Sensation, Emotion, and Feeling
Sensación, Emoción y Sentimiento
A question about the differences between sensation, emotion, and feeling, and how each relates to the path of awakening.
Sensation, Emotion, and Feeling
A question about the differences between sensation, emotion, and feeling, and how each relates to the path of awakening.
Can you explain a little more about the difference between feelings and sensation? You mentioned earlier that sensation is linked to emotions. How do you differentiate them?
There isn't a rigid distinction; these are general ways to talk about and describe experience.
Three layers of experience
By "sensation," I refer to what comes through the experience of, for example, the skin, as well as deeper sensations arising from the nervous system, the body, the flesh. Emotion is tied to sensation because certain emotions produce changes at the level of the body and the flesh. But for emotions, there normally also needs to be a thought process, a narrative. There needs to be some sense of something happening to me, framed by a certain kind of story.
Feeling I differentiate because, in a sense, it is prior to both sensation and emotion. It is deeper. There can be effects at the level of sensation and emotion, but the origin of feeling is deeper still. Feeling could be linked to words like joy, love, sadness, or pain. And with pain in particular, you could have pain that is emotional and pain that is more of a feeling. You could call it the feeling body.
How avoidance works
In this practice, we want to be able to contact sensations in order to move out of purely thought-based experience. That is going to bring up emotions. It is going to trigger fear, worries, reactivity. As we move into that and through that, we can unlock a deeper connection to feeling.
Often what is happening is that there is something we are having a hard time feeling, and the mechanism of avoiding it, of numbing it, works by pulling away from sensation into thought, and by using emotions as a cover. We activate a lot of thinking and emotion in order not to feel. Usually what happens is a great deal of storminess, a lot of activity that is also very distracting. The point of it is to create that storminess, because in the storminess we cover the feelings.
When feeling is contacted
But once we are in touch with a feeling, the storminess usually calms. If we get in touch with sadness and there is a deep connection to it, or if there is a deep connection to vulnerability or even a deeper fear, the storminess at the level of emotions and thoughts will settle.
Strange as it might sound, I frequently pick up the sensations of others, especially those I care for, even when they are not physically near me. Sometimes I pick up their emotions too. I don't think it has anything to do with my own thoughts. I just accept it as it is, but I would like to know: is there anything I can do with this? Can it help in my cultivation, in my practice toward awakening? And if so, what should I do?
What do you mean by cultivation?
I perceive myself as not yet awakened. I see that there are practices I should do, or undo, to help myself awaken. That is what I would consider cultivation.
Talent and awakening
I think I understand your question. It is very possible that you are perceiving what others are experiencing. These are talents. But that does not, in itself, mean anything regarding awakening. Awakening has more to do with, for example, how you interpret that experience, and then how you act based on it.
It does happen that as we awaken, these talents awaken as well, so it can be a sign of that. But it can also simply be a natural talent one has, without an awakening cause behind it.
I would say: treat those experiences as you would any other, because your true self, your true body, includes those experiences and includes those who are close to you. The way you can use that experience is to practice treating others as you would treat yourself, and to learn to treat yourself lovingly.
Thank you.