We experienced the good and bad of life around us through our feelings: most specifically feeling pleasure and pain, as the finer nuances of emotion are not within a young child’s repertoire. (This stage is basically 6 months to 2). Normally, we want to increase pleasure and decrease pain, but as children we’re not sure what we will encounter—either in the world itself or from our parents, so every reaching carries risk. Over time, our feelings join together and become baseline emotions, like fear, sadness, or anger, or perhaps joy, optimism, and pleasure. These emotions become grooves in the psyche that carry our energy through the body and into our life and relationships—for better or worse.

Below are lists that were taken from Marshall Rosenberg’s book on Non-Violent Communication. Notice which emotions you experience most frequently in your day-to-day life. Put a circle around those that serve you and an X next to those that don’t.

Notice the physical sensations associated with the emotions you feel most frequently. Does your belly turn into a knot? Do your hands get sweaty? Does your heart beat faster? Do you clench your jaw, tighten your throat, or feel shaky in your legs? Become the observer of your emotion, as if you just got put in a human body and were totally curious about the experience.

Ask yourself: When have I felt like this before? What are the beliefs behind this emotion? How does this emotion serve me or work against me? What other emotion could I be courting instead that would serve me better?

For the negative emotions, it actually helps to find a safe place where you can exaggerate them. Put on music and dance them out passionately. You’ll find they will pass and make room for more posi¬tive emotions.

You can rewire your brain by then focusing more on the positive ones, training your body to really feel their sensation, to sink into that sensation, to wear it like a suit of clothes.

Often people want to know what to do with their emotions. How do we deal with them? Other than acknowledging the unmet needs, what do we do when we feel angry at our kids, irritated at work, so depressed we can’t do anything, or scared to the point of paralysis when it’s time to act?

It is important to remember that emotions are connected with movement. So what we need to remember is that something has to move or change. Therefore we need to move the emotion, both physically and figuratively. We can dance, walk it off, shake ourselves out, do yoga, we can exercise, move it into creativity, such as drawing or singing, or simply allow it to move through the body into an expression of whatever we are feeling, even if that is only moving it into a pillow or yelling in the car while we drive.

This expression of the more shadowy feelings can release them and actually take us to joy.

The purpose of this watery realm of emotion is not only to put us in touch through the feeling realm, but to cleanse the soul. Whenever we successfully move an emotion through, we have a sense of clarity, lightness and freedom, much like the way it feels after a big storm passes. We can breathe deeper, move more easily, and feel more present.

That state of grace is what we’re after. Processing emotions properly can be a gateway to getting there.