Internal Consciousness: Emotion

An emotion is a physiological and neurological experience that occurs and provides us internal sensory information.

Emotions have two core aspects. The physiological, where we experience something physically in our body using interoception, and the neurological or mental where we sense something in our mental space. Some emotions tend towards being experienced as more physical, others more mental.

The words emotions and feelings are often used interchangeably. A simple distinction is to use feeling as the verb to describe the activity of sensing an emotion, and emotion to describe the sensory information you receive from the action of feeling.

Feeling an emotion includes both sensing what is going on in your physical body and your mental space. Again, this is not a universal definition, so whenever you start to talk about emotion with others, listen carefully to see what their understanding is of feeling and emotion.

Affect and emotion are related but distinct concepts. "Affect" refers to the outward display of observable behaviors that indicate an individual's emotional state, while "emotion" is the internal, subjective experience of feeling that the person has. In simpler terms, affect is an outward expression that can be observed by others, and emotion is the inward experience that is private to you. When we observe another person who is emotional, what we are observing is affect. When we ask them how they are feeling, what they are describing is their experience of emotion.

People are often not very good at explaining their experience of emotions to others. There may be a big difference between what is observable and what is felt. Understanding this can literally save relationships, because you start to realize that what we perceive others experiencing and what they actually are experiencing themselves may be very different things.

In our study of consciousness, our objective is to increase the deliberateness with which we feel emotion. We explore our emotions more deliberately, notice whether we feel in control of them, and train our ability to deliberately increase, decrease or stop feeling emotions altogether. Through this process, we start to untangle, understand and deepen our unique personal relationship with emotions and how we express them. 

There is a school of thought that says emotions are associated with a location in the body, and that emotional traumas are stored in body tissues and muscles. It is broadly called somatic theory. This idea has a lot of merit and many followers, but it also has the potential to create a lot of confusion. If we get too fixated on the idea that emotions are always experienced as body sensations and always ‘stored’ in our body physically, it can lead to the incorrect conclusion that we are not responsible for our emotions, because they have become ‘embodied’ and therefore can only be removed by using some sort of physical therapy. 

Many people do react well to this somatic approach, and for them doing physical body work can bring significant emotional release as well as physical and psychological healing.  Therapists that rely on the idea of releasing emotions from the body can work wonders for some people, while for others it is much less effective, because they have fewer associations between emotions and specific body parts.   Be wary if someone is insistent that all emotions can be handled using a somatic approach, as different people can often have very different experiences of where an emotion is located, or even if it is associated with their physical body at all. 

The chakra system and much of eastern energy philosophy are also strongly based on the assumption that differing aspects of consciousness are associated with different parts of our physical body. This can be a useful idea for some people as they study the emotion consciousness sense, because it may help them to develop the skill of directing attention to specific areas of the body. But observing our body carefully is the consciousness sense of interoception, not the consciousness sense of emotion.  Becoming fixated on the idea that emotions are always physically based will generally end up limiting your ability to explore more advanced techniques for exploring consciousness.

The idea that emotions are stored in your physical body is also not supported by the latest ideas from neuroscience about how emotions are caused.  This research is understandably controversial and suggests that emotions are creations of consciousness that occur in the brain, which then direct the physical body to create neurochemicals and hormones that cause the body to behave and be felt physically in a certain way.  The brain then reacts to what it feels in the body using interoception. This acts as a feedback loop, resulting in you taking notice of what your body is ‘saying’, while reinforcing the idea that your body, not your brain, is where emotion is occurring.  While the body does experience a sensation, ultimately it is the brain that caused the sensation in the first place, rather than the body producing the emotion. Essentially, the brain is using body sensation to force you to pay attention!

Surveys about emotion typically report that many people report a remarkably narrow range of emotions on a daily basis. People also have huge differences in our ability to experience and interpret their emotions. Men and women often feel emotions very differently and commonly underestimate or judge each other before understanding how big these differences are. There are many cultural beliefs around the idea that men feel fewer emotions than women. In many cultures, men are socialized to view emotions as negative or as expressing weakness. This results in them avoiding expressing them, resisting feeling them, and refusing to talk about them. But that is a completely different thing than assuming that men feel their emotions less intensely or have fewer emotions than women do.

If you are a parent of teenagers, you might also know that emotions can be a very volatile and slippery topic for the teenage brain and knowing how to describe and process emotions can be difficult for them. They need a lot of compassion from us as their brains and bodies go through a rapid period of hormonal change that impacts their ability to identify, understand and manage emotions.

How people experience emotions is made even more confusing by emotions being completely personal. What love both feels like and how it is interpreted for me may be very different for how it feels to you, even though we may be calling that emotion by the same name.    

Our emotions are also influenced by which ones we felt growing up, and whether it was socially acceptable to express or communicate what you were feeling in the culture you grew up in.

As we study the internal consciousness sense of emotion, we practice perceiving and observing our emotions by directing our attention to an emotion very deliberately, feeling it as intensely as possible, then deliberately stopping feeling it. Deliberately feeling emotions can be very challenging to many people, especially men, who have often been told that feeling their emotions is not masculine. For some men, deliberately feeling their emotions is perceived as a direct threat to their masculinity.  

Even more significant is that for both men and women, there may be a belief that emotions 'just happen to us'. In other words, there is something false or wrong about deliberately feeling, imagining, initiating, exaggerating, or deliberately creating emotions.  We may even have to do considerable self-discovery work on our beliefs about emotions before we are able to fully explore them deliberately during more advanced techniques that allow us to manage the consciousness sense of emotion more fully. 

People will sometimes vigorously defend the idea that we are not responsible for our emotions. Sadly, this conviction is sometimes based in a traumatic early life emotional event, where the seemingly logical conclusion was that the intensity of the emotions associated with that event are simply impossible to recreate intentionally, or that doing so would be overwhelming. 

People with abuse in their upbringing usually have lots of emotional triggers and these can be unpredictable, go very deep, and be very stubborn to shift.   Abuse can be very challenging to handle without professional help. If you embark on the study of consciousness and find that deliberately feeling your emotions triggers you, it may be a sign of trauma and abuse that you have unconsciously repressed.

None of these exercises are designed to replace professional trauma therapy if you have experienced a serious traumatic event.

Working with our consciousness sense of emotion requires us to use some careful thinking in order to create a suitable structure for how we will work. Because of the risk of triggering past trauma, we need to create a safe process that allows us to deliberately feel emotions, and not accidentally trigger too much negative emotion. Once we have that structure in place and have increased our skill at exploring and handling emotions, most people can tackle pretty much any emotion. I’ve investigated emotions of blind panic, dismantled my worst childhood memories and nightmares, deliberately reconstructed every traumatic emotion that occurred after a serious car accident, and had what I would only describe as a near death experience and rebirth. All without leaving the chair I was sitting in, or without having to spend years in traditional therapy explaining what I was feeling.   

Another trap for studying emotional consciousness is to confuse thinking about emotions with feeling emotions. Thinking about an emotion is not emotion, it's thinking. Emotions can only be felt. You know you are thinking about emotion rather than feeling it when you find yourself telling a story about what you feel, rather than actually feeling.

Exercise: Feeling Emotion

Find a quiet, comfortable place to sit where you won’t be disturbed for at least ten minutes. Close your eyes and bring to mind an emotion you’ve felt recently —something neutral or pleasant, like contentment, curiosity, or joy. If you are feeling something right now, you can use that too. If you’re comfortable working with more challenging emotions like sadness or frustration, you can choose one of those, but if you are not sure of your skill level, focus on something pleasant.  

Next, gently direct your attention where the emotion appears to occur - is it mainly in your body, or is it a mental sensation? Observe it as if you were looking around a room you have just walked into, with curiosity and neutrality. Do this for about a minute.  

Now, really pour all your attention into feeling the emotion in as much detail as possible.  Direct your attention deeper into the physical sensations of that emotion — is there a tightness in the chest, warmth in the face, lightness in the limbs, etc. Then, deliberately shift your attention deeper into the mental aspects of the emotion, noticing how they might be distinct from the physical sensations. Does the emotion appear located anywhere particular in your mental space? Does it feel dark or light, or tight, buzzy, vague or intense? 

There is no right or wrong to how you feel an emotion. People experience similar emotions very differently.  This is about learning to be more familiar with the unique body and mental signature of this emotion to you alone. Sense whether this emotion is familiar to you. How often does it occur to you? Do you always experience this emotion in a similar way?

Now, switch your attention to any meaning you might associate with this emotion. The meaning might be an internal narrative about how it feels to have this emotion, or it might be responding or advising you on how to react to the emotion.

The key is relaxed, curious attention. This isn’t about fixing, changing or reacting to the emotion, just about just observing it with deliberate focus. If you find yourself straining, take a slow breath in and then slowly let it all out again, and when you are ready, gently direct your attention back to feeling the emotion again. You might have to do this multiple times in order to feel it fully.  

Once you are comfortable with feeling emotion, start to explore its size and intensity. If it is located in the body, where are its edges? Is it combined to one area of the body or more than one? If it is in a mental space, can you sense how big it is within that space, and can you detect its edges? In a mental space, the edges are usually where it drops off noticeably in intensity. This can be quite a subtle exploration, so take your time.

Once you feel you have explored the emotion fully, pick another one. As you shift to the next emotion, notice if you have any reluctance or relief about switching, or whether there is a sense of release as you remove your attention. 

Continue exploring different emotions for at least 10 minutes, then check in with yourself and see how you feel.  Do you feel more aware of your emotional landscape? More grounded? If the exercise brought up discomfort, did you understand why? If you are feeling upset or unsettled, go outside and do a few minutes of the external consciousness practices from the previous section until you feel relaxed again.

Self Reflection: Emotion

• Have you ever deliberately trained your ability to deliberately feel specific emotions?

• In no more than one sentence, how would you describe your relationship with your own emotions?

• In no more than one sentence, how would you describe your relationship to the emotions of others around you?

• Do you consider yourself aware and in tune with your emotions, or are they distant, unknown or misunderstood?

• Have you ever had an emotional breakdown? What were the circumstances?

• When you are tired, hungry, thirsty or stressed, what happens to your emotions?

• Do you ever just spend time feeling your emotions deliberately?

• In general, when you think about emotions, do you feel positive or negative?

• Do you take responsibility for your emotions, or do other people and events trigger emotions in your mental space or body?

• What is the worst trauma you ever experienced? If you remember it, do you still react emotionally to the memory?

• What’s the most intense emotion you ever remember experiencing?

• When your emotions get triggered by the actions of others, how does that make you feel? Be honest: have you ever accused someone of making you feel a certain emotion?

• Do you regularly use caffeine, drugs, food, supplements or alcohol to modify your emotions or emotional perception? If so, are the results reliable?

Your Personal Insights

 Make notes in your journal about your relationship to your sense of emotion. Make sure you have written down what at least one emotion felt like, and whether you could identity if it was physical or mental.
If possible, have a conversation with a friend about your experience.