Our emotions influence our state of mind and are a major focus for our growth. Being more aware of our emotions and the message they carry is the first step to releasing any underlying patterns of suffering that block our experience of wholeness.

The key point is that in everything we do we have a choice. Through awareness we can change our habitual emotional responses and transform our lives.

Exercise

1. Focus on yourself and become aware of how you are feeling. Stay with this for a while. If the feeling is pleasant, enjoy it. If it is unpleasant, avoid responding negatively and instead focus on understanding and accepting how you are at that moment. Develop a response of kindness and love towards yourself. Remember that our feelings are temporary and can change. Use positive affirmations and consider the potential you have and can realise.

2. Now repeat step 1, but this time focus on a friend. What is your feeling? Develop a desire for your friend's happiness and wellbeing, and for release from suffering.

3. This time focus on someone you hardly know, or are not very interested in. Develop your capacity to feel and respond. Develop a desire for their happiness and wellbeing, and for release from suffering.

4. Next, focus on someone you dislike or find difficult. Stay with the feeling. Realise that things for them are bound to be different from how you see them. Wish that they too find happiness and wellbeing, and are free from suffering. Remember that they are the Source 'in disguise'.

5. Finally, focus on all four of the previous and work to equalise the love between them. Once you have achieved this, take the love out to the people in the area around you; then to the whole town or city; then to the whole country; then to the whole world; then, finally, out into the Universe. Extend your love to all life and know that you are all, in truth, One.

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