Your Body Knows the Answer

OF THE THREE GATES, the third—emotion—is the most challenging. This is because ordinary feelings and emotions are the hardest to differentiate from felt senses. As its name suggests, a felt sense involves some kind of feeling, but it is not the usual kind of feeling we associate with emotion words like angry, sad, or happy. Understanding this difference is a key to success in finding and learning from the felt sense.

Ordinary emotions are a blend of physical, mental, and affective (felt) experiences. When you get angry, there are physical changes, such as muscles tensing and feeling hot; there is a conceptual story line about why you’re angry; and there is a felt-sense component, which you’re probably not conscious of. As we will see, a felt sense, once it is recognized, can “feel” very different from the emotion you started with. It exists at another, more subtle level. A felt sense is the feeling that lies beneath the feeling.

For example, as I sit at my desk, writing, my dog Luna suddenly starts barking loudly toward the front door. A man is delivering a package on the porch. I feel a rush of anger at the dog, and I turn and bark back at her, “Luna, be quiet! Come here! Lie down!” But if I step back from my anger and check what’s going on in my body, I notice an achy, squeezing sensation at the center of my chest. This is a felt sense. Giving that achy place some friendly, curious attention, I discern a sense of vulnerability there, and a need for self-protection. I have been intensely focused on my writing, and the barking threatens to interrupt my train of thought.

What I’ve realized so far may seem obvious—I’ve been interrupted while working and I’m upset about it. But there’s more here. I now have enough self-awareness to question whether shouting at the dog is the skillful response: Does it prevent me from being interrupted, or does it in fact contribute to the interruption? Is this the way I want to behave toward my dog? Is my gentle, loving, and loyal Luna trying to interrupt me or just doing her canine duty? Now I have the space to see more appropriate ways to respond: I can choose to stay focused on my writing, knowing the barking will soon subside, as it always does; I can gently but firmly reassure the dog that everything is all right; I can go with the dog to the door and open it, letting her see that nothing is amiss, and perhaps pick up my package at the same time.

But there is still more here: I can now question why my reaction to this small disruption was so strong in the first place. Directing friendly attention to the felt sense, this achy, squeezed sensation in my chest, I receive the spontaneous insight that at some preconscious level I fear that if I lose my train of thought, I’ll never get it back. I will be “lost.” Now I remember the panicky feeling of being lost in the woods, something that happened to me twice when I was a young child. With this insight, I am able to soothe that young child part of myself—of course getting lost and not knowing how to get back to the family is scary when you are six years old!

I am able to see now that the surge of emotion triggered by my dog’s barking was more from that old fear of getting lost than from the present situation. Yes, getting interrupted is irritating, but have I actually lost my train of thought irretrievably? Of course not: my present-day, grown-up self knows perfectly well how to refocus on my work and pick up where I left off. It even knows that after an unexpected interruption like this, I’m likely to get fresh insights and be able to say something worthwhile I wouldn’t have had access to if Luna hadn’t jolted me out of my rut!

This seemingly insignificant episode highlights the difference between an emotion (sudden anger) and what the felt sense beneath it can reveal (fear of being lost). It also nicely illustrates the series of small steps that are involved in first finding a felt sense and then eliciting new, helpful information from it. In chapter 5, you will go through all of these steps using an episode from your own life. In the following exercise, you will practice just the crucial step of searching “underneath” an emotion in order to find a felt sense.

Start with the three GAP steps. Then, as in the previous exercise, begin by bringing to mind a situation in your life. This time, choose something that you know has an emotional charge to it—something that makes you angry is a good place to begin.

However, a note of caution here: You want to bring to mind something that evokes anger but not so much that you become overwhelmed by it. If the emotion is too strong, you won’t be able to get enough distance to search underneath it for the felt sense. So, if you are prone to being flooded by strong emotions, instead of a situation that provokes anger, try starting with something that is merely irritating, annoying, or frustrating.

Relive the situation in your mind. At the same time, be attentive to any physical changes—constriction, agitation, heat, rising or sinking sensations—that signal the presence of emotion. Depending on whether or not you are someone who easily becomes emotional, you may have to experiment to get enough felt emotion so that you can experience it in your body but not so much that it overwhelms you. Once the emotion is clearly present, take time to notice specifically where and how it is affecting your body.

Next, invite into your awareness a subtler body sense of the situation. To do this, you have to both drop the story line and step outside of the raw energy of the emotion it has evoked. This is a question of getting the right distance: enough that you aren’t trapped inside the emotion but not so distant that it’s not there at all. See if you can find a region of experience that lies below the emotion. What is important here is your willingness to sense deeper in yourself by means of gentle, nonreactive friendly attending. After a while, a felt sense may emerge. It will have its own bodily felt qualities such as tightness or heat or “like a small ball in my belly,” but this body feel will be more subtle than a tight jaw, a pounding heart, or constricted breathing. The felt sense may also have an emotional tone like fear or sadness or vulnerability that is quite different from the emotion you started out with.^a

Getting to the felt senses lying beneath the raw emotions triggered by events in our lives involves a process of disidentification. When we are in the midst of an emotion, we are identified with it. Instead of us having the emotion, the emotion has us. There may be times when being completely absorbed in an emotion is exactly where we want to be, but it is also well known that strong emotions affect our perception of reality and our judgment. We say and do things that we later wish we could undo or do differently. Knowing how to disidentify, to get some space between us and the emotion, is a skill vital to our long-term welfare.

You can picture the process of disidentification as if you are stepping back from the emotion, placing the emotion somewhere outside of you, rising above the emotion, making yourself larger than the emotion, or putting a box around the emotion. These are all metaphors for the change of perspective involved in disidentifying. Consider which of these metaphors best fits you—or consult your felt sense and come up with your own.

It is helpful to practice the three gateway exercises in chapters 2 and 3 several times. You can do them all in a single session or one at a time. It’s fine to spend more time on the ones that seem to work best for you. You can take a break from any exercise that is confusing, frustrating, or just unproductive, but try to come back to it after some days or weeks. Something may have shifted in you in the meantime that will give you better results.

a. The “feeling beneath the feeling” isn’t always different from the original emotion; sometimes this process is more about staying with the bodily felt quality of the original emotion—fear, for example—and allowing more facets and subtleties of it to emerge.