Are emotions merely just body sensations?
Tags:
According to Guenka's Vipassana (and maybe the Buddha, who knows), what we call feelings and emotions are merely patterns of body sensations. Everything is mapped to body sensations.
This claim seemed to me far too radical at first glance, an outrageous underestimation of our rich and painful emotional world, even some sort of new mind-created invention for suppressing emotions.
But when I started observing my emotions deeply and continuously, I was astonished to find out that behind the mental abstract image of each experienced emotion indeed hides a unique pattern of body sensations... endless patterns in shape, area, type of sensation, location... Endless combinations. I found out that this mental abstract representation we call emotion of each body sensation is just a cover for the underlying sensation and moreover, when I penetrate into observing and accepting the sensation itself something magical happens that did not happened when I was just observing the front-end emotion: the whole emotion+sensation simply weaken and even disappear or at least I suddenly did not care anymore about them - they can stay or they can go away, I am not that preoccupied with them anymore...
- Tania's blog
- Login or register to post comments
- Printer friendly version
Cool :-)
Sounds like a very 'useful' thing to realize... in a sense, the body is part of the mind, eh?
Really, the body is 'in' the mind, as it isn't there at all unless we think of it. As I see it, your focusing on the underlying body sensation was the same as letting go of the connected thought(s), which is possibly why the feelings went away or lessened.
From here, this kind of awareness you've been practicing is a great approach, as it dissolves falsehood, i.e. unconsciousness, or "what we believe to be true" that was never really true. This is exactly what self-enquiry is.
Hey Omkaradatta, thanks!
Hey Omkaradatta, thanks!
I agree, the body is in the mind (or at least in awareness) from the reason you mention and from the very fact that during deep night sleep it is not there...
This Vipassana thing of observing and accepting the body sensations taught me the one truth for me: accept and observe whatever is and then you find out by experience that the solution is not that the pain disappears (as you were certain before that this is the solution) but that you suddenly don't mind if it disappears or not, you are indifferent.
This "revolutionary solution" is the supporting experiential basis, I feel, for the claim that we are not the body... if I can be indifferent to the pain of something than I am not that something, by definition...