Emotion formula

Perhaps for some of you this letter will be nothing new, but for me it was an aha-moment.

I used to think that a thought is a thought, emotion is an emotion, a physical sensation is a sensation. And while thoughts and sensations were very clear for me and I could tell what was a thought and what was a sensation, emotions were kind of hard for me to explain or point at. They were like an ambiguous cloud that came on you and your clarity was lost for a while.

When we try to dissect the nature of emotion, we can come to a stupidly simple explanation.

Emotion = thought + physical sensation

That’s it! No matter how hard I try to see what else is there, I can’t see anything except for those two!

For example:

Happiness = “I made it! I’m awesome!“ thought + warmth in the heart area
Anxiety = “what if it doesn’t work?“ thought + knot in stomach
Sadness = “Nothing good is ever going to happen to me“ thought + heaviness in chest

I know, it can be damn uncomfortable and painful to feel anxiety, for instance, but it does not go beyond a thought and a sensation.

Emotion is like an intersection between body and mind, it’s in the both worlds at once. So when working with an emotion we can’t neglect one aspect of it.

Just like we can’t fully think our way out of anxiety, we can’t fully dissolve anxiety by sensing the body only. It seems to me that there has to be acknowledgement of both a thought that drives an emotion and allowing the emotion to roam freely in the body.

It is about relaxing the body into the physical side of the emotion and seeing through the automatic and illusionary nature of the thought that runs it.

That’s it from me for today 🙂

With love <3

Ali