The question of whether animals experience emotions has been pondered since ancient times. Aristotle believed that humans and animals experience similar emotions, whereas Descartes thought that animals were like machines and lacked consciousness or emotions. In the 20th century, scientists believed that subjective experiences like emotions could not be measured empirically. It’s only recently that methods for identifying emotions have developed, including AI-based approaches. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen used machine learning to successfully identify positive and negative emotions in animals such as cows, pigs, and wild boars.
Although in everyday language, we tend to use feelings and emotions interchangeably, some differences are worth exploring. Unfortunately, there’s no universally agreed-upon definition of either. Different disciplines take separate approaches. For instance, some neuroscientists say that emotions and feelings are found in the brain and define emotions as a neurological reaction and feelings as the mental interpretation of an event.
From a mindfulness perspective, feelings are part of experiencing an emotion, which arises from the felt sense of bodily sensations. Emotions are more complex as they include physical sensations, behaviours, and thoughts. For instance, say you’ve been waiting, and someone jumps in the queue ahead of you. Your body may tighten and become tense; there may be a strong impulse to react; and thoughts about how selfish and ignorant the person is may run through your head.
Emotions evolved as a way of surviving and making sense of the world around us, including our social world. Emotions include instinctive, primary emotions like fear, and more complex secondary emotions like empathy. Through symbols and language, humans developed the ability to think abstractly. For instance, our ancient ancestors drew pictures of animals that they hunted. Although this gave us an evolutionary advantage in controlling and mastering the world around us, it also allowed us to disconnect from our feelings, which is a key cause of suffering at both the individual and collective levels.
The main evolutionary purposes of emotions are to:
- Inform us that something needs attention
- Motivate and drive us to act and think
- Understand how other people are feeling
- Communicate what we need and how we feel to others
Whichever way feelings and emotions are defined, we know that we experience them in our bodies, which may or may not be noticed or acknowledged. By exploring what happens in our own experience, we learn to be more aware of and work with feelings and emotions as a useful resource that complements thinking. We also know that although we sometimes overidentify with certain emotions, they are not who we are, as they come and go. With awareness, we can gain insights into how feelings and emotions flow through us, and they are also one of the ways many thoughts are generated. For instance, if our motives are wrongly misinterpreted, we may feel anger, sadness, and shame at the injustice and experience many thoughts arising about the situation.
There’s a tendency to believe that emotions happen to us and that they’re something we can’t change, but neither of these statements is entirely true. Neuroscientists can demonstrate that emotions arise from our unconscious reactions to experiences. Although emotions like anger, fear, and sadness are part of everyone’s common, shared experience, there are no emotions already out there in the world; we produce them inside ourselves. Unfortunately, the same lower-brain mechanisms that produce feelings are also involved in forming automatic habits. So, it’s no surprise that without awareness and an understanding of how we generate emotions, we tend to react automatically to life events in the same old ways that no longer serve us.
You can change what you feel in several ways and at many levels. The most obvious option is to change the situation, such as leaving a frustrating job and finding a more fulfilling one. You can become more aware of what you feel the moment you feel it, noticing the physical sensations and thoughts, or whether or not the emotion is an old reactive habit pattern. Emotions have content in the form of physical sensations, thoughts, and energy, which drive us to act and express ourselves.
In the complex, chaotic, and uncertain world we live in today, there has never been a more crucial time to explore and embrace these important areas of our experience.
Suggested weekly practice
- Notice feelings and emotions as they arise through observing changes in body sensations, like tightening, warmth, or tingling.
- Move towards, embrace, allow, and consciously acknowledge feelings and emotions in awareness, which allows them to flow through you rather than becoming blocked in your body.
- Explore where feelings and emotions resonate in your body. Are all physical sensations just tingling, tightness, pressure, ache, and so on, or do some have an associated feeling beyond pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?
Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.
- Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps
- Then play the second audio to explore feelings and emotions that are already here with you; exploring the tone and meaning within physical sensations; noticing thoughts that arise; sensing the emotion as a flow of energy