Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it. ~Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

I have always believed emotions are part and parcel of my life and my experiences, and are a means of survival. I can see that emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

I noticed that emotion happens right before I take some action. If you have a love emotion, you move forward and kiss your date. If your feeling is a strong desire, you get into your car and go buy that ice cream.

I have a practical take on emotion as I work to Be the Change in my life. Emotion means feeling; we’ve been told to control our feelings - our emotions. But how? You can control them completely through what you think. Feelings are at the tail end of your thinking process. This process is not visible, so we can miss that it even exists.

You can think. This means you are Mind Itself, because only mind can think. Your Mind is Cause. This is a critical piece of information. What is the extension of this kind of thought?

If you are Mind because you can think, then the very next thing to examine is that your thinking causes its own end product. You now have two important pieces that precede understanding about your feeling. You know that your Mind is Cause and it causes what you think.

When your mind wants something, it thinks about what it desires. You provide reasons why you can or should have what you desire. If you have a negative tendency going, you provide reasons why you should not have what you desire.

That decision you made to have or not have is actually a feeling of conviction. You are absolutely convinced that you could or could not have your own desire. You might feel joy-filled; exhilarated; or you might feel sick, or disappointed.

Next, something wonderful happens: the thing you desired will appear in your life experience. When I first begin to observe this process, it looked like a coincidence. Eventually, I came to trust that it is me creating my own desires. My mind is a Cause Machine.

Here is a summary of the Truth that sets you free:

FIRST A desire comes up from inside yourself

SECOND You begin to think about the desire and eventually reach a conclusion about whether you can have it or not

THIRD A feeling or absolute conviction manifests the desire “physically” in your life.

So what is feeling? It’s the frosting on the cake. It’s the period at the end of the sentence. It’s the result of what you thought to a conclusive state, and it is the only way things can manifest in your life. I hope you will use this process to begin to create what you most want.

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling? ~ Claude Debussy

Author's Bio: 

Maria Khalifé, expert in holistic, motivational living, teaches powerful, life-changing techniques. Universal principles sustain her revolutionary methods of coaching, speaking and teaching. Certified at the Ford Institute in San Diego, Maria leads others in accelerated growth on The Path through The Change Coaching Institute. http://www.changecoachinginstitute.com