I am assuming we are talking about day to day, not specifically during meditation. I've had a number of way through my life. First one was to ignore unwanted emotions or try to ignore them and try to carry on despite them. That way didn't work too well but it may have at least taught me now to resist getting sucked into emotion too much. Later, I worked with attempting to change them, sort of like jhana surfing. I found that if I could remember hard on an emotion I wanted instead, if I could remember it clearly enough, I could sort of jump into it and then I would get to it. Thus anxiety could be shifted to calm confidence, for instance. As might be suspected, I only worked consciously on trying to change bad to good, but not the reverse! This tactic has advantages and I feel I learned from it, but I also noticed that unwanted emotions tended to sneak back again in short order. It was sorta like trying to say 'no' to a cat, the minute you aren't paying attention, the cat is trying to sneak back again and do that thing you told it to stop and now it has become even more determines than before. At some point, I realized the mood alteration method was not a long term solution and that I had to get at the source of the moods. But I do think during this time that I started to develop an attitude that I was not stuck with what I had but that I had the ability to work with self and improve things and change things. It was sort of like a dog training approach, I learned that just as the Dog Whisperer could change an apparently bad dog into a good dog, so might I perhaps also change myself. Somewhere in this phase, I developed a more proactive approach and started to set aside a subtle victim mentality I had carried for a long time, although it was not until later that I was able to really recognize that shift and how important I think it was.
The primary way I did the next phase was via observing self scripts (the things you tell yourself) as much as I could. Most people have running commentaries in their heads that describe their interpretation of life and events. These commentaries include things like judgements on others, daydreams, assumptions on why things happen and why self and others behave and exist as they do. I started a program of analyzing these scripts and often choosing to change them. For instance, I might notice I am thinking some guy is a big jerk and hates me. And I might decide that a better or more accurate assumption might be that this guy is clearly angry about something which may or may not have anything to do with me but that there is no point in letting it concern me at this time. Or I might notice someone has left their clothes in the dryer and I might say to myself, "I HATE that, it's my pet peave, I hate it when people leave clothes in the dryer," but then upon noticing this mental script, might decide instead to realize that really it's just not a big deal really, I'll be done in seconds, it's a nice day out, etc. Digging deeper, I might even realize that the irritation actually arose out of self judgement that I had waited until the last minute to do my clothes and now was in a big hurry and how I often did that kind of thing and how it was really irresponsible, etc etc..(more scripts that were not useful..)
IMO, a lot of these self programs are taught to us early on by parents and society and have become an internalized habit that we are barely aware of. My goal was to become much better aware of them and give them a good hard look for usefulness and integrity. Working on this took a number of years of daily work as there was a lot of bad habit to find and work on and it can be hard to change a life time of habit into a new direction. Again, like cats, the old habits do tend to sneak back, but not as bad as when I had tried to just force the emotion with jhana surfing, and over time I did notice the new habits taking hold and a different type of momentum taking hold. My outlook on things began to change and I made many useful insights at times about my own development and things around me. The course of my life was much less of a mystery to me.
This is a time in my life when I was also able to identify a lot of thought structures that IMO where counterproductive and it's when I started a businesss, made it successful, and improved my life both financially and socially quite a bit. I consider it the time when I was able to change the course of my life in a lot more positive direction and it actually was not that long ago, maybe like 4 or 5 years ago when it started. And although I do not consider myself to have totally finished that process, still more work to do certainly, but seems clearer now after a lot of introspection that much of my problem previously was that I was at war with self, with parts of me wanting different things or pulling in different directions, parts of my telling myself one thing but other parts of myself doing the opposite, and once I had sort of integrated self better, there was much less of that, allowing a more clear direction and less problems and more even keel attitude. Because I was always creating my own problems, I had just not realized it very well previously. Outer life automatically corresponded to inner life so the only way to improve outer life is to improve inner life FIRST. Fixating on outer life is actually fixating on symptoms, not causes, I had to fixate more on inner self instead. I was able to clean up a goodly majority of chaos with the analysis of self script method, a method that is used in some of the more effective forms of psychology as well.
Next phase was I noticed that although I had cleaned up most unproductive self scripts, sometimes negative emotion would just come anyway, apparently not connected to anything obvious, no self scripts and not even anything apparent in my outer life. Like I might notice I felt really anxious, but not know why. This surprised me, I had assumed when I cleaned up negative scripts, which was a lot of work, that I would then have fixed negative emotion, but I found out apparently it was not quite that simple. Sometimes I would feel really great for no apparent reason as well. Obviously one prefers the great and would avoid the anxiety! But still there is mystery about the cause of either not being apparent. These moods would appear to cycle through the basic jhanas, although I didn't not know about that being a typical cycle until I came here and read about it. Previously, I thought of them more as random mood swings but once I heard there was a typical cycle, I saw they seemed to conformed to it. These mood are particularly easy to think of as 'not me' because they seem on the face of it to come from nowhere discernable and I got fairly good at observing them from a distance and not getting sucked in. Nevertheless, I was not fully satisfied with that situation and not understanding why it was happening.
So next phase was digging deeper for source and understanding. I spent more effort trying to understand emotions themselves. I made some new insights into sources way way back in childhood that were sort of preverbal times, and those insights did help. Sometimes I could feel a sort of electrical release of energy when I figured something out, as if just the understanding alone is enough to help at least some. Still sometimes finding areas of clinging that I had still managed to keep hidden from self, so working on those. But also, I spent time just accepting the emotions and allowing them, emersing in them and realizing the good in the bad. I noticed things like pleasure and pain are similar, happiness and sadness are similar, how anxiety is a form of excitement, etc. This seemed to take a lot of the strength out of the cycling emotions and the cycles are more subtle now and harder to define. I noticed that normally I would have a subtle resistance to sadness and anxiety and then I experimented with releasing that resistance and how different that felt and how sadness can shift to happiness sometimes by doing that. A newer feeling now is one of intense boredom but that one too, seems like I can get out of it by accepting it and kind of learning to enjoy it, kind of hard to explain but it goes back to that accepting/allowing concept we sometimes heard so lately that is more of what I have been working on, simply because it feels right and seems to work. This is about where I am at now.
I used different tactics at different times but personally I do not consider any one tactic to be the be all and end all of tactics. I think each tactic taught me things and got me to the place where I was ready to do the next one. And I suspect that the tactics I currently am using would not have been something I would have been able to do if I had not gone through some of my earlier learnings. Like if someone had told my 18 year old self that pleasure and pain are very similar or to learn how to enjoy your boredom, I do not think I would have been able to understand it much of a useful level. So I consider all the processes to be different parts of a long and winding path that finally got me to here, where that is! ;-)
-Eva
What has helped me the most has been dialectical behavioural thereapy techneques. It's a method developed by Dr Linahan that combines cognative therapy with buddhist mindfulness. You can easily apply the skills to a meditation session, and the idea is to intorduce space between emotions and reactions in order to reduce the emotions about the emotions.