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.

1. All consciousness, thus all emotional responses, are highly subjective in nature.
2. Perception, perspective, cognition, neural images, and personal interpretation turn experiences into emotions.
3. You have a form of subjective self-originated consciousness, which colors how you interpret life’s experiences.
4. 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.
5. Personal subjective experiences always includes feelings in your body – pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
6. Long-term consciousness in living helps to integrate various experiences into our personal emotional life.
7. It is this personal inclination that sharply reflects itself in your emotional reactions and responses.
8. There is no specific part of the human brain that holds consciousness; it is integrated in our human brain
9. Our personal emotional experiences relate fully to sensory inputs, relational/personal perspectives, cognition, and interpretation of people, places, and things.
10. 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.
11. The identified personal quality of human experience is called “feelingness.” (p. 160).
12. 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  

New Edition of Mindful Happiness in Production…Coming soon!