This fluid nature can make it somewhat slippery when we first begin to explore our emotions. We might know that they greatly amplify our experiences of life and we can see their colouring of the stories we tell others about ourselves—as if what we have felt about life events has often mattered most. We know they are important but not always how or where to begin to engage with them consciously. Yet many of us are aware that we could do with acquiring some emotional skills.

 

Much like other human senses, our emotions have a purpose: to communicate useful information that help protect and enhance our wellbeing. Emotions are expressions of a finely tuned information system and they influence us in a myriad of ways. Looking closer reveals their astonishing power of influence. Who would have guessed, for example, that emotions are much faster than thoughts? 

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Emotions literally change the chemistry of every cell of your body, and
affect the world outside your body. — Candace Pert

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The slow evolution in the human collective of understanding and appreciating our emotions is only natural given that so few of us have had the benefit of an emotional education. Most of us have instead unconsciously absorbed ways of coping with them. It is quite the norm to feel at the mercy of our emotions, not empowered by them, and when this is the case, we can easily become afraid them and put our energy into different ways of keeping them at bay. The hand-me-down strategies we pick up in early life and during our socialisation could already be to act out on our emotions; to numb, repress or even obsessively chase emotions we want to feel. It is supported systemically as well as a strong ideal in contemporary cultures is to control our emotions rather than benefitting from a fruitful collaboration with them. 
 

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A BIT OF SCIENCE
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Humans have tried for a very long time to figure out the nature of emotions. Well over two thousand years ago Plato named them passions and looked at them as something separate to the rest of the human psyche. He advised people to turn away from their emotions as they were irrational, disruptive and confusing.
 

Since that time many other brave explorers have diligently tried to bring order to this unpredictable element of human life. One dominant pursuit through the centuries has been to distinguish emotions from one another and establishing their distinct physiological patterns. Classifying each and every existing emotion was thought to make it easier to predict, read, manipulate and control them. 

 

This long-lasting quest for the exact number of human emotions has led to countless controversies along the way. It essentially reflects a reductionist approach where emotions became just another mechanical, fixed and predictable component of our biology, much like reflexes that are wired in and triggered by external events. To this day some ninety different definitions exist of human emotions in order to describe what constitutes and differentiates them.

 

The reductionist approach to study human emotions has been steadily crumbling under the weight of more recent research and has led to a great paradigm shift in how we view them. 

In several meta studies of the field, neuroscientist Linda Feldman Barrett paradoxically had to conclude that “Despite tremendous time and investments, research has not revealed a consistent bodily finger print for even a single emotion.” p.15 How Emotions Are Made Lisa Feldman Barrett 2017 Pan Books London

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What has been clarified instead in contemporary research is that a simple system of feelings in our physiology is always active, much like the other senses are, but when we feel an emotion, it is an event that is uniquely composed at that particular time, and reflects many additional influences and circumstances. Surprisingly, emotions are created on a case to case scenario. They do not arise prefabricated in reaction to the various predicaments in the outside world.
 

What makes today’s discoveries so valuable to take onboard personally is that they awaken the realisation that we are not at the mercy of our emotions but instead co-creators of them whether we are aware of this or not.

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According to Barrett, there is a working relationship that takes place between feelings and emotions. Feelings “are actually with you every waking moment of your life. They are simple summaries of what is going on inside your body, kind of like a barometer” and they come “from the physiology of your body: calmness, agitation, excitement, comfort, discomfort.” They are not, however, emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett Ted Talk
 

Emotions are instead created through complex processes that involve predicting what to do with those simple feelings when they are felt. It is the core systems of the brain which try to make sense of the information and link it to a vast array of past and present influences. Scanning immense amount of information, the brain makes guesses and predications, and this takes place out of our awareness, in milliseconds. Emotions are actually composed on the spot. 
 

The neurosciences have also studied the influence of emotions on human behaviour. Using brain imaging technologies, the research has determined that we act far more upon our emotions than we do on cognitive processes.
 

The vast constellation of past and present influences that the brain has to contend with during its prediction processes is not only coloured by our personal history but also by the “shifting social, political, cultural forces that have shaped what we we believe about our emotions” according to Tiffany Watt Smith, a historian whose focus is on human emotions. 

In her view our emotional languages are likely to be communications about the matters that we most value.
 

Her research has found that people not only vary greatly in how they relate to their emotional experiences, but that these differences vary from era to era, culture to culture, place to place, person to person and experience to experience as well. Because of such a wide variety of emotional expression, what used to be seen as an emotion is now best perceived as an ‘emotional category’ in her view. 

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So emotions do not have predetermined characteristics nor are they events with predictable physiological signatures. Instead they are the result of an extraordinarily sophisticated process of reading huge amounts of data and predicting what should come next. There appears to be nothing simplistic about emotions whatsoever. They are not the primitive instincts they were made out to be in the last millenia.
 

What the new paradigm is telling us is that we are not sitting ducks when it comes to our emotional nature. We are in fact influencing it in many different ways already and can learn to do so more specifically. There is plenty of room for exploration and discovery of options when we want to engage.
 

The take-away from the contemporary research is that we feel our emotions but we are not at the mercy of them. When we feel hurt we are having an experience composed of numerous influences, known and unknown, that we have come to understand as “being hurt.” And this can be changed.  While we might feel anger, the anger itself is not carved in stone inside; it is expressed through filters of many different influences from our personal history, cultural conditioning and even inter-generational legacies.

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None of this means that we won’t experience emotionally coloured states that feel very familiar and seem to resemble one another. As we grow more aware of our ‘go-to’ states, it becomes easier to experiment with new ways of relating to them. When new information is added to the way we relate to our experiences, the brain will also consider it when making those predictions of ‘what should come next.

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These cultural shifts in understanding human emotions are revolutionary and Barrett extends her sympathy to us all as we get used to them: “These ideas do not match our experience in daily life where emotions seem to emerge like little bombs to disrupt whatever we were thinking or doing a moment before.” p. 40 How Emotions Are Made Lisa Feldman Barrett 2017 Pan Books London
 

There are innumerable benefits that stem from these new understandings. On a personal level they support our liberation from the collective fear of emotions and encourage us to collaborate with our smart multi-coloured sentient nature. As we take onboard the ramifications of engaging intentionally with our emotions, we also begin to protect ourselves from the many external manipulations of it. 
 

We live in an era of history where the knowledge of human emotions is considered an extremely valuable commodity. Knowing how to manipulate other people’s emotions is a huge industry now, and vast investments are made to turn it into a fine art. The crucial idea behind the commercialisation of human emotions is that we are are unwittingly targeted and played on emotionally to feel, think and behave according to agendas that serve external interests that we are not aware of. 

 

When we liberate ourselves from feeling intimidated in the presence of uncomfortable emotions, and learn to relate to emotions in whole new ways, we also free ourselves from the shackles of being fear-mongered and manipulated emotionally in various ways. This emotional freedom is not only creative and empowering but also invaluable .for our overall health and wellbeing. 

 

Practically we liberate ourselves by engaging bit by bit with our emotional nature. The bottomline is that when learn about it we also discover our go-to states and emotional stumbling blocks. With some understanding of these, we can see what skills we have been lacking. Now we can begin to practice the relevant skill-building in everyday settings because this is how skills become second nature. 
 

All of this is possible when we honour and give value to our emotions. It is interesting to grow used to being present with our emotions; to learn to validate them, allow them to do their job and move on instead of perpetuating habits of repressing them. It is more than possible to get used to their sensations, discover their languages and appreciate even the difficult emotions instead of only grasping for our favourite emotional states. 
 

It is actually liberating to support the free-flowing nature of human emotions instead of trying through various means to capture and keep the preferred versions hostage. It is moving to become comfortable around our emotions and discover how to take good care of our emotional wellbeing. It can be utterly fascinating to discover how we can influence the quality of our thinking, self-talk and beliefs, and know we have the skills to access peace of mind whenever we want.
 

Becoming emotionally educated contributes to the quality of life. Just imagine the relief of knowing how to quietly interrupt a downward spiralling of difficult emotions and see them release. Or be freed from the charge of emotional baggage that has been weighing heavily on us for years. Or voice how we feel and see it heard and respected. 

 

When we collaborate constructively with our own emotional wellbeing we also contribute to the wellbeing of others. There is great joy in speaking the language of emotions and noticing the effects it has in our relationships with others. It is very meaningful to know how to assume responsibility for our emotional responses in life and no longer be compelled to blame them on others. Being emotionally intelligent makes us interpersonally intelligent.

 

Today there is a wealth of resources available which support all of this and much more. On this website you can explore more about different aspects of relating to your emotional nature and also learn about some key skills. 

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EMOTIONS AS MESSENGERS
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Our emotions exist to inform and guide us. Their indispensable function is to help us navigate the world around us, interact with others and remember what really matters to us. Feelings and emotions weave in and out of life to support and mobilise us through the maze of influences we experience as human beings. They are also central to the quality of life we have. After all, how we see and experience the world around us depends largely on how we feel.
 

When we begin to observe our emotions we can see that they seem singularly dedicated to point things out that really matter to our wellbeing—-benevolent, undermining or otherwise. They speak of the relationship we have to the world and others and could, for instance, like anger, be telling us that a boundary has been crossed or that something needs to be put right.

 

They do this by moving through us with their messages and then they depart. The idea is to learn to catch what they are saying. The language they speak, however, can take a moment to learn, and in terms of their communications, emotions do differ from one another in the ways they communicate. 

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Emotions express their individuality much like a temperature, colour or sound would. Their characteristics are conveyed in sensations in the body. They can also be sensed in different parts of the body, for instance the gut, solar plexus, heart area, throat, shoulders, back, but other areas as well. They speak in body postures, and how the head is tilted, the mouth is shaped and the eyes are cast. They show up in the tones of voice. Emotions communicate their signals in remarkably varied ways.

 

Take the eyes, for instance. To describe different emotions they will change from being closed, downcast, avoidant, hazed over, wide open, flicking, tearing up, looking tenderly into someone’s eyes —or staring straight ahead into the distant horizon. The eyes reflect pain, fear, shock, anger, joy, delight and love, and all the other emotional states we experience.  

 

Our emotions might be indicating that something we are pursuing is pointless or very important to get on with. They might be warning us not to rush into something, encourage us to move ahead or to proceed in an entirely different direction. They tend to bring life and movement to our lives by inspiring us to adventure, explore, create and cultivate in order to serve our wellbeing. 

 

When we become friendly with our sentient nature we can even turn to it for comfort when things are tough. Author Karla McLaren refers to this surprising companionship as an “astonishing secret that lives inside the emotional realm: If you trust and attend to your emotions they will take care of you.” Karla McLaren PAGE NUMBER? 

 

While an emotional message can be communicated in extraordinary detail, the emotional states we are most familiar with also tend to interact, overlap and converge with one another. It is as if they are used to dancing together. They might seem to move into the background of one another, combine or push for dominance. We can feel several emotions at once in a situation, say, guilt and anger, curiosity and fear. This mobile, changeable quality of emotions can make their individuality hard to grasp at first but it becomes much easier to pick up on their messages once we have learned to engage with them and observe them in action.

 

While our emotions are created from a wide range of factors, they are influenced by what we think, believe and tell ourselves. They are expressed viscerally, in the body, not in the head. When their messages are delivered, they depart. When it is not, another attempt at delivery is likely. 

 

It is when we don’t have the skill to pick up their message that the trouble starts. The energy of unexpressed emotions tend to lodge in the body. Beyond the basic skills of engaging with emotions, another skill-set to acquire is to know how to release unexpressed emotional charge from the body. 

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Emotions Speak in Many Ways, here are some 

Sensations

Postures

Breathing

Heart rates

Eyes

Facial Muscles

Tones of Voice

Biochemistry

Prefrontal cortex shutdown

Contraction

Expansion

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FILTERS OF CONDITIONING
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Most of the emotional ‘rules’ and coping strategies we live by are learned while growing up. It is quite typical for many of us to take in how and when to become emotional but not how to collaborate productively with our emotions. 
 

We are deeply affected by the first influences that surround us from the moment we come into the world. During infancy we absorb like sponges the most critical information in direct experiences with our caregivers and the cultural expectations of our surroundings. As we grow up ever more data is added to the inner ‘how and when to get emotional’ data base. 
 

All this conditioning takes place outside our conscious awareness, and continues to be acted on unconsciously until the time when we are able to bring our early conditioning into light. We might find out that we have mostly been taught what not to be emotionally. Maybe we discover that we have always felt a lot of emotions but been trained to show only a few. Or that we were taught to hold others responsible for our emotions and therefore have the right to dump them on others. 
 

Beyond the different expressions of our personal conditioning, we are also profoundly influenced by what the ancestors of our lineage underwent, as well as what has happened in the human collective as a whole. Humanity has a collective unconscious that is shared by all the members of its species. Hence we are born into and formed by various invisible collective and ancestral influences that are powerful. 

It can be helpful to see this accumulated conditioning as filters. These filters of conditioning add meaning, energy and direction to our emotional responses in life, and much, much more. When, for example, the core systems of the brain is gathering all that information in milliseconds to be able to predict an ‘appropriate’ emotional response to something, it is effectively dealing with a barrage of these filters. 
 

But since the neuroplasticity of the brain was discovered, we also know that it not only considers existing factors but also new information in such processes. Say we have responded to something very differently than in the past. The brain forms new synaptic links to reflect this and will also reorganise them. 
 

This is heartening to know when we want to consciously influence the ‘how and when to get emotional’ scripts that we operate on. By intentionally practicing new responses to situations, people, experiences and such, we can rest assured that these new filters will be factored in by the brain. We can quite literally ‘make-believe’ our way into the creation of new filters of perception and responses.  By using them over and over they will be entrenched as new neural pathways and grow in influence. 
 

We also encounter common emotional themes in early life. Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psycho-social development are still used as reference points that describe what these themes might be, and the challenge of integration that they impose on us. Are we able to integrate the theme of a certain age, or not? What happens if we do, or when we don’t? 
 

Erikson’s research suggests that the very first psychosocial theme that we are exposed to in infancy is whether to trust or not. The theme of this first stage is known as ‘trust versus mistrust.’ At the later toddler stage we are more likely to encounter situations that reflect the theme of autonomy versus experiences of shame and doubt. During the pre-school age the theme revolves around learning to take initiative versus experiencing guilt. The school-age highlights theme of industry versus feeling inferior, and in adolescence, the probable encounters are with the theme of identity versus identity confusion. Young adulthood explores the theme and issues around intimacy versus isolation. 
 

The point of discovering our filters of conditioning is to liberate ourselves from those that no longer serve us. Filters show up in numerous ways and details so it can take concerted effort to identify them. They exist as deep rooted beliefs, coping strategies, roles we play and invisible scripts that inform many of our decisions. Luckily there are many approaches that help illuminate this inner work.
 

At some point in life we are likely to stop and ask: What are my typical filters? Just naming a few of theme is enough to open the door to exploration, discoveries and choices that support our emotional health and wellbeing.

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