Moods, Feelings and Emotions
Feelings and emotions are regarded as lived experiences. These experiences involve the brain, body, mind, psyche, personal history, relationships, and perhaps phenomena that we do not even understand. Working through the literature in my research, I found in reading the scientific accounts, intellectual analyses, and theoretical models, three big problems:
The definition of what an experience is depends heavily on the writer’s underlying approach. Different frameworks highlight different features, causes, and meanings. There is a big difference between the definition of the neurologist and the definition of the panpsychist.
The second problem is that there is no agreement on where experience originate. Again it relies heavily on the approach used and here is a table with the most popular approaches.
Thirdly, feelings and emotions are not material objects available to external observation in the way physical things are. They are first-person experiences that can be communicated and observed, but that is far from the lived experience and one wonders if you will ever be able to define the lived experience as it is lived, not observed or described. Communication is influenced by vocabulary, background, culture, previous experiences, subconscious programming etc. of both the experiencer and the listener or reader. Even observation of something like facial expressions of someone having an experience is influenced by bodily factors, culture, attention and focus of the observer.
This means that 'the lived experience' carries a meaning that is universal understood despite these three problems. I would like to present to you how I see feelings and emotions as lived experiences.
I begin with the ordinary use of words that we all employ unconsciously—words we were taught by our ancestors, parents, culture, and environment.
The question, “How do you feel?” implies a state that can be described.
We do not ask, “How do you emote?”
In our language, a feeling is understood as an intellectual description of experience.
Emotion, by contrast, is understood as a bodily expression or awareness of experience.
A slow, soft slap on the wrist is very different from a fast, painful slap on the wrist. Both are bodily actions, but each expresses a different e-motion. We recognise the emotional difference through observation or through acting it out.
The distinction that scientists make between feelings as “inner” and emotions as “outer” does not work for me. A feeling is not the experience itself; it is a description of experience. Likewise, an emotion is not necessarily outward or visible. An increased heartbeat when witnessing an accident may be an emotional response even though nobody else can see it.
This distinction—between feelings as descriptions of experience and emotions as embodied expressions or awareness of experience—is, to me, more helpful and specific than the simplistic separation between inner and outer.
(Just for interest sake - and you do not need to read this, but it was an interesting observation: I add this paragraph: I had a big fight with my AI that insisted that the difference is about inner (feeling) and outer (emotion) experiences as lauded by many scientists and research projects, but the AI in the end conceded that my distinction is much more helpfull and specific than inner and outer. I then asked the AI to edit my writing for spelling and grammar and it ignored this paragraph.. he he. do you think I hurt my AI's feelings... or his emotions?)
The distinction I make is also evident in Greek. The Greek word thumos indicates “a conscious act of will” and is translated as “feeling.”
The Greek word pathos indicates a condition of being moved and is translated as “emotion.” This is movement within a state of being that is not necessarily conscious. It is bodily movement—an increased heart rate, sweating, physical movement, sign language through the use of the body, and so on—but it remains an experience regardless of whether the experiencer is aware of it.
This brings me to the third Greek word, orgē, which is “an unconscious act of will” and is translated as “mood.” This seems to be the fountain, the wellspring, of our feelings and emotions.
Unlike other “scientific” theories and approaches, I regard moods as the soul’s link between your Self and your destiny, your quantum field of probabilities, your multiverse of being, and your original soul contract. Your moods influence your feelings and emotions and steer your life in the direction it was meant to unfold.
Now we come to the important part of this article and the reason I have written it. Our bodily e-motions are not merely movements; they also include cellular memory—memory inherited from our ancestors, from the people we spend time with and love, from the objects with which we interact, from the environments through which we move, and from the postures and positions in which we hold ourselves.
I wrote this article to make you more aware of how you move: to become conscious of the fact that, with every movement, you also live out an emotion. You may not have words to describe it, and that is precisely why it sits in your body rather than in your head.
It can help, in part, to put your experiences into words and thereby express your feelings. But another part of the matter is that your body has a mind of its own, as Professor Candace Pert argued. You need to focus more on your body and allow it to move as it wants to, because it, too, has ways of expressing its pain, trauma, love, frustration, and guilt.
That does not mean you need to go dancing every night. Rather, move consciously, with the intention of allowing your body to speak its truth and express the things that need to be expressed.
Using the picture above as a metaphor, we could say that the picture as a whole is the mood; the individual elements—the flowers, the road, and the clouds—are descriptions that express or explicate that mood; and the walking figure represents the state of being that is moved by walking along the road.
