Three Bodies: Sensation, Emotion, and Feeling
Tres Cuerpos: Sensación, Emoción y Sentimiento
A student asks for clarification on the distinction between sensations, emotions, and feelings, and how avoidance operates across these layers.
Three Bodies: Sensation, Emotion, and Feeling
A student asks for clarification on the distinction between sensations, emotions, and feelings, and how avoidance operates across these layers.
You were saying something about what emotions are, and I think I understood feelings too, but I didn't fully grasp the part about sensations. When you were speaking just now, you said that feelings were the deeper layer beneath sensation and emotion, and that emotions were more linked to thoughts. But sensations: I didn't really understand what that was.
Sensation is simply the experience of the body. The experience of the body not through thought. Touch, or anything that comes through bodily experience.
So when there is avoidance of feelings, it means we are avoiding emotions and also avoiding sensations, which are more neutral in themselves?
The map of three bodies
Let's put it this way. As a very general map, say we have three bodies: one is emotional, one is physical, and the third is a feeling body. Take this very lightly, not as a literal thing.
Whatever is happening in each of these bodies, which are really one body, is related. The general relationship is this: whatever we are feeling in the feeling body is often hard for us to be in touch with. That difficulty is avoided through contraction in the physical body, the body of sensation. Those contractions are then managed through the emotional body, and through thought we create the emotions that manage them.
Working through the layers
The way to work with this is to observe thoughts and notice how we use them to create emotions that manage our experience, and then to start undoing that process. One of the ways is to bring attention to sensation. We are moving out of thought into the physical body, and that is going to require going into all of the mechanisms of emotion. As we work through that, we can come deeper into the body of feeling.
That is very clear, thank you so much. I can really relate to this. I see at which level it is happening and how self-inquiry has helped so much to see the thoughts clearly that are creating these emotions. Very naturally, these emotions become more accepted because they are seen as not inherently real, just the result of a process. The different levels you described really make sense to me. Very helpful.
You're welcome.