Can We Tame Our Emotions?

Episode 10 · May 25, 2023

Emotions and inner life

The Truth Hurts · Episode 10 · audio in Hebrew

Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Listen on YouTube Share on WhatsApp

The conversation

You know exactly what the right thing to do is, and you still find yourself doing exactly the opposite. According to Gili, this isn't about a lack of knowledge or a lack of self-discipline. It's emotion taking the wheel, the same way it works in animals, through an ancient mechanism of fight, flight and freeze. Even completely ordinary people, with no troubled background at all, can find themselves in a single moment doing something they would never have believed they were capable of. The real question isn't what you do when you're in control of yourself. It's what happens inside you the moment that control disappears.

The truth

  • The shooting in the mall parking lot in Ramla: an older couple and a young couple with children, two completely ordinary families, get into a fight over a parking space that ends with a 75-year-old man shooting the younger man dead in front of his wife and children. Proof that a normal background is no guarantee of control in the moment of truth.

  • The lesson Gili drives home: what runs a person is emotion, not knowledge. The moment anger or fear wakes up we become, in her words, "slaves of the emotion", and it makes no difference how much training or self-control we have.

  • Simple everyday examples of the same thing: the alarm clock you switch off even though you decided to get up early, or an angry phone call that leaves you with a stomachache and regret afterward.

  • The story of the king who wanted to know what rules a person, the mind or the emotions: a wise man showed up with a trained cat that walked on two legs and served drinks, but the moment a mouse jumped out of the snuffbox, the cat dropped everything and chased it on all fours. The power of the mind is limited the moment an emotion wakes up.

  • Every person has a different emotional Achilles heel. One reacts badly when they're tired, another when they're hungry, another when they're insulted.

  • The key to controlling emotion is a deep look at yourself, not an analysis of the actions you take: what you long for, what you hate, what you dream about, because that is what really defines who you are.

Questions and answers

Why can't I calm down after a phone call that made me angry, even hours after it ended?

Gili says that a person isn't defined by the actions they take but by what they really want to do. That, she says, is why controlling emotion starts with a deep look at yourself: what you long for, what you hate, what you dream about and where your real desires lie, because that's what defines the real person underneath.

I know I'm controlling, and full of appetites, and full of fears and frustrations. Is it going to be like this forever? Do I have no chance of getting out of it?

The answer comes from Maimonides, who wrote that "knowledge changes emotion". Every feeling is a result of the way we approach things. Gili illustrates it with a story about someone who sees a man dragging a woman down the street, gets angry and thinks about calling the police, and then understands that this happens every day because he's the one taking care of her, and in one moment the fury turns into compassion, without reality itself having changed at all.

Why does one phone call where somebody yelled at me stay lodged in my stomach for hours afterward, and how am I supposed to control that at all?

The answer is clear: yes, a person has to control their emotion, but it depends entirely on changing their understanding, their knowledge, and not on the emotion itself, which is spontaneous and can't be commanded directly. To change an emotion you first have to change the consciousness that feeds it.

Gili's original episode description

The tenth episode of The Truth Hurts focuses on the human emotional system, the large and complicated dimension of human experience.

In the episode Gili and Tal try to examine the central role emotions play in our lives, and the difficulties that come up when we try to tame them.

Can an emotion be tamed at all?

Are we really slaves to our thoughts, or do we have a tool for controlling them?

And of course there are a few practical tips from Gili, to help you deal with your feelings in a healthier and more aware way.

About the podcast

Listening to The Truth Hurts feels like sitting in on a healing session.

The truth can hurt. It’s right there in the name. But we’re not here to cause pain. Quite the opposite.

In each episode, two women sit down for an honest conversation: an Emotional Healer and her client.

We talk about healing and consciousness, faith and science, the body and soul, personal growth, energy, and different approaches to healing. Above all, we face the truth no one says out loud: everything around us is upside down.

Is this podcast for you?

  • You want to hear the truth, and you’re ready to face it. (Yes, those are two different things.)
  • You want to gain insight and improve your quality of life.
  • You want to make a change.
  • You want a deeper understanding of the laws of the universe.
  • You want to live a healthy life in body and soul.
  • You want to take away something you can carry with you for life.

You don’t need any prior knowledge. You only need the desire to explore a wide range of ideas and discover practical guidance for living.

Listen and get in touch

Gili Man Wolner, Emotional Healer. Helping you heal and grow through Jewish wisdom.

Have a question about an episode? Send a WhatsApp message to +972 50-681-0611 (messages only).

Listen to The Truth Hurts (in Hebrew).

Tal Eckerling, co-host: Website · Facebook · Instagram