The Body As A Sense Organ For Feeling.

One factor contributing to the myth of body / mind separation is the belief that the head and the body are separate – that all mental and emotional activity takes place in the head (ie the brain while the rest of the body serves as a vehicle to carry the brain around and take it where it wants to go emotional feelings, according to this belief, are mental events occurring in the head, so have nothing to do with the body, per se. But emotional feelings are not simply mental events that take place in your head. They are highly complex mental and muscular events involving changes in neuromuscular organization throughout your body.

You feel emotions by subconsciously organizing your body in particular ways, then feeling the resulting body organization. Your musculature amplifies your emotions in much the same way that your stereo system amplifies music, and you experience your emotions through this neuromuscular amplification.

Feeling is the interpretation of sensation from your body, just as vision is the interpretation of sensation from your eyes, and hearing is the interpretation of sensations from your ears.

Feeling is an ongoing process through which you perceive the world and your relationship to it, just as vision and hearing are.

Emotions are only part of what you perceived through feeling. You also feel internal body states such as hunger, thirst, and temperature; body position and movement; and gut feelings about the rightness or wrongness of situations or courses of action. Even your sense of self, your basic sense of personal identity, is experienced more through feeling than any other way.

Vision and hearing are real-time processes. That is to say, you perceive a stimulus while it occurs, and stop receiving it when the stimulus stops.

You see these words while they are in your visual field but if you turn your head to look out a window, the words disappear and are instantaneously replaced by the window and the scene it contains. Look back at the words, and they reappear again. When you are listening to something, you hear it as long as the sound is there. When the sound stops, so does your perception of it. In a fully-functioning human nervous system, the feeling sense should work the same way. You should experience your current feeling – perception completely in the present moment, and it should then fade away as you move on to the next present moment.

If you were subject to emotionally traumatic experiences – the impact was even greater. You experienced things that may have threatened your very survival.

You wanted to make these things stop, or at least to diminish their intensity as much as possible. You could not do much about the external events that were happening to you, but you did have some control over your experience of those events. You could shut your eyes to block out the sites, maybe put your hands over your ears to diminish the sounds, and tense every muscle in your body to reduce the intensity of the feelings. And it worked, at least to a point it got you through, and you survived!

But the feelings you blocked out did not just disappear. The feelings remain as dysfunctional patterns in your nervous system and your musculature, limiting you in an unusual and often unexpected ways.

Feeling As A Psychosomatic Event

You experience feeling by organizing your body in a particular way, and then quote “reading out” that body organization as the feeling experience. A feeling, then is a psychosomatic event with both psychological (mental) dimensions, and somatic (body) dimensions.

From a psychological perspective, a feeling is an emotional experience (or other type of feeling experience). From a somatic perspective, however the same feeling is a pattern of excitation in your nervous system and musculature. But when you are not willing to allow yourself to experience the feeling, for whatever reason, you cut it off by imposing a block that prevents the feeling from completing.

You interrupt the neuromuscular pattern of the feeling by superimposing a stronger pattern on topof it, supressing it, or at least diminishing its intensity. This block, like the feeling itself, ia also apattern of neuromuscular excitation, maifesting as muscular tension.

The amountofongoing effortrequired to maintain the block will be different for different people and situations. Some people may cary constant muscular tension for years.

The feelings that you do block out do notjust dissapear. The uncompleted pattern remainsheld in suspension, ready to surface if the opportunity presents itself. Circumstances which trigger associations with the original event can providesuch an opportunity.