Peaceful at Every Moment

   Reading Robert Augustus Masters Spiritual Bypassing, I am still wrestling with the experience of emotions from a mindfulness perspective. If  emotions are neither ourselves nor are they 'not ourselves', how do we best relate to them? And is there any significance to making this special relationship with emotions into a kind of goal in itself?
    I tried this experience recently: rather than using daydreams or other distracting things to get rid of disturbing emotions, I tried to 'stay with' the emotion, as a lot of the psychologists in mindfulness are currently suggesting. That is, I honored the energy of the emotion itself by giving it space to be what it is, and even allowing specific voices to come up which 'speak for' those emotions. But what I found was that there were times when I would be pulled into the energy rather than being a witness to it.  And when I started to become a bit more curious about where it is coming from, I was able to sometimes come up with possible ideas or scenarios for why things were as they are...but this didn't seem to change the emotion itself. In this way, I think that expecting emotions to change simply by being mindful of them is not always going to create a fruitful result.
   I have found that another way of looking at emotions might be to think of them as wisdom teachings in disguise. Emotions often appear to be messy, intrusive and unpleasant, but there is always a symbolic wisdom that is contained in the emotion itself, even though it might not seem this way at the time. When I say 'symbolic wisdom', I am not talking about the kinds of symbols we might see in books on dream interpretation. Rather, there might be the hidden wisdom of what the emotion demands of us, telling us to perhaps slow down or take notice of certain tendencies or preferences.
     I think the key quality here of experiencing emotions is not to see them as inherently good or bad, but to observe them coming and going, not trying to resist them or seek them in any way. After all, emotions are really just clouds floating in the sky of mind, and a lot of these emotions might just be temporary. To try to place too great a significance on certain emotions runs the risk of creating opposition and reading into emotions too much. In fact, the most important quality that a person can cultivate is equilibrium, as well as the necessary enthusiasm to be able to see possibilities in each new moment. If I only dwell in a particular mood without observing its temporary nature, I might not see the possibility of just abiding in it. Instead, the feeling will come across as overwhelming or even burdensome.
   For this reason, it seems important to be able to see the positive aspects of one's emotional states, even if they seem a bit strange or scary at the moment. Trusting in the more positive aspects of emotions can free a person from being dragged down in moods of hopelessness or confusion.