This is something I read very early on and it helped me understand the emotional body: “The body and the man are two, and the man’s will is not always what the body wishes. When your body wishes something, stop and think whether you really wish it. For you are God, and you will only what God wills; but you must dig deep down into yourself to find the God within you, and listen to His voice, which is your voice. Do not mistake your bodies for yourself-neither the physical body, nor the astral, nor the mental. Each one of them will pretend to be the Self, in order to gain what it wants. But you must know them all, and know yourself as their master.
When there is work that must be done, the physical body wants to rest, to go out walking, to eat and drink; and the man who does not know says to himself: “ I want to do these things, and I must do them.” But the man who knows says: “This that wants is not I, and it must wait awhile.”
Often when there is an opportunity to help some one, the body feels: “How much trouble it will be for me; let some one else do it.” But the man replies to his body: “You shall not hinder me in doing good work.”
The body is your animal – the horse upon which you ride. Therefore you must treat it well, and take good care of it; you must not overwork it, you must feed it properly on pure food and drink only, and keep it strictly clean always, even from the minutest speck of dirt. For without a perfectly clean and healthy body you cannot do the arduous work of preparation, you cannot bear its ceaseless strain.
But it must always be you who controls that body, not it that controls you. The astral (emotional) body has its desires – dozens of them; it wants you to be angry, to say sharp words, to feel jealous, to be greedy for money, to envy other people their possessions, to yield yourself to depression. All these things it wants, and many more, not because it wishes to harm you, but because it likes violent vibrations, and likes to change them constantly. But you want none of these things, and therefore you must discriminate between your wants and your body’s.
Your mental body wishes to think itself proudly separate, to think much of itself and little of others. Even when you have turned it away from worldly things, it still tries to calculate for self, to make you think of your own progress, instead of thinking of the Master’s work and of helping others. When you meditate, it will try to make you think of the many different things which it wants instead of the one thing which you want. You are not this mind, but it is yours to use.”
###end of excerpt of At The Feet Of The Master by Krishnamurti