Consciousness of Your Emotions
Besides common scientific reflections on human emotions – that is neuro-chemical-electrical cellular impulses in response to sensory inputs – our emotional response system includes you and your innermost emotional reactions to both internal and external stimuli (people, places, things, memories, experiences, phenomena). Your mental state in response to sensory contact with phenomena often initiates your subjective experience of emotions. To help you do a better job in emotional responsiveness versus emotional reactivity, I have listed several aspects of emotions and consciousness. Hope these are helpful in your quest for inner peace and happiness.
- All consciousness, thus all emotional responses, are highly subjective in nature.
- Perception, perspective, cognition, neural images, and personal interpretation turn experiences into emotions.
- You have a form of subjective self-originated consciousness, which colors how you interpret life’s experiences.
- If you already know that your developmental attachment history was difficult emotionally, then you already know you need improved emotion regulation skills to navigate through life’s challenges.
- Personal subjective experiences always includes feelings in your body – pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
- Long-term consciousness in living helps to integrate various experiences into our personal emotional life.
- It is this personal inclination that sharply reflects itself in your emotional reactions and responses.
- There is no specific part of the human brain that holds consciousness; it is integrated in our human brain
- Our personal emotional experiences relate fully to sensory inputs, relational/personal perspectives, cognition, and interpretation of people, places, and things.
- Feeling states, like all other human systemic responses, are homeostatic in nature; there is a tendency to return to a more steady state after fluctuations of energy.
- The identified personal quality of human experience is called “feelingness.” (p. 160).
- To cope better emotionally use the information above as well as breathing techniques, meditation, yoga, exercise, and compassion.
For more information refer to Demasio, A. (2018). The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feelings, and the Making of Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 11-31, 44-52, and 99-161.
Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC
From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont and the Home of The Monkton Sangha
Author of Mindful Happiness
being and interactions with core Buddhist concepts and experiences such as happiness and suffering, impermanence, non-dual nature, dependent origination, and emptiness of all phenomena related to the former. It is the total integration of these concepts, processes, and experiences that guide us on our personal path to enlightenment or nirvana. If we achieve wise-mind skills and meaningful regular meditation/yoga practice – as well as keep the above information in mind – we will also achieve mind and body wellness to the highest possible levels.
leads us to an error in perception: That we are separate, substantial, solid individuals experiencing separate, substantial, solid things in the world. We believe the objects and experiences we are aware of are solid, full, real forms of form in a very temporary time-space continuum. However, our consciousness and awareness are transparent, empty, and formless; thus, our mind-body of experience making sensory contact with objects – and registering as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral – is also transparent, empty, and formless. It is simply just how the mind and body function. Consciousness has no set of values or valences; it is simply a state of neutral awareness.
our consciousness is the only absolute reality of all things that appear to exist. The momentary sensory contact with objects and experiences produces that which consciousness is aware of. So, with these somewhat heavy viewpoints from Buddhist Psychology, we will examine upclose the meditative experience of being conscious of pure emptiness. Personal awareness of your consciousness is a neutral continuum of constancy, but sensory contact with objects and experiences leading to pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant feelings is a limited time-space phenomenon in the present moment.
nteresting ideas have been presented by Stuart Hameroff, professor emeritus and director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Consciousness Studies. Consciousness rests in the center of many brain-mind discussions. In it’s most basic form, consciousness is simply awareness – think meditation experience. Something changes in the dynamics of energy, and we become aware of it. The brain’s one-hundred billion neurons have much to do with this process of becoming aware. In their complex electrical-chemical processes, patterns, and interactions our brain’s neurons produce something experienced as aware consciousness. We are always conscious about something going on inside and/or outside of us. Thus, consciousness can be a double-edged sword – keeping us fully attuned to what the universe (small and large) is doing, but also maintaining a steady-state of mind-noise – endless flow of thoughts that may be either comforting or terrifying. Consciousness, itself, may be one reason why the human brain has so much difficulty relaxing itself. Let’s begin to review a few of Hameroff’s ideas.