Feelings vs Emotions

On this blog, I use Emotions and Feelings to mean different things, although English is a little limiting. For example, we “feel emotions,” we don’t emote them (although some sure do (laughs)). I use this classification because of how I subjectively experience them. Your experience may vary.
 
The first thing to understand about emotions is they’re not concepts. Trying to figure them out with the mind is an exercise in futility. This also means we’re not actually feeling, we’re thinking. We may have learned to avoid emotions by staying in the head. And that means we’re repressing how we feel.

This reminds me of a sign in a local restaurant. “Men have feelings too. We feel hungry.”

The first thing on the table is to learn to notice our emotions. Simply ask yourself every so often what you’re feeling. Not sensations or concepts, but actual emotions. Once they’re more conscious, we can learn to allow them to arise, move on through, and complete. Then we can resolve our backlog.

If we don’t allow them or try to control them, emotions cause us problems. Think of it like trying to repress energy. It will leak out through health issues, anxiety, psychological issues, and more.

Until we lighten up that arena, finer feelings are unlikely to be very available to us.

Where emotions are felt as passing waves of energy in response to our experiences, finer feelings are associated with the flows of consciousness.

Emotions
– fear, anger, grief, sorrow, and depression. Also satisfaction, pleasure, and attached love.
– a subjective way of experiencing the energy of our response mechanism. They have a sense of mine and can feel reactive.
– are associated with this person and how we’re responding to experiences.
– function at a more dense level than the mind.
– can make us feel contracted or entangled and like they can take us over.
– based mainly in the 2nd chakra (the hips) but can be experienced anywhere.

Fine Feelings
– love, bliss, happiness for no reason, compassion.
– experienced as an effect of the flow of consciousness and the Divine through us.
– a quality of being more universal and not constrained to us personally.
– are more subtle than the mind.
– are expansive and can fill us up to overflowing.
– based mainly in the heart but can be experienced anywhere.
– in the field of intuition and intellect so they can have a quality of truth to them.

Both add richness to life when allowed to move.

As we progress spiritually, finer values become much more conscious. We also progressively become more aware of the collective and the universal. Through the stages in consciousness, everything becomes a part of ourselves. We come to experience not just a local body and emotions but collective stages and the cosmic body of all bodies.
Davidya