Have you ever noticed that our day-to-day life is full of deep mysteries we take for granted?
Genuinely unanswered questions we’re rarely even asking?
For example, every night we do that thing where for hours on end we lose all awareness of our physical surroundings for 8 hours while we experience wild adventures in worlds we can’t enter by day.
Isn’t that strange?
But instead, we casually say “well, time to hit the hay!”
Another thing like that is our constant interactions with feelings.
We do have some answers to that, but there’s a crucial part that remains missing:
According to current scientific consensus, emotions are made in the brain (by our brain’s interpretation of certain physiological and neurological states).
Scientists have reliably been able to replicate these connections. For example, by stimulating neurological responses, or observing how our interpretation of our physical sensations can determine whether we are scared or excited.
Medical science in particular has shown that we can manipulate moods by messing with neurotransmitters.
But the fact that antidepressants actually flatten your overall emotional experience rather than just make you happy gives us a clue that we still don’t know how emotions are really created. If we did, we’d have happy pills instead of flattening pills.
This is because the fact that we’re able to measure what happens in our body and what influences it, emotionally, doesn’t necessarily mean that what we’re observing is an act of creation.
It could also be an act of reception, or invocation.
I’m willing to bet that you’ve witnessed acts of emotional reception before:
Where an emotion seemed to come from outside you and you let it in.
Like feeling someone’s bad mood before even looking at them.
Or walking into an empty home and “feeling in the air that there was a fight here earlier”.
How is this possible? For “emotional residue” to be felt in a space where the original bodies who presumably created these emotions are no longer present?
It’s not, unless we accept the premise that emotions can also exist separate from us.
That we are not their creators, but their receptors and conduits.
This is, of course, a premise even harder to prove than the current scientific consensus.
But what can I say? I know it in my bones, and I’m sharing with you so that you can receive it if you’re willing.
I’ve been working with emotions personally and professionally for the better half of a decade, and I’ve become convinced that emotions are not created “within” individuals at all.
They are experienced within us. And we can—as scientists have observed too—amplify them or change them based on our relationship with them.
But they are not created by us, that much I am sure of.
Emotions can both arise within us (invocation), or be offered to us from outside (reception).
(And sometimes they aren’t sent from one person to another, but invoked by the relationship between them. Vibes are a complex mix of projections, attractions and aversions. )
We can feel them move through us, which I’m sure you’ve felt before
An emotional charge enters your body.
You want to go somewhere. You express it fully.
Now the charge is gone.
Where did it come from?
Where did it go?
(Where did you come from, Cotton-Eye Joe?)
Sometimes the answer is obvious (it was a reaction to something, etc.) sometimes it seems random.
In my experience, every emotion is accessible at all times.
What changes is how much we open or close to it.
Joy, fear and anger are always here, they don’t disappear.
When a specific emotion seems to “arise” in us, I believe what’s really happening is that we are configuring our body in a certain way, almost like tuning a radio dial, that allows us to pick up on that feeling.
That through our physiological holding, we can invoke or exile certain feelings from our experience.
We can hold ourselves in a way that’s harder for joy to penetrate. We can put our body in a state that is inviting the experience of fear.
A process which would produce the same measurements scientists are seeing, just for different reasons:
What if this physiological response and mental interpretation isn’t what “creates” the feeling, only what lets it in?
For a measuring instrument or a self-reported survey, these would be indistinguishable.
But suddenly many of our experiences would make a lot more sense, wouldn’t they?
For example, how it’s possible to empathize with other people’s feelings, even if we haven’t felt anything like it?
This phenomenon of emotions entering us from outside also shows up in many ways we wouldn’t ordinarily label as “a transfer of emotion”:
If someone’s angry behavior pisses us off, is that a reaction? Or were we open enough to let the anger pass from their body to yours?
If someone’s racism makes us see them as “just a bigot”, is that a result of our opinion on racism?
…or could it be that the same energy of dehumanization was passed on to us? That the same feeling they felt when dismissing a person for their skin color is the feeling that we welcomed in and now feel while we dismiss them for their racism?
When you start looking at it this way, suddenly emotions seem to be spreading through populations and groups, one interaction at a time, moving from human to human like a game of zip-zap-boing.
If you don’t know the game, here’s a quick refresher of the rules (found on Wikipedia):
…and here’s how that plays out with feelings:
The vibes at work were bad, and now “zip”, Bob comes on and passes those bad vibes on to his wife.
But the wife wants none of it, she says “boing”, tells Bob to get his mood sorted and continues going through her day with a smile.
So Bob goes on twitter and “zap”, he trolls a few people he politically disagrees with. But “zip”, they pass the feeling back to Bob who continues to engage until “zap”, a friend of Bob sends him a funny reel that makes him smile again.
Meanwhile his angry tweet goes viral and “zap”, a bunch of social media activists now continue to carry the feeling that Bob’s boss passed on to him at work.
Who started it? God knows. Maybe Bob’s boss’s dog’s neighborhood nemesis when he was annoyed that the city maintenance crew removed his favorite bush to pee on.
That bush really tied his territory together!.
All jokes aside, it does seem to function this way, doesn’t it?
A feeling enters our body and then we do something with it. Sometimes we release it. Sometimes we pass it on to strangers on the internet. Sometimes we hold on to it for a decade and let it shape our entire personality.
The latter is what happens when we open ourselves up to a feeling, decide it’s too much for us to feel, but close ourselves again before it fully passed (meaning it stays inside us, locked up, held back).
Our bodies function as channels for the emotion to pass through.
So if we physically constrict, that’s part of the channel where things are harder to flow unless pressured.
Which is also why body-based therapy is often more effective than talk therapy for specific things like treating trauma, chronic pain, and anxiety: It focuses on releasing these stored feelings, where talk therapy can go in endless circles because the underlying emotion is still not allowed to pass.
(For wholeness’s sake: Talk therapy is an amazing tool too, and has helped me personally with other things. While my own work centers on embodiment, I have a major beef with the marketing of many body-based therapists for positioning talk therapy as a bad alternative. Btw, notice what’s happening here? Whatever beef they had with talk therapy, that feeling is now passed on to me 😉 )
When an emotion is held in the body like that, it becomes your context.
Instead of acute anger, for example, there’s a constant slumbering grumpiness.
Instead of acute sadness, there’s an undertone of melancholy to your being.
And it’s leaking through the little gaps in the channel, or looking for outlets.
For example, I used to dislike anger. Meaning: I would close myself off to it.
To make sure no anger came in, but of course, that also means making sure no anger came out (since the channel is closed).
Interestingly, I would occasionally get possessed by ideologies with righteous stories.
I’d be heavily into punk ethics, or veganism, for example.
This allowed me to believe I simply cared about something, when in reality it provided me with many opportunities to zap some of that anger I was holding back in my body.
When I stopped repressing anger, the ideologies suddenly stopped making sense to me.
Isn’t that interesting? Instead of my worldview creating my feelings, my feelings were externalizing my worldview!
I’m not saying this applies to everyone’s beliefs. But it’s yet another example of how these feelings travel through society in our big game of zip-zap-boing.
Whether one heart at a time, or moving from one giant to another, feelings—much like ideas—seem to travel between us in waves.
Who started the wave and when? Did it even start with one of us? Or did they originate independently?
The outrage, the grief, the ecstasy.
All I know is, they’re bigger than me, you or our mirror neurons.
They move the masses through songs and memes, finding ways to resonate with each of us so we’d let them in.
They are always here, and immediately jump to the rescue when one of our bodies calls for their need.
For example: If you try to wake me at any time before 8AM it’s quite literally impossible. But if I hear/smell something that sounds like it could be a threat to our home or a loved one, I am awake and on my feet in less than a second. Because fear woke me up in ways alarm clocks fail to.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the feelings you feel are always yours to feel.
Just like Bob’s wife wanted nothing to do with that bad mood that wasn’t Bob’s to begin with, we can practice discernment with which feelings we want to receive inside our bodies.
If a deadline is coming up, a little anger might help you care enough and energize you to finish that project when you’re tired.
But if that anger is arising in response to a news article you’ve read about a situation you can’t constructively respond to, maybe it’s best not to invite it in.
When you find yourself being highly charged with a feeling, you have a few options:
You can hold on to it for as long as you want to.
You can express it out loud so it finally leaves you (and an empathic listener can help too).
You can, zip or zap it to other people.
You can match it with an equally strong energy and boing it back out.
You can transmute it into art and infuse it with our beauty.
Or, if you have enough capacity to feel it fully in one go, you can release it into the ground like a lightning rod.
You can let the feeling move you in a healthy way by consciously choosing to receive as love.
And lastly, you can transform the feeling by embracing it.
But that, my friend, is for another day.
For now, I hope that in some way, some of my words could “zap” to you what I’m perceiving this aspect of reality to be.