Feeling and emotion are power sources of transformative living, rooted in your body.
Your brain is only one realm of material sense-making, only one organ that houses the energetics of intelligent solutions.
Emotions are your raw, in-the-moment, flesh sensations.
Your gut drops when the emotion of fear arises. Your heart warms up when experiencing love or joy. Your eyes widen (or, you faint!) when experiencing shock or extreme excitement overload.
These are flash responses to unique, immediate experiences. View them as pure-wave, energetic forms of insight. Intentionally illogical and instinctive, ripe with significance regarding your engagement with reality, right now.
Alternatively, feelings are the aftermath of emotion.
Closely tied to your thoughts and memory. Feelings often shift into beliefs, judgements, assumptions, and expectations.
Feelings also become nervous system patterns of habit, that deplete or increase the quality of your life and ability to thrive.
As a pattern you become aware of, you can choose to enact a feeling, or disrupt and redirect it.
Both emotion and feeling are innate data centers that affirm and clarify, in real-time, what is amiss or working well.
They signal your soul's quality of life.
Each offer initial measurements – through the intensity or density of feeling or emotion experienced – how well you are aligned or misaligned with fulfilling your needs, desires and intentions. They also signal how connected or disconnected you are in relationship with others.
As a builder and creator focused on cultivating inner life wellbeing, you must dissolve tension in your body, to equally release tension in your mind-thought streams.
Tension is obstructed or suppressed emotion, distilled into feeling that stealthily shows up as "logic" (what you think you know to be true), in the form of thought.
Responding and reacting are two different modes of living, especially in relation to stress.
What you think and believe shows up in your physicality, actions, and behavior. Your nervous system signals your intention and disposition first – before you ever speak a word, otherwise.
Working with your body as the primal data center to shift difficulty into benefit is a conscious habit you make a decision to explore. It requires courage and a different kind of power. Especially if you're used to ignoring your body's signals beyond basic sleeping, eating, perfunctory self-care actions, and the bare minimum exercise to move throughout your day.
One practice to shake off the habit of ignoring your own body-mind communication is deep, lower lung breathing. Hands on your belly. Keeping your shoulders dropped and relaxed.
Inhaling fully through your nose, expand your belly to raise your hands.
Exhaling easy through your nose, release your belly.
A simple touch point, hands on your belly remind you of your existence – in the flesh – right now. Not just as a mere human or professional. You exist, beautifully. Innumerable nervous system portals of insight are housed in your digestive area. A second brain, a second realm of intelligence to pool resources from.
Own it. By inhaling a deep, long fulfilling breath. Secure your ample share of life force.
Own it. By exhaling fully, releasing as much thought, worry and concern you may have about the day, the week, month, or moment.
Exhaling: "I release. It's done."
Tension is gone.
Inhaling: "I accept, and am thankful."
Support is here.
Note if this shift in your body-breath, hand-to-belly connection makes a difference in how you respond versus react throughout the day. You now have a daily practice to activate, a simple tool of transformation.
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Photo · NASA (nebula, interstellar clouds)