Mastering Your Emotions
We all wrestle with our emotions on a daily basis. It’s one of the main reasons why we suffer for far longer than we really need to. Letting our emotions get the better of us, saying and doing hurtful things in times of stress, anger or jealousy, only lead to unhappiness, bad karma and unhelpful outcomes. Sometimes, however, one random act of kindness is enough to turn the situation around and transform it into a positive. In my case, this involved baking a cake for someone I hate. (Well, I don’t actually hate anyone, it just kinda rhymed. I was just really not very happy about a situation.)
#bakeacakeforsomeoneyouhate
Here’s the background story. When my husband left me on my 40th birthday, I was completely devastated. But I managed to flip my perception and overcome the disaster in 12 hours—which I write about in one of my upcoming books, ‘How to get over Betrayal in 12 hours’. However, what I found really hard to come to terms with was the fact he started a whole new family with his younger girlfriend.
Given we’d already had three children together, surely he realised he’d now have even less time, attention and money to spend with them. I found myself faced with a choice, to be bitter and frustrated, or accepting and content—but either way, more babies were on the way and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
And that’s when I came up with the brilliant idea of baking a cake for someone you hate…
You see, baking a cake is an act of kindness and love, a symbol of celebration and happiness. A cake takes effort and allows you time to mindfully imbue the batter with forgiveness and fold plenty of love and happiness into the frosting. By performing this small act of kindness, I was teaching myself to plant the right karmic seeds for my future, rather than sow the wrong kind, bitterness and anger.
And so, after coming home with their first few babies I showed up with a decadent chocolate mud cake. I’m not sure what they thought about the gesture, but, man oh man, it sure did make me feel good.
I’m now on a mission to create a movement to see how many people can #bakeacakeforsomeoneyouhate and find peace in their heart via baked goods.
Would you do it?
If the answer is yes, please take a pic of the cake and tag it with #bakeacakeforsomeoneyouhate
In her book Kindness, author Kath Koschel says that providing random acts of kindness gives you a ‘helper’s high’. In other words, when you are kind to someone, your brain’s pleasure and reward centres are activated, so you benefit from your good deed too via the release of feel-good hormones.
Here are a few other practical tools you can use to master your emotions, as outlined by my favourite Buddhist teacher, Lama Marut.
TAKE CONTROL - If you want to master your emotions and avoid the usual knee-jerk reactions and habitual responses to difficult or annoying situations, you need to 'get medieval' on the three poisons that are responsible for our suffering—attachments, hatred and ignorance. You also need to banish your savage inner critic and smack down your unhelpful emotions like rage, vanity, lust, jealousy, resentment and annoyance.
RECOGNITION - acknowledge and label any of your unhelpful emotions and tendencies as they arise in your head (ie by being mindful) and recognise them as harmful to you, rather than being simply inevitable.
UNDERSTANDING and WISDOM—realise that it is never in your best self-interest to be anything other than cool, calm and collected when faced with adversity, that giving rein to our worst inclinations and thoughts is neither rational nor advantageous.
DE-IDENTIFICATION - disassociate from any unhelpful emotions in order to gain distance and clarity and strip them of their power (you are not your jealousy, pride, envy or depression, we do have control over them).
DETERMINATION - cultivate an unwavering resolution to wage war against your inner enemies and unhelpful mental afflictions (because any other attitude will only sustain and invigorate them).
*Disclaimer-If I bake you a cake it doesn’t mean I hate you. I actually don’t hate anyone! I just love the concept of baking cakes for people when I’m upset with them about something rather than remaining angry or upset.