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
recognize this is simply all part of normal life experience for us humans. It is also suggesting that you learn and use various “wise mind” skills and practices (mindfulness, meditation, RAIN, yoga, walking meditation, etc.) to help yourself feel and do/be better in life. Rupert Spira in various writings highly influenced by classical Vedanta boiled it down into a few very important understanding – understanding about the way things are, and how we consciously experience the way things are. In the use of laughter to nudge you out of suffering, we may want to pay attention to some of his key ideas. Along with the recognition of wasting lots of emotional energy trying to change what happens to us in primary suffering, it may help to recognize that just allowing or radically accepting what our experience is in this present moment is a form of ultimate truth. Emphasizing neither the body nor the mind in experiencing suffering, we may want to realize that it is simply our conscious awareness of present-moment suffering that makes it so hard to be with it in peace. Being more aware and being more able to just be with your experience no matter what it is are important skills in life. Preferences for pleasant self-objects, other people as objects, things as objects,emotions as objects, and our personal experience as objects – all these associated desires and related cognitive-emotional-behavioral consequences simply produce greater suffering. Once we are skilledenough to just be with our suffering as a part of life, we may be better equipped to become a happier person. Inner quiet, equanimity, liking and loving, loving kindness, compassion, as well as a deeper understanding of reality are all part of moving though suffering and, perhaps, into more happiness. The conditioned mind and body may still seek sense pleasures (short-term joys but 
ultimately long-term causes of suffering), but eventually we may understand that trying to attach/hold onto pleasant emotions and trying to avoid unpleasant emotions gets us nowhere. Pleasant and unpleasant are simply part of the larger life-picture of what is. So what about laughter in all of this?
something, and weight loss. Adding “forced laughter” via laughing yoga or eye-contacted, face-to-face laughter did get people to laugh. Since people had to decide whether or not to cooperate, the terms “forced laughter” may be inappropriate. Since, according to certain neuroscience opinions, the body cannot recognize differences in authentic laughter and forced laughter – this research may be quite meaningful. Also, again from neuroscience research, we know that facial emotional expressions find their way into the brain. Like the body, the brain (other than exaggerated executive criticism) cannot differentiate natural laughter from other forms of laughter. The more and longer people laughed, the better the outcomes were.