You cannot choose your emotions, but you can control your actions through the agency of will. Thoughts are actions, to some extent. Certainly you can suppress them, and repeat them.
I would stipulate as a general rule that if your emotions are not serving you, they are hindering you, and that if you are suppressing them you are losing a great deal of your action-potential.
I would stipulate as well that positive thinking only stimulates positive affect where it is already present.
Sartre claimed we could choose emotions, but I think he was emotionally constipated, and lukely a clinical narcissist.
2 replies on “Emotion versus action”
Must disagree here. One can indeed successfully train oneself to choose emotions.
Some years ago, I made the decision to train myself into experiencing gratitude as my dominant affective disposition. I learned to produce within myself gratitude at will (this is helped immensely by having a spiritual framework that views the cosmos positively), and then to replace "negative" emotions (fear, envy, anxiety) just by saying "thank you", and feeling gratitude flood through me, and becoming present and grounded in the moment.
When you work with emotions enough, including/especially within meditation, you begin to realize that they are merely specific forms of energy that we attach thoughts to – thoughts which are usually incorrect to some degree. And with this comes the realization that we are not at the mercy of our emotions, but can begin to use them, as we do other forms of energy, as tools for our own personal evolution.
I would argue that what you are doing there is not necessarily choosing emotions, but rather liberating them.
Just in the last day or so I have been working with expanding and entering negative feelings, and seeing how they lose their effect when I do that.
We do perhaps share the belief that life is meant to be happy, and that it is only the barriers we erect to it–as defenses against something or other, here or there–which prevent the spontaneous emergence of joy, gratitude, and calm.