Have tea with it

If you always instinctively react to negative feelings - say, anxiety, anger, insecurity, or boredom - then you’ll behave erratically, irrationally, and experience an emotional roller coaster. The underlying conflict or knot that’s causing the emotion will remain unresolved 

Instead, a Buddhist teacher advised me to invite the feeling to have tea with me. Talk to it to understand what it wants and why. Maybe you end up letting go of the underlying attachment and freeing yourself,  or you act on the need deliberately and practically. Either way, you’ll be calmer and more successful than being controlled by your emotions. 

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