Responding to emotions
When an emotion comes up, there are four basic ways to respond:
Recognizing that no response is needed
Taking appropriate action
Locate the space of being in which the emotion is not a problem (which often leads to the energy moving through or dissolving)
Any other available approach
Expanding on each of these...
No response needed
The emotion is implicitly recognized as congruent. Nothing to do. No intuition of incongruence arises. Life goes on.
Take appropriate action
Treat the emotion as useful information/feedback for your actions. For example: when hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.
Locate the space of no-problem
Liberate Emotion As-Is, continuing involvement: Identify with the physical sensation of the emotion (while maintaining spaciousness). Allow the feeling to be as it is (complete acceptance that the feeling may never change, and may persist forever.) As a direct result, any compulsion of a particular action flowing from the feeling vanishes. As a possible but not necessary (or necessarily desirable) fruit, the emotion may dissipate...but it doesn't matter if it does or doesn’t: that is what complete acceptance implies.
The central fruit of this practice is liberating the energy of the emotion to move in life as a powerful and benign force. A useful scaffolding for this is active appreciation of the physical sensation of the emotion (e.g., actively appreciating the feeling of a fearful clench in the stomach). A necessary prerequisite for this to be in contact with the physical sensation of an emotion.
Adding Spaciousness, remaining uninvolved: This approach is more likely to lead to a dissolution of the emotion. Note, though, that dissolving an emotion foregoes the opportunity to transform the energy of the emotion into a useful and valuable energy. Continued involvement with the liberated energy of the emotion and remaining uninvolved with the emotion are equally appropriate actions to take in different contexts.
Any other available approach
Breathing, self-control, affirmations, psychotherapeutic techniques, physical techniques, energetic techniques, etc. with a preference for energetic techniques over physical techniques if available, and a preference for transformation (so that there are no damaging side effects) over suppression (actively preventing damaging side-effects) of emotion if available.
There is a spectrum from nebulous to well-formed patterns. Nebulous patterns generalize more. To take three approaches:
1) Visualize oneself as a peaceful personage. Long term, this will generalize the most.
2) Technical Breath control...this will generalize to fewer situations than (1) but more than (3)
3) Pure rigid behavioral self-control...sometimes, this is all you've got to not stab someone. Not a bad method, then.
You use the capabilities you have available, and perhaps add new capabilities over time...