DirectorHodl on Nostr: emotions are mind constructions that limit your ability to feel. what i mean by this ...

emotions are mind constructions that limit your ability to feel. what i mean by this is that what we really mean by emotion is a somatic sensation happening in your body - a "feeling". the feeling is a reaction to something happening externally or internally. if you look a baby, they don't know whether they're angry or sad, they're literally just feeling things. they haven't yet labelled feelings as concepts. the trouble with labelling a feeling as a particular emotion as you get older is that emotions are ultimately intellectual concepts a collection of humans have decided more or less symbolize a particular pattern of feelings. so what happens is that your mind starts to condition each feeling with the label, and eventually, the feeling-label-emotion dynamic becomes so intertwined that any time a feeling comes along that is vaguely in the pattern of "anger", for example, your mind just makes you feel the general sensation of "angry" because you've built it into your system as a habitual reaction. it simplifies and generalizes and you miss the detail and novelty because you went to the label as apposed to the experience, and then the label hijacked the experience. here you are short-circuiting your experience of reality with your conditioned mind. because in reality every feeling is totally unique and full of creative information. however if you let the labels take over, basically that information becomes compressed, lo-fidelity, and you just feel a more general sensation you already understand. your mind is on a kind of energetic budget, it’s only got so much juice for you in this lifetime, and though it is highly programmable it will take short cuts wherever it can and labels are one of those mechanisms it employs so that it does not need to sort through new information. the skill to develop is to "listen" to sensations without getting emotional. just listen to the body and whatever is happening in the mind without habitually reacting. people might think that is suppressing or repressing but it is the opposite. if your emotional mind concepts take over as soon as you feel something, it will then project the general feeling associated with the new novel feeling onto the nervous system and you won't feel what actually wanted to come through. so by taking away emotions you actually feel your feelings as fresh information everytime if that makes any sense. this also doesn’t mean not to express your feelings. it’s saying to stop analyzing and trying to understand every little feeling and simply feel it, the understanding will come later spotaneously and the meaning will be much more colorful because you didn’t generalize it as an emotion.