It’s just one of these evenings on which I used to have a drink after work: Stressful appointments, traffic jams, frustrating weather, dark when coming home. The catch: I don’t drink anymore.

So, the gloomy and depressive emotions come, and if you don’t have anything to distract you from them, or you don’t want distraction, because that means only postponing dealing with them, you have to deal with them.

How to do so? “Surfing the wave”. Imagine the emotion like a building wave which is about to engulf you. You can handle the wave or you can try to outrun it. If an emotion is building up, running from it is is like avoiding it (or postponing dealing with it). A good mechanism is to “surf” on it. Get on it, ride on it, let it build and then ebb. You learn to deal with the bad emotion, since you learn the lesson that it will fade away. You draw the Fear Tiger’s teeth if you do it a couple of times. Of course it is not a nice feeling, but you learn to live with even these feelings. No-one can always be happy, and bad emotions belong to you like the good ones.

The tricky part is realizing where it came from and what caused it. Surfing a wave is only really helpful if you can name the emotion and know its origin.

Go into the emotion and try to deconstruct it: Is it a simple emotion or is it more complex? Has it been there, lingering around? Were there any events today that shaped the start of the wave? When was that? Where was that? Try to pinpoint the origin.

Meditating helps and also breathing. Visualizing is helpful. Try to deconstruct the feeling bit by bit until you have every single drop of it analyzed. Then you can safely surf the wave and the teeth of the Fear Tiger may fall out by itself.

It takes some practice. Important to note would be that you should be self compassionate about the feelings. Don’t blame yourself and don’t feel ashamed.

Then you can master the emotion.

Until next time: Keep the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.