Book excerpt: You are an emotional body. You were born with a body primed and ready to express your needs through emotions, and they influence all you feel, think, do, and say. Everything you encounter triggers your emotions, and then influences your health, relationships, perspective and perception of the world. By learning more about emotions and developing skills to sense how they emerge and express through your body, you can become more adept at self-regulating emotions, managing how you express them, and consciously shifting from undesirable emotional states to more desirable ones. The lessons in this book, previously available only through specialized courses and workshops, provide detailed information on a remarkable physical approach to emotion regulation. The Emotional Body uses physical patterns discovered in scientific research, and an instructional style informed by extensive research, somatic education theory, and more than ten years of development.