The energy of feelings

Feelings run our lives.

Nearly everything we do is in pursuit of feeling more of what we like and less of what we don’t.

We seek out things like romantic comedies, mystery novels, and roller coasters for what we feel when we watch, read, or ride them.

When you visit your family, take a vacation, or clean the house, it’s often because of the feelings you hope to experience—or the feelings you hope to avoid if you didn’t do those things.

If you dislike your job, your partner, or even your partner’s hair color enough, you may soon find yourself dreaming of different jobs, partners, and hair colors—because your mind tells you they will bring different feelings.

Approaching what we call good feelings and avoiding what we call bad feelings lies behind much of what we do.

If our lives revolve around feelings, you might think we’d know exactly what a feeling actually is. You might think we’d understand what it’s made of and how it works.

We use language to label and describe feelings. But beneath those labels and descriptions, what is a feeling?

There are many ways to answer that question. For the sake of our exploration, consider this: feelings are fluctuations of energy to which the mind attaches words and stories. Energy moves through experience, and thought interprets, labels, and defines it.

So when we talk about feelings and emotions, we’re really experiencing two things: the movement of energy, and the mind’s commentary about that energy.

Thought and feeling are two sides of the same coin—one formless energy appearing in different forms of psychological experience.

When the energy moving through you is low and your mind is thinking about a cat who died, the mind calls that sadness. When low energy feels stagnant and unchanging, the mind might call it depression.

I encourage you to feel into the energy itself—the sensations and movements within experience—while holding the interpretation lightly.

In doing so, everything reveals itself to be fully feelable. Nothing needs to be approached or avoided, because every dance of energy is temporary, natural, and completely feelable exactly as it is.