Working with Feelings

Living Skillfully with our feelings is a balancing act. On one side we want to experience them fully without reflecting on them. On the other side we want to observe them as objects of mindfulness to know the way our perceptions of feelings influence our behavior and to better manage them.

The key point is to be mindfully self-aware enough to listen to your body’s messages, to overcome reactivity and cultivate responsiveness.

The Quality of Experiences

Our emotional responses reflect our feelings and the way we perceive them. We receive a continuous flow of feeling experiences, resulting from contact with sounds, visual images, touch, smell, or thoughts. We perceive them as primary sensations - pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Then the secondary feelings, our emotions like happiness, anger, sadness, etc., arise as a reaction to the primary feeling.

"We secretly believe that if we can act just right, then our stream of feelings will be pleasant and there will be no pain, no loss.”[2] Well, that is not going to happen. Unpleasant and neutral feelings are part of life.

Neutral experiences are barely noticed. They don’t grab our attention as the pleasant and unpleasant feelings do. We want pleasant feelings to continue and painful ones to go away. Accept them all.

Stop Suffering

Pleasure and pain are inevitable life experiences. In the parable of two arrows: the first arrow is the pain of an injury or a sense of pleasure. The second arrow is all the worrying, tension, angst, anger, and depression that makes you suffer. The second arrow distracts us from the primary feeling.

We can avoid the second arrow. Aware of reactions to our feelings, with practice, we can step back and become responsive. Pleasure and pain remain but our response to them changes. 

Cultivate Equanimity

Equanimity is a base for responsive action. With practice, we can objectively observe our feelings calmly accepting the good, bad, and neutral. Feelings are felt and we remain calm, interested, not indifferent.

To cultivate equanimity, apply mindfulness practice and a mindset based on acceptance, letting go, and replacing reactivity with responsiveness. Accept what is, let go into the flow of ever-changing life experiences, do what you can. Repeat.

Exercise: Mindfulness of Feelings while Eating

Try this mindfulness exercise for a few minutes at each meal. If you are with others, there is no need for them to know what you are doing. Be subtle about it. No stress, no thinking, just feeling and observing with five percent or so of your attention.

Taste something. Note your contact with the food—seeing it, smelling it, bringing it to your mouth, tasting it. Note the initial feeling of pleasure, or pain, before you label it. Feel the sensations of the food in your body and the feeling tone of pleasant or unpleasant. What happens next?

The Peaceful Warrior's Path

This article is a sample of the thinking in my forthcoming book, The Peaceful Warrior's Path: Optimal Wellness through Self-Aware Living. It is a practical guide with concepts, tools, techniques, and exercises. Publication is planned for October 2023.

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[1] Tonhaque, Danique, “Cognitive Neuroscience: Emotions,” Behavioral Research Blog, Noldus.com, November 21, 2019, https://www.noldus.com/blog/cognitive-neuroscience-emotions#:~:text=Emotions%20are%20a%20brief%20episode,physically%20happening%20inside%20our%20bodies.

[2] Kornfield, Jack. The Wise Heart: Buddhist Psychology for the West. Rider, 2008.