Emotional Mastery

There is a lie at the centre of how most people relate to their inner world. The lie is that emotions are problems to be solved. That fear is a malfunction, anger a defect, grief a weakness, shame a verdict. We are taught — by schools, by workplaces, by well-meaning parents who could not handle their own feelings — that the goal is to not feel the difficult ones. To be "fine." To keep it together. To manage the appearance of calm while the interior burns. This book is the opposite instruction. Emotional mastery is not the absence of emotion. It is not the cold, clenched control of a man who has buried everything and calls the silence peace. …