Feelings: the interior domains of Sensation, Thought, Emotion and Wish. [intuition and imagination]

These are all concepts to which we will return, but for the moment let's look at the relationship between knowing what we need and our familiarity with our feelings. How does knowing how I feel help me know what I need and help me act in ways that create it?

As I write these words it is winter, a blustery day in February. It is cold and I notice that I am cold. I have a feeling, in this case a sensation of cold. Feelings are data. They are data about the qualities in the relationship between my "I am," the core sense of my identity, and the world around me. In the case of sensations, these are data about the relationship between "I am" and the physical world in which I find myself. Because "I am cold," I will now act in ways that create what I need. I can identify that cold doesn't satisfy me. What I need is warmth. I identify that there are at least two immediate options I can follow. I can flip on the space heater or I can put on a sweater. I make a choice and see if my actions create what I need by continuing to monitor my sensations. This is what feelings are for. To give us the data about what we need, or about when we don't have what we need, so that we can act in ways to create what we need.

"Sensation" is one category of internal experience. There are many different ways to construct a typology of interior experience. Deepak Chopra in one of his books lists ten domains of consciousness. For our current purposes, that is a bit too complicated. Ten are more than we need for now. We start with just four. Later we add another two. But, for now, just notice that sometimes when something has you stirred up emotionally you might say that you are stewing about something. We use the acronym STEW to remind us of the four primary interior domains.

Sensation: I feel cold.

Thought: I feel like I am being mistreated.

Emotion: I feel hurt and angry.

Wish: I feel like taking a walk.

So whenever you are stewing about something, remind yourself to identify each of the four domains in what you are worrying about. What are your Sensations, Thoughts, Emotions and Wishes? Notice that each of the four interior domains is a feeling, or at least we can speak of it as such, but each is distinctly different. A wish is very different from a sensation. A thought is very different from an emotion.

If something upsetting happens I am likely to feel bad. But is this a sensation, a thought, an emotion, or a wish? It can easily be all four.

Suppose I finally get around to registering for the semester and find out that the last class I need to take to finish my degree is already filled. There is a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel nauseous. I know that if I can't find a way to get into that class, I will be delayed six months in graduating. I am furious at myself for not getting around to registering sooner. I wish I weren't such a procrastinator.

The strength of the sensations and the emotions help me gauge the urgency of this issue and motivate me to act. The thought about delaying graduation six months reminds me that the need is not just about this class, but about the degree and the employment opportunities that I believe will open up once I have it. And the wish reminds me that there are certain qualities of self care that I can address where I pay more attention to what I need and I don't put off acting in ways that get me what I need.

The creation of this internal awareness we call feelings is something which develops as we mature. We have placed these in an order which spells STEW and thus makes it an acronym which is easier to remember, but the developmental sequence is actually from sensation to emotion to thought to wish.

· Even before we are born we have sensations. Though we don't have a conscious memory of our awareness before birth, we hear what music Mom is dancing to and the voice of Dad as they talk in bed.

· Once we are born we now have a relationship and that relationship has qualities which cause emotions to arise within us. We come to recognize mom's face and we feel joy. We have a pain in our stomach and we feel fear. We hear footsteps outside our bedroom door at night when we cry and we feel hope.

· We have come to associate the sound with the presence of someone in hall. We have built a cognitive correlation between the sound and the person coming into the room. We observe events and ascribe meaning to them. We become able to think.

· And having thoughts, we then begin to anticipate what might happen and even to consider what we might want to have happen. We become aware of desires and wishes.

So we develop from sensations to emotions to thoughts to wishes. Each stage of awareness depends on the one below it. My wish that someone would care for me in the middle of the night depends upon my thought that there are parents nearby who can hear my cry and my hope that they will respond to me supported by my sensation of hearing footsteps in the hallway.

In the 70's a friend of mine lived in a cooperative house in which there was a sensory depravation tank. This was a big tub in a dark and quiet basement in which there was salt water heated to 95°. When one would lie in the water in the dark and the quiet with no sensory input for a period of time, images began to appear in ones awareness. It was a sort of acid trip without the acid.

It seems that without sensory input we begin to lose our upper level cognitive functions. This was intended in that setting to be recreational or even spiritually enlightening. But it is also a form of torture called solitary confinement. We need sensory stimulation to have emotional awareness to have cognitive functioning to know what we need.

So if I want to get what I need, I have to know what I need, and thus to notice when I am not getting what I need. I know I am not getting what I need (or perhaps I am getting what I don't need) whenever I am having a "bad" feeling. I put bad in quotes here because the feeling itself isn't bad. It is good data. It is just a feeling I don't like having. If I step into the street and look up and see a bus barreling down on me, I feel fear, and I step back out of the street. I don't like being afraid, but I like getting squashed by busses even less. The fear is my friend.

"Good" feelings also give me information about what I need. When I feel safe or satisfied I am getting feedback that the current situation is healthy for me. If I can figure out what is working and what I did to create it, then maybe I can recreate the situation in the future.

Knowing how I feel helps me know what I need. Ideally, once I know what I need, I know what to do to create what I need. But I am not likely to create what I need without knowing what that is and I won't know the need unless I know what I feel.

So feelings in general and emotions in particular are information about the qualities in our relationships. They help us know what is currently going on and can guide us in determining what we need. They are also a source of energy. The fear gives me the strength to step out of the street.

Emotional Energy

The energy that emotions carry is not the same kind of energy we get from filling our gas tanks or having a good meal and a good night's sleep. When I am low on gas I know that my car is about to run out of energy and I need to stop and get gas. When I have had a long hard day I am tired and hungry and I need to eat and sleep. Physical energy is finite. When we run low, we have to fill up.

Emotional energy is infinite. We don't run out of love if we love too much. We cannot hate someone so much that we quit hating them. I may become accustomed to being afraid of someone, but I don't stop being afraid.

Emotional energy is an eternal resource. It is prana in Sanskrit and chi or qi in Chinese. It is the force of the universe present in all things and flowing through everything, most especially through us.

One way I sometimes think about this energy is that it is like the vision that Neo had at the end of the Matrix when he became able to see the foundation of the material world as a flow of 1's and 0's coming down through the walls with an eerie green glow. All matter is energy.

When we are in a harmonious relationship to everything which arises around us we can be open and relaxed and can allow the energy to flow fully and freely. We have an experience of shalom. But when something happens which invokes esuba we feel fear or anger or sadness and we constrict around the flow of energy. This constriction impedes the flow of energy. Just as when there is resistance in a wire which is conducting electricity, we start to get hot. The constriction causes a change in the quality of the energy which can both draw our attention to the problem and can be a source of energy for addressing it.

Complex Feelings

Feelings are an internal awareness which gives us information about our relationships and which prompts us to act on our own behalf. They are data and they are energy.

There are many typologies of feelings. We have already suggested that when we are stewing about our experience we might remember to attend to our sensations, thoughts, emotions and wishes. But especially as we look at becoming aware of our emotions, we need a bit more help.

As a culture we are generally pretty aware of what we want. We have a lot of permission to be conscious of our desires. If you don't know what you want, simply turn on the TV and you will find lots of advertisers telling what you should want.

We are also pretty much aware of what we think. Most of what we do in formal education is about learning how to think. We learn what symbols mean and how to manipulate them to create meaning. Reading, writing and arithmetic are all about symbol manipulation for the creation of meaning.

When we get down to emotions we start having more trouble. While there have been some efforts to teach emotional awareness as a part of our schools (as with the Magic Circle) for the most part we are dismissive of the value of emotion. After all, it is not rational. And rational is good.

And when we get to the level of sensations we are pretty dismissive of our more subtle sensations. We allow these subtle sensations to inform our speech from time to time, as in when we say things like, "that guy is a real pain in the neck," but we don't generally feel the pain that is appearing in our neck as a source of information about how we are being informed about our surroundings. More often we dismiss such sensations as though they are not genuine. We trivialize what are known as psycho-somatic complaints by telling ourselves they are not real; they are all in our heads.

Some people allow themselves to be aware of these subtle sensations and to value and appreciate them and to expand their capacity to experience them. We sometimes refer to these people as Intuitives. They know without clearly knowing how they know, or at least, it is not a cognitive knowing. They just have a feeling, a sensation. When we allow ourselves to more and more fully attend to the subtle sensations and emotions which come to us we become more and more intuitive.

Just so as we allow our thoughts and our wishes to create a fuller vision for how we want things to be; we become more imaginative. We have now six kinds of internal awareness; sensations and emotions which support intuition, and thoughts and wishes which support imagination.

If we are to develop a greater capacity to create what we need and what the rest of the planet needs, we have to nurture a greater capacity to know our feelings. The place we have the greatest difficulty is with our emotions. We live in a culture which is very disparaging about emotions. This is especially true for men, but we can even be pretty cruel to women's emotional expression as when we label them hysterical.

It helps if we use our capacity to think to support our awareness of our emotions. To that end I suggest a cognitive map for helping us know what emotions we are having.

As we have already noted, there are really no bad feelings; there are just feelings we don't like having. Some emotions arise from events in which we get what we need and some from events in which we don't get what we need. Some emotions arise from events in which we get what we don't need and some from events in which we don't get what we don't need. This is confusing so let's create a chart.

We therefore have the good feelings of safety and satisfaction and the bad feelings of hurt. These become our fundamental distinction between emotions. When we don't get what we need we are hurt. When we do we are safe and satisfied.

Remembering that our goal is to identify what we need by attending to what we are feeling when we are not getting it, we want to give special attention to the bad feelings... to hurt. As we do this we notice that hurt can happen in the past, the present, or the future. Hurt can be something done to us or something we do to others. So we can identify five distinct "bad" feelings.

When we have a present experience of getting what we don't need or not getting what we do need we feel hurt.

When we have an experience of anticipating that in the future we will be hurt we feel fear.

When we remember a time in the past when we lost something which was precious to us or didn't get something we needed we feel sadness.

When we are hurt by what we experience as the result of the choice of another we feel anger.

When we have caused hurt in another by a choice we have made we feel guilt.

Let's make another chart just so we have these five feelings in front of us.

Each of these words for an emotion is but the title of a category of feelings. Under fear we find worry, alarm, terror... Under anger we find peeved, mad, furious... and so on. Each of these other feelings are derivative of the larger feeling being a variation that is more or less intense or otherwise showing a gradation of color. We may think of emotions as colors on a painter's pallet. Each of them may blend with others to create new shades and gradations of emotion.

When we feel "bad," it is because we are feeling one or more of these feelings or their derivatives. In fact, we are probably feeling many of these feelings all at the same time.

After Joe was late to work, having stopped to get gas, he decided that instead of brooding and blaming he would actually use the feelings coming up in him to get to know his own interior better.

He knew he was mad. He was angry that the boys were so hard to get going in the morning and he was mad at himself for not having noticed that the car was almost out of gas and he was mad at his boss for being so rigid about the starting time.

He was afraid that he was not going to get a handle on the morning routine and he would continue to be late and that might result in him losing this job or at least not getting a raise.

He was hurt that Jane didn't seem to appreciate how hard this was for him in the morning and that his efforts to be a better dad to his boys than his own father had been for him were not being appreciated.

He was sad that his relationship with Jane had become strained by her having to get to work so early that she couldn't be there to help and he missed the close time they used to have in the morning.

And he felt guilty that he was so short with the boys and didn't give Jane appreciation for how hard she was working.

When Joe sits with his "bad" feelings he discovers the rich and vivid information about how the qualities in his relationships are not as he would have them be. He can respond differently in ways which create more of what he needs by attending to each of these emotions. If he doesn't know that he is having these feelings he doesn't know what he needs and he can't do anything to address them short of going out with his buddies and getting drunk.

Our "bad" feelings, when they are not named and addressed, can be the stimulus for bad behavior. When we feel bad we have a tendency to do bad things.