The Secret of Emotions by Justice Saint Rain is a helpful guide to understanding the connection between our emotional sensations, and our experience of virtues. Making that connection gives us a whole new vocabulary for understanding our feelings. Since most of our decisions are motivated more by our emotions than our intellect, understanding the messages that emotions are sending will have a profound impact on the rest of your life.
Many of us struggle over the conflict between our head and our heart. If following your heart has repeatedly gotten you into trouble, but to follow your head feels like a kind of soul-death, then this book will be “life changing.” It will teach your head how to understand the language of your heart, and teach your heart how to speak the language of God by explaining the connection between our emotional sensations and the Divine virtues that we long for.
This is not a religious book, but understanding our emotions means understanding their relationship to virtues. Virtues, the author suggests, are reflections of the qualities of the Divine Spirit in the world. But you can call the Divine Spirit your Higher Power, God, the Universe, the Force, or whatever creative energy makes sense to you. Uniting our understanding of emotions, virtues and the Divine is what makes this book ground-breaking and very effective.
“The Secret of Emotions was life changing.”
“This is probably the most thought-provoking book I’ve ever read. I’m not sure I wanted to dig this deep, but dig I did. The Secret of Emotions will stun and amaze.”
“It is like 500 counseling sessions in one.”
“This could be recommended for any counselor, teacher, or spiritual leader’s reference shelf.”
You can read additional reviews by clicking on the “Reviews” tab above, or click these links to go to Amazon or Goodreads.
The friendly, conversational style lends itself to reading out loud for book clubs or group therapy sessions, which is why we offer bulk discounts.
This is book 1 of the Love, Lust and the Longing for God trilogy, which is available both as a set of three books and as a single volume. Each of the three books can be purchased individually: The Secret of Emotions 4 Tools of Emotional Healing and Longing for Love, Two other books in the series are The Secret of Forgiveness, and The Secret of Happiness.
Look for excerpts from all of these books on our FaceBook page called The Secret of Emotions.
Read more by Justice Saint Rain on his blog.
Note: This is NOT a picture book, but if you scroll through the pictures, you can read some short excerpts with pretty backgrounds.
8.5×5.5 96 pg.
Shawaii (Amazon reviewer) –
This is probably the most thought-provoking book I’ve ever read. I’m not sure I wanted to dig this deep, but dig I did. The Secret of Emotions will stun and amaze.
From a facebook comment –
I just read the first book of the trilogy, and wow! As a student of psychology (and Baha’i) who hopes to go into psychotherapy, this book gave me so many insights into why counseling can be so ineffective for many clients. In my own experience, therapy just seemed to skim the surface and superficially explain the reasoning behind my emotions. This helped me fill in many of the missing pieces in my quest to better understand the human psyche and someday be able to help others. Thank you and I look forward to reading more!!
The Virtues Enthusiast –
I read the first page and bought 5 more books to give as gifts! I couldn’t put it down and am anxious to re-read it. I think everyone needs this book! It is probably one of the most powerful self-help books I’ve ever read.
VirtuesNine –
If you have not yet read this book, you MUST! It is AMAZING! It is like 500 counseling sessions in one. It is all about how we misinterpret emotions because of society and our experiences as children, how emotions are intimately connected to virtues, and that to heal emotionally and grow spiritually we need to “fill the empty places in our lives with Divine virtues.” Obviously easier said than done (which is fully admitted to in the book). It’s only 71 pages – dense with information, but a quick read – MORE than worth the price! It is an extremely enlightening and inspiring book with valuable insights and guidance for healing emotionally and growing spiritually. It has completely opened my eyes to my own motivations and how my emotions have influenced my life choices in the past. I am seriously amazed at the insights this book has provided – like how perpetuated societal misunderstandings of emotions play such a major subconscious and self-destructive role in the majority of peoples’ lives, whether they know it or not. If you couldn’t tell, I HIGHLY recommend this book. Happy reading!”
Kim –
The Secret of Emotions is as readable as Falling Into Grace, but rather than focusing on Baha’i matters it is of a more universal nature. Justice has tapped into some previously overlooked basic truths about emotions in general and “love” in particular. The insights have helped me immensely. This book is ideal for virtually everyone who has ever been through any kind of emotional turmoil. The only reader I can imagine not being happy with this book is someone who is allergic to the word “God” … and even then I think I would give it to him if he were in a lot of emotional pain, and would just hope for the best.
Kathy D –
Wonderful book! I love the way you are always so REAL, open and honest. You expose yourself so that all of us are free to see that we all have the same emotions and feel the same things. After reading this book I had a profound sense of RELIEF! I began to understand my feelings and why I do some of the things I do now or have in the past. I think you are incredibly courageous and your insight into human nature extraordinary. Thank you for being such a pure and hollow reed of God’s blessings to us. You are an artist, a poet and a healer. With gratitude
From a Goodreads Review –
The Secret of Emotions was life changing. It is full of revelations and answers to emotions felt when you are too close to the situation to discover. After reading this book I purchased The Power of Focusing and have plans to read the remainder of Justice Saint Rain books. This is a book that I will revisit.
virtue99 –
The Secret of Emotions explores new ground in the terrain between values and emotions, spirit and psychology, making this book exciting news. The author offers a way to bridge the divide between abstractly received wisdom and our own hard-earned practical experience. It does this by bringing us, along a very few clearly-defined and easily-taken steps, to a new space where our understanding of our own underlying metaphysical machinery is re-imaged in a way which empowers us to access and ameliorate it truly. This paradigm shift activates a process which can bring great spiritual healing.
The book begins by establishing a functional relation between emotions and spirit. The way certain metaphysical concepts are approached demystifies them, translating them into the language of our most direct experience with an elegance and an immediate functional rightness, and this is perhaps its greatest service. By re-framing an abstract concept such as shame in terms of how we directly experience its energy, it can be apprehended and examined elementally. After establishing the interconnection of spirit and emotion in this way, the author shows us how we can use this understanding to replace patterns of negative experience in our daily lives with a healthier model which serves us truly.
This approach has great advantages. On the one hand it manages to bypass, as if to short-circuit, certain arcane taxonomies of inherited religious and spiritual systems which mystify, rigidify, and arbitrarily encode such concepts. These inherited arcane systems risk not only empowering but also disenfranchising an individual by subverting him into a rigid, hierarchical system. In this regard Justice St. Rain’s approach here works like a historical reset, bringing these concepts immediately into the realm of the workable in terms and experience we can all relate to. The elegant spiritual wisdom on which this approach rests is also what distinguishes it on the other hand from many self-help works of similar ilk.
The author is explicit in acknowledging how his approach differs from traditional religious duality on the one hand and modern relativism on the other, and why this new approach actually works. It is that our standing in relation to the Divine has progressed historically, to the point that we are ready to use such wisdom directly as individuals. In this context the elegant re-framing of this approach helps us recognize and decouple from inherited patterns which no longer serve us, and hands over the keys to a powerful set of techniques. It works because we are ready for it, historically and societally, and in terms of the greater knowledge we have now as individuals more responsible perhaps for ourselves and the world around us.
It doesn’t actually matter if each of the assertions in this book turn out ultimately to be metaphysically fully accurate, if for example shame is, “objectively”, exactly as the author describes it in relation to love and energy, and so on. For ultimately, apprehension of the space between our physical and spiritual existence is necessarily, by its very substance, re-framable. By invoking a few elemental psychological and moral concepts in new relation in metaphysical terms here, the book brings us immediately into a powerfully useful working space for healing.
Having done this, the book goes on to outline a longer-term proposal for ongoing incremental self-improvement which rests on this transformed understanding. This second part is, necessarily, not as immediately satisfying, as it entails real and sustained life work. Yet the breakthrough possible from the paradigm shift presented earlier in the book is such that it can sustain a reader into this new territory. Virtues and emotions are mapped onto each other, and this provides a powerful basis for navigating our lives forward from here. To follow this advice is to iteratively deepen our understanding in a positive feedback loop, one which can quickly confirm in practice the insights presented here.
It is a joy to discover this system. Its profound and direct approach can add great clarity to anyone seeking to overcome obstacles, heal wounds, replace outdated negative patterns and better reach the capacity which is our rightful due. We are born noble. This book helps us better access and understand this nobility of spirit by aligning it in healthy relation with our directly lived experience.
The Secret of Emotions, like the rest of the books in this series, are of great and immediate help regardless of your path through life, your experience or beliefs. Having been myself surprised by the rare generosity of spirit and friendly helpfulness apparent in these pages, I only hope you have a chance to read and discover it for yourself. (Amazon Review)