The difference between emotions and feelings is often explained by Jung’s definition: emotions comes from a learning or a memory, and the feeling is a biochemical reaction to an emotion or thought. The emotions us humans experience, anything from happiness, to sadness, to extreme joy and depression, creates different feelings. Our body releases different chemicals when we experience various things and they create a different environment within the body. For example if your brain releases serotonin, dopamine or oxytocin, you will feel good and happy. Convexly, if your body releases cortisol while you are angry or sad, you will have an entirely different feeling associated with the body kicking into survival mode.
What about when we are thinking negative or positive thoughts? The placebo and nocebo are examples of how this can heal or do the opposite for us, and how immensely powerful our thoughts are. So lets study what our thoughts are based on. What is good in our part of the world might be bad in another culture. Good and bad is relative to our experience, education and convention. Also we know it changes with age and opinions in life, we simply develop a “new thinking” in many areas. So if the perception of good and bad is ours to decide, how does this decision affect us and what about when we are not emotionally charged to neither positive nor negative? How does our perception of good and bad affect us if there is no good or bad? If we see everything as a process, rather than time framed happenings, all judgment becomes a contradiction and thus useless.
The concept of Duality from eastern and western philosophies, is an explanation of the fact that we define our experiences as good and bad. We spend a lot of brain-time defining and judging situations, others and ourselves; what is to be considered as positive and what should we consider as negative? The brain is a very powerful tool and we define what something is or should be, based on memories and emotions that create feelings. What we feel enhances a biochemistry, it affects our thinking, saying and doing. We begin to have the results play out in our world. If we feel negative about something we produce stress hormones, if we feel good about something we produce happy hormones, and then we absolutely affect our biochemistry with our thinking and doing even more, no doubt!
Small incidents like a brute in the traffic jam can upset some resulting in huge stress but others will not be bothered. Things are not innately positive and negative. We make them positive or negative. So what if we don’t define things as positive and negative, or if we do we don’t judge ourselves in doing so. What happens biochemically and neurologically then? What if we only see our feelings as signals to learn something, and our lives and all happenings as one, as a long process, where “bad” leads to “good” and vice versa. Then there is no bad nor good in the first place, no judgment, no measuring only a flow of incidents making the whole, like water droplets making the river. For one thing we will have much less fluctuant biochemistry, and therefore less mood swings. Meditation and mindfulness is a fantastic practice to train ourselves to get to this state of non-judgment biochemically. Our energy is more steady, working in lower frequency with less highs and lows. In deep meditation there is no judgment, no measurement. There is only stillness and silence. That is healing, it gives us Prana energy, and after we are more prone to be loving and compassionate.
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