by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
How to Cultivate Emotional Mastery in a Real, Human, and Integrated Way
There’s a lot of noise out there about emotions which will give you complicated explanations about what they are, how we should deal with them, what they ‘mean’, and what techniques we need to use to handle them properly.
Buried within all of this noise is the quiet but reliable truth that most people never really hear:
Emotional mastery is actually a very simple thing but the ego will do everything in its power to make it seem complex, confusing, and overwhelming. This is because as long as things feel ‘complicated‘, we avoid the real work, stay fragmented, and remain out of alignment with our own REALNESS (the opposite of ego).
If you’ve ever found yourself caught between feeling too much or feeling nothing at all, then you’ve already tasted the confusion the ego thrives on:
This is because most people fall into one of two unhelpful patterns when dealing with their emotions, and although the patterns look different on the surface, both are rooted in the same basic fear: the fear of what will happen to the ego if we actually allow ourselves to feel.
Some people become emotionally robotic which means that they suppress anything that threatens their sense of control. Others swing the opposite way and allow their emotions to define their identity, letting every wave of feeling dictate their behaviour.
Both strategies are attempts to avoid reality and both keep people stuck.
What we need, if we’re serious about emotional mastery, is a way of relating to our emotions that doesn’t trap us in either extreme.
We need a real way – a way that aligns with how emotion actually works in the body, the mind, and the deeper levels of human experience. That’s what this article is here to help you understand and embody.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Emotional Mastery Without the BS: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- How to Cultivate Emotional Mastery in a Real, Human, and Integrated Way
- What Emotions Really Are (And Why People Fear Them)
- Emotional Mastery Trap One: Suppressing Emotion (Becoming a Robot)
- Emotional Mastery Trap Two: Identifying With Emotion (Becoming the Emotion)
- The Third Path to Emotional Mastery: The Real Approach (Do Nothing)
- Emotional Mastery: Principles, Vision, and Conscious Choice
- The Ocean and the Wave
- Practical Steps for Emotional Mastery (Without the BS)
- Emotional Mastery Final Thoughts: What’s Real Is Always Real
What Emotions Really Are (And Why People Fear Them)
To begin untangling all the confusion around emotions and emotional mastery, we have to start with the most basic truth about emotions, which most people intellectually know but don’t actually live.
It goes like this:
Emotions are e-motion, energy in motion.
This means that they’re not fixed, they’re not permanent, and they’re not a definition of who you are – they’re simply energetic experiences that arise within your system and want to pass through it.
If we were raised in a world that encouraged embodied realness, this simple fact alone would transform everything but, instead, most of us were taught – directly or indirectly – that emotions are dangerous, messy, inconvenient, or signs of weakness.
We were taught that feeling something fully might overwhelm us, expose us, make us lose control, or even make us unloveable in some way.
This leads to most people living in a state of resistance to their own emotions – not because emotions themselves are harmful, but because our ego feels threatened by what those emotions might reveal.
This kind of resistance is what keeps emotional energy stuck and it’s this ‘stuckness’ that creates the tension, the anxiety, the frustration, and the sense of being emotionally ‘blocked’ that so many people live with on a daily basis.
This is where two traps show up that keep us from emotional mastery:
Emotional Mastery Trap One: Suppressing Emotion (Becoming a Robot)
The first trap is suppression:
This is where people push emotions away, bury them, or pretend they don’t exist.
This leads to them tightening around anything that feels intense or uncomfortable and trying to carry on as if they are unfazed. On the surface, it looks controlled and stable – maybe even like emotional discipline – but underneath, the emotional energy is simply being forced into hiding.
And anything that gets forced into hiding eventually tries to come back out.
Think of the classic example:
Someone feels a surge of anger but immediately swallows it because they don’t want to appear confrontational, rude, or uncontrolled.
They stay calm on the outside, but the energy remains trapped inside the body, tightening everything up – later, when someone leaves a teaspoon in the sink or breathes too loudly, the suppressed anger explodes out of them, seemingly out of nowhere.
Or take lust:
People suppress it because they’re ashamed of it or believe it isn’t “appropriate” but that energy doesn’t disappear – it simply leaks out later in compulsive behaviour (like texting people you know you shouldn’t really be texting or whatever).
Suppression is always a form of resistance because it blocks the natural movement of emotional energy, builds pressure internally, and guarantees that the emotion will come out later in a distorted and unreal way.
Emotional Mastery Trap Two: Identifying With Emotion (Becoming the Emotion)
Then there’s the opposite trap which is full identification with the emotion:
This is where someone feels an emotion and completely merges with it without letting it pass (which is what it ‘wants’ to do because emotions are e-motion, energy in motion).
In cases like this, the person in question doesn’t have anger – they are anger.
They don’t feel jealousy – they become jealousy.
They don’t experience sadness – they sink so deeply into it that they can’t imagine a world in which the feeling will ever pass.
From the outside, this looks expressive and honest as though they’re really “in touch” with their feelings but, on the inside, this too is resistance because instead of allowing the emotional energy to move, the person holds onto it, feeding it with stories, meaning, and reactive action.
The emotion stays at its peak because they won’t step back far enough to see it as a wave rather than an identity (which is always ego).
This is unhelpful because it always leads to unreal action – acting from emotional reactivity and unreal and fragmented ways of identifying instead of from conscious choice.
Anger turns into punching a wall or someone’s face.
Lust turns into texting an ex at midnight.
Fear turns into running away from something that actually matters.
Sadness turns into shutting down and withdrawing from the world.
When emotion dictates action, the action is rarely real because it comes from fragmentation, not wholeness.
The Third Path to Emotional Mastery: The Real Approach (Do Nothing)
Emotional mastery begins when you realise you don’t have to suppress your emotions or express them impulsively because there’s a third option – the REAL option – and it’s surprisingly simple:
Do nothing.
Not nothing in the avoidant sense.
Not nothing in the apathetic sense.
But nothing in the spacious, conscious, and aware and accepting sense.
Doing nothing in this context means stepping back enough to observe the emotional energy without interfering with it. It means letting the emotional wave rise, reach its crest, and then fall naturally.
To put it another way:
It means allowing the Reality Wave to do what reality always does when we stop resisting.
The key to being able to do this is learning to understand that emotions move like waves which means that they build, they crest, and then they dissolve.
People who suppress their emotions never let the wave crest – instead, they stop it at the very beginning.
People who identify with their emotions keep the wave at its peak – which means they refuse to let it fall.
On other hand, those who approach their emotions in a real way allow the entire wave to unfold from start to finish.
This is what you need to train yourself to do if you want to master your emotions.
When you do this, the emotional energy is processed cleanly because it completes its natural cycle:
Nothing gets stuck, nothing explodes, nothing needs to be acted out, and – perhaps most importantly -you regain your ability to make conscious decisions rooted in your principles and vision, not your temporary emotional state.
Emotional Mastery: Principles, Vision, and Conscious Choice
After the emotional wave has fallen – and only after – you are free to choose how you want to move forward.
This is the moment where your principles and vision matter more than anything:
Your principles are the beliefs that support your realness: compassion, courage, honesty, self-respect, integrity, boundaries, and the commitment to living in alignment with truth.
Your vision is your direction – the path you’ve chosen for your own growth, purpose, and becoming even more real.
Together, they provide the foundation from which real action emerges.
The bottom line is that when you only ever make decisions from emotion, you get chaos because emotions are temporary, keep changing and keep conflicting with each other; when you make decisions from principles and vision, you get alignment because these things are REAL and what’s real is always real.
In short, emotions are temporary, but the real is lasting. The real doesn’t shift with your mood or your fear or your impulses. What’s real is always real.
Emotional mastery is therefore not about becoming emotionally numb, nor is it about riding emotional highs and lows like a rollercoaster but about learning to feel everything fully, without resistance, and then choosing consciously from a deeper place based on where you know you want to take yourself.
It’s about remembering that you are the ocean, not the wave.
The Ocean and the Wave
This metaphor captures the essence of emotional mastery:
The wave is the emotion and it’s always temporary which means it rises and falls and changes shape. It can feel powerful in the moment, but it has no permanence.
The ocean is your wholeness and it’s steady, deep, and unchanging.
When you forget that you are the ocean, you identify with every wave that passes through your experience, and life becomes chaotic, overwhelming, and exhausting but when you anchor into your deeper self (your REALNESS), every emotion becomes something you can allow, observe, and integrate rather than something that throws you around or dictates your behaviour.
This is the foundation of real emotional freedom.
Read Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to build the strongest foundation within yourself possible: a foundation of realness.
Practical Steps for Emotional Mastery (Without the BS)
Here’s a simple, grounded process you can use daily to work with your emotions in a real way.
These steps reflect the Awareness → Acceptance → Action process that underpins all real transformation and that I use with my coaching clients (and talk about in some of my books):
1. Pause and Recognise the Wave
When you feel an emotion rising, take a brief pause and breathe – even just three seconds is enough – and acknowledge what’s happening.
Simply recognising that “this is a wave” is often enough to stop the ego from pulling you into reactive behaviour or suppression.
2. Bring Awareness to the Body
Shift your attention from the story in your head to the sensations in your body.
Describe the sensations neutrally without any stories or projections attached: tightness in the chest, heat in the face, pressure in the stomach, shaking in the hands.
This grounds you in reality rather than the ego and its old narratives.
This article goes deeper into this: Escape the Matrix in 4-Steps: From Projection to Presence
3. Do Nothing and Let the Wave Crest
This is the heart of the process:
Instead of reacting or suppressing, just allow the emotional energy to rise and reach its crest (knowing that it will fall afterwards).
Breathe with it, stay present with the sensation, and let it reach its natural peak.
Most emotional waves peak within 30–90 seconds when we stop resisting them.
4. Wait for the Fall
As the wave begins to soften, you’ll feel a shift – a sense of space or release:
This signals that the emotional energy has moved through you.
You aren’t forcing anything – you’re just letting the body do what it naturally knows how to do and following the principle of “emotions are e-motion, energy in motion“.
5. Choose a Real Action
Now, once the wave has fallen, ask yourself:
What do my principles guide me toward here?
What does my vision call me to do?
What action aligns with who I know I’m becoming rather than how I temporarily felt?
This is where emotional mastery turns into real transformation.
Emotional Mastery Final Thoughts: What’s Real Is Always Real
Emotions are part of being human but emotional chaos is not inevitable, and emotional repression is not strength.
The real path lies between these extremes:
When you allow emotions to move through you without resistance, without attaching to them, and without acting impulsively, you begin to experience a kind of inner freedom that most people don’t know is possible.
You realise that your emotions are temporary waves and your realness is the ocean beneath them.
When you learn to trust in this truth, you stop being a slave to your feelings and start becoming a conscious participant in your own life.
This is emotional mastery without the BS, without the ego’s complications, and without the fragmentation that keeps you from your wholeness.
It’s the simple, powerful, and deeply human practice of letting reality move through you so you can respond from truth instead of something else.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to find a foundation of realness within yourself and start living your real life then book a free coaching call with me and I’ll help you to start building flow and taking real action.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
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Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
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