Emotions

Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. it indicates your emotions as well as all unconscious mental emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body’s reaction to your mind, or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a build up of energy in the body that we can anger. The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the body to contract and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness.

The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgement and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom. A great deal has been written about this in recent years, so we don’t need to go into it here. A strong unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just happen to you. For example, I have observed that people who carry a lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it are more likely to be attacked, verbally or even physically, by other angry people, and often for no apparent reason. They have a strong emanation of anger that certain people pick up subliminally and that triggers their own latent anger.

If you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by focusing attention on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This will also put you in touch with your emotions.

Reference : The Power of Now. Eckhart Tolle.