Endlessly Agreeable
Emotional intelligence is not about being calm all the time. It is not about controlling emotions through force or discipline. It is not about being endlessly positive, agreeable, or empathic. Emotional intelligence does not mean you never feel anger, fear, sadness, or frustration. It means you are able to recognize these emotions when they arise. It is also not a performance skill, not something you “use” to manipulate others or optimize outcomes. When emotional intelligence is reduced to a tool for influence or productivity, it loses its depth and integrity. At its best, emotional intelligence is a relationship with your emotional system, not a strategy to override it.
Vera Hellerman
Emotional Well-Being Techniques: Critical and Far-Reaching Influence on Health and Well-Being
Here you’ll find excerpts from our lesson on Emotional Well-Being Techniques, where we explore the keys to emotional well-being, plus techniques and practices that improve our relationship with our emotions.
If you haven’t yet reviewed the earlier posts in this series, you may want to browse those first to gain a fuller sense of the depth of knowledge around the physiology of emotions and their immense significance and impact on health and wellness. See an overview and context here. The Research & Teaching Guide included there has links to full lessons, as well as Substack posts featuring selected excerpts.
Emotional Well-Being in a Nutshell
Emotional well-being refers to a relationship with your emotions that is grounded, aware, and accepting:
Recognize that all emotions — even the most difficult ones — serve a purpose.
Notice emotions as they arise, creating space before reacting or expressing them.
Allow emotional energy to move through you without resisting or suppressing it.
Experience feelings fully, without becoming overwhelmed or judging yourself.
Embrace emotions as powerful forces that can inform, heal, transform, and inspire creativity.
Embracing Emotion
When you look at a statue of the Buddha or the image of a great yogi with their serene smiles, it’s easy to think that these beings never experienced the same kinds of emotions or thoughts that swirl through your body/mind. But you’d be wrong. Buddhas, yogis, and sages feel the same emotions and thoughts that you do, including fear, anger, sorrow, doubt, and overwhelm… But here’s the key:
They don’t turn or run away from the emotions – they face them.
They don’t fight the emotions – they embrace them.
They turn towards them with clarity, compassion, and loving awareness.
Through this process of compassionate facing, embracing, and seeing clearly, the sages discovered something remarkable. It’s this: every emotion – no matter how challenging – can be healed, transformed, and expressed as life-giving energy.
Eric & Devi Klein
See Also
Mental Health Introduction — Be familiar with common mental health terms and with evidence-based root causes of anxiety and depression.
Mental Health & Yoga — Review research on how yoga impacts emotional balance and mental health, and learn a general approach for choosing yogic tools.
Emotions as Messengers
Approaching Emotions with Curiosity
A wide range of emotional states — including sadness, anxiety, grief, and depression — reflects a healthy and natural response to life. This doesn’t mean it’s easy to navigate intense emotional waves — only that doing so is part of the human experience.
The first step is to accept the existence of negative emotions. This is discussed in detail in the previous lesson on Suppression & Triggering.
Beyond simply acknowledging and accepting our feelings, we can learn to relate to them friends bearing messages, offering insight and guidance.
When approached with curiosity rather than resistance, emotions can support healing, growth, and a deeper sense of wholeness.
Emotional intelligence is not about eliminating emotions or always feeling good. It is about being able to notice what is happening inside you, to make sense of it, and to respond rather than react… It helps you recognize emotional signals as meaningful information, rather than as disturbances that need to be suppressed or fixed. – Vera Hellerman
See Addendum: Feelings List to explore the core emotions and a wide vocabulary of words used to describe feelings.
As with physical pain, our emotional pain is also trying to tell us something. It too is a messenger. Feelings have to be acknowledged, at least to ourselves. They have to be encountered and felt in all their force. There is no other way to the other side of them. If we ignore them, repress them, suppress them, or sublimate them, they fester and yield no resolution, no peace. — Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living
To Feel, Come Back to the Body
So how do we feel our feelings — rather than suppressing or distracting ourselves from them?
To feel emotions, we must bring attention to the body. This is in contrast to getting caught in thought — whether judgment, problem-solving, or layering additional reactions like frustration or shame on top of simply having emotions.
Phrases such as “come back to your body,” “feel where your body meets the floor,” or “notice your torso expanding with the inhale” are invitations to:
Bring the mind back from distraction or mental overactivity, and
Turn attention toward the inner experience.
This essential practice — often described as being grounded or embodied — means becoming aware of bodily sensations and the inner state of being.
Another term for this inner sensing is interoception. Practices such as breathwork, mindfulness, and grounding help cultivate this awareness and support the experience of being “in the body.”
Access in-depth teachings and practices in Grounding & Interoception.
The next steps are:
Noticing emotions as they arise, and
Allowing emotional energy to move
Essential Oils
Research published in 2008 demonstrated that smell directly influences emotions, affecting not only a person’s emotional state but also how emotional information is processed.
As a specific example, results from a clinical trial published in 2005 showed that orange essential oil reduced and improved mood, and additional research curated by Dr. Eric Zielinski DC showed it to be calming, stress-reducing and helpful with depression among other impacts.
See the full lesson for six evidence-backed essential oils and their specific impacts on emotional well-being.
Meditation & Mindfulness Techniques
See the full lesson for more information on meditation and mindfulness techniques that help to promote a healthy relationship with emotions including loving-kindness meditation and cultivating witness consciousness.
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