Emotions are a form of feedback. They are psycho-physiological responses to your interpretation of information/stimuli and your perception of reality. Your emotions reflect what/how you are thinking about your experiences, your imagination, and/or your observations.
In order for your emotions to be useful and not destructive to/for you, you must first understand what they are and how to appropriately process and respond to them.
You have to be able to see, handle, and manage your emotions effectively (and, therefore, non-judgmentally) in order to most accurately decipher their message (about how you are looking at/responding to any given thing) so that you can then use your intelligent mind to formulate correct and appropriate thoughts, words, and actions (responses/Karmas) to your observations and perceptions.
Once you understand, and know how to manage and regulate, your thoughts and emotions, you can then consistently deal with, choose, and/or change how you feel (by changing how you look at things or giving yourself what you need based on context, etc.), since running away from your emotions, suppressing them, projecting them, and other such fear/ignorance-based responses (to energetic feedback) does not support you to truly gain mastery over your body-mind (where your emotions take place to begin with).
You only know true happiness when you understand how, and that, your perception of, and, therefore, relationship with, reality (outside of the actual Absolute Reality) is a choice and a fabrication, and then take full responsibility for how you feel when creating (with)in that reality if you choose to live on a relative plane of existence with the rest of the world.
You will know that your practice/skill in emotional regulation is solidified after you create joy even when unfortunate things happen to you and or others that may cause you emotional pain simply because you are manifested in human form and have the ability to fully feel.
Yoga-Meditation Lifestyle Wellness 