Feelings are your present. Emotions are your past.
Do you find it difficult to trust your gut feelings? Do you find it difficult to tell the difference between what you’re feeling being a good guidance in your life, and what you’re feeling being misguidance in your life?
The difference is between a feeling and an emotion.
A feeling is not an emotion
Feelings arise from within your body. A feeling is a physical sensation in any part of your body. Feelings inform you in an immediate sense of the way it feels to be you, of how you are today: whether you’re hungry, cold, hot or frightened. You rely on these sensations to guide you from that very basic level, at the first point of feeling something, and that guides you to the next step, and the next step, and the next step in your life.
A feeling is a guiding force of information within the body of you. It is not there at a cognitive level, as a mental formation of words. It is there at a felt level, just before the thoughts and words come into existence. Your thoughts and words are the expression of that felt information.
An emotion is different. Emotions are supercharged by the way you’re thinking about the feeling inside you, or the situation outside you. That thinking is a reactionary state: you’re thinking about something in objection to it, in judgment of it, in dislike of it, and creating your own discomfort with it.
Emotion is confusion: the loaded, unresolved issues of your past.
The reason you have a bias against certain feelings is your past experiences where those feelings were involved. Those experiences are okay as long as they’re resolved. If they’re not resolved, they change your relationship to the feeling into an objection to its presence within you.
How to tell them apart
If you’re driven by a pure feeling, it will be a guidance in your life. It will be healthy and helpful for you, a deep inner guidance, a deep gut sense that takes you through life in a way that is best for you.
If you’re driven by emotion, you find yourself exaggerated in your expressions. You are driven, obsessed, over the top. You are unable to feel comfortable not doing the thing you feel you have to do. You have to have it, you have to be it. You are overwhelmed, or controlled by what is driving you, and you’re unable to let things go, even when you can see it’s not a good thing to do.
A feeling can be just as strong in driving you to do something, but you can stop at any moment, during the action, during the thought, during the speech. It’s a softer feeling. It isn’t connected to a story of your life. It’s a response to your life, from how it really is inside you.
A feeling is an easy response to your life today. An emotion is a demanding reaction, driven by your unresolved past.
The spark
I was talking to a lady yesterday who was annoyed with herself for an obsession she has. When she meets a man and there’s a feeling of tremendous connection, which she very rarely gets, she wants to follow it up. She becomes obsessed with that person. She fantasises about them, and even if she doesn’t see them for a month or two, she keeps building up her image, her hopes and her stories around someone she has just met. It drives her crazy. She said, “I wish I wouldn’t do that.”
This is a typical example of a pain-driven, emotionalised state. In that moment of connection you get a feeling that feels better than the way you were feeling before, and you become attached to reproducing it. You give the spark an importance it doesn’t deserve. What it tends to mean is that you have a similar sort of pain going on inside you as they have inside them. It’s an unconscious connection, which is why you can never explain why they had that effect on you.
When you already have a sense of yourself that is okay, you meet someone and there’s a nice feeling between you, and you enjoy it. It doesn’t pick you up and make you feel better. It adds something to you that wasn’t there before. You may pursue the friendship, but you’re not driven to. You can take it or leave it. That doesn’t mean you’re cold. It means you’re not desperate. What makes you desperate is a hurt inside you that they give you temporary relief from.
If you follow that temporary relief, you’re following emotion. If you follow the sense of yourself that finds the other person pleasant to be around, you’re following a feeling.
When your gut misguides you
When you have an aversion to a feeling inside you, anything that triggers it gets the blame. You say, “My gut feeling is telling me this is wrong.” It’s not telling you this is wrong at all. It’s putting you in touch with something in you that you are uncomfortable with and avoid feeling. That is a misguidance.
It is often your closest friend or closest relationship that stimulates these feelings, simply because you’re in contact with them day by day. You interpret the discomfort as them being the problem. Many long-term relationships come to an end this way, because the people in them don’t understand how to heal their pain.
Before you decide someone is a bad person because you have a bad feeling about them, live with that feeling for a while. Don’t be in a hurry to get away from it, and therefore from them. Ask whether it is you, or the other person. Ask whether you’ve felt this before you even knew them. Ask whether the people who get close to you always stir up these same feelings, and whether you drive them away because of it.
It may be their fault. But you have to be able to tell the difference between your pain driving you and your pure, inherent sensations guiding you before you can know whether that person is the problem, or whether they’re stirring up a problem already existing inside you.
Feelings are your present. Emotions are your past.
Emotions are the information of your unresolved past. Feelings are the information of the immediacy of living your life right now. Emotions become a reaction. Feelings become a response. Feeling is intelligence. Emotion is confusion.
The more you notice when you’re reacting, the more you can come back to the feeling driving that reaction and feel the emotional charge of it. It’s only happening as long as you keep thinking about the thing that upset you. Stop thinking about that, and the upset inside you starts to dissolve.
Locating where a disturbance actually lives in your body, and staying with it until it resolves, is what my meditation app, Undo, will guide you in doing for yourself.
About the author
Matthew Zoltan
Matthew Zoltan pioneered mind-body connection therapy in Australia in the late 1980s and is the creator of Natural Meditation. 39 years of direct work with the body. Founder of Quiet Retreats. Co-founder of the Undo app.