When emotions begin to control us, the instinctive response is to try to control them back — creating a power struggle with our own emotional life. This management stage is a form of repression with intellectual overlay: we actively decide emotions aren’t good and develop strategies to suppress them — running, positive self-talk, meditation-as-avoidance, or simply ignoring.
Brett describes it as “creating new impulses to fight the initial impulses that are coming up within us.” You can achieve a meta-stable state through management and maintain it for a lifetime, but it comes at a cost: joy disappears, aliveness drains, and you’re spending constant effort maintaining an internal war rather than living freely.
“Most people’s meditation is management, and that’s torture.” — Adyashanti, as quoted by Joe
The management stage is seductive because it looks like progress — you appear calm, in control, functional. But the most telling sign of being stuck here is the absence of joy, not the presence of dysfunction.
Related Concepts
- It’s not the emotion that hurts but the resistance
- Emotional development follows a spiral
- Bullying yourself creates resistance
- Managing emotions prolongs suffering