Practicing Emotional Mastery
Manage your internal world and quickly recover from emotional imbalance

So what is emotional mastery? What are emotions, for that matter? A simple way to view emotions is simply energy in motion. They become problems only when we judge them as wrong, bad, inappropriate, etc. When we misperceive our emotions, we may miss the message that they carry or stuff them down, only for them to emerge stronger later. Emotional mastery is the ability to process our emotions so that their message gets to us, and their energy is used for appropriate action.

I love how Peter McWilliams interprets the purpose of our basic emotions in his book, "Do It."
Fear is the energy to do your best in a new situation.
Guilt is the energy for personal change-it is anger directed toward ourselves, and anger is the energy for change.
Unworthiness keeps us on track--just as we can have anything we want, we can't have everything we want. So too, we are worthy of anything we want, but we may not be worthy of everything we want.
Hurt feelings are a reminder of how much we care.

So how can you use this information as a facilitator? I suggest that you release any old beliefs you hold around emotions and begin to cultivate present moment awareness as your emotions arise. Begin to look at them, not as good or bad, but simply with curiosity, and with the question, what's energy for?

Examples
Here are some examples of how your emotions might be effectively expressed in a group:

To help validate a participant and to help them feel more connected to themselves, you may share the feelings arising in you as a result of them sharing their experience.
To assist a group in moving through pettiness and resistance to being fully present, you might express some of the anger and frustration you feel observing their process.
If you feel tears of sadness arising as a result of someone sharing something deeply personal, letting this emotion flow displays your humanness and builds trust with the group.
If you feel anger and frustration over the group not moving the way you think it should, use this energy to be fully present and fully honest with the participants about their process.

These examples are not meant to show how you can use emotion to manipulate participants, but as possible positive outcomes of sharing authentic emotions.