Emotions are not thoughts, though thoughts lead to emotions. However, I have a suspicion that not ALL emotions are led by thought.
Bear with me on this – it’s a little excursion into the workings of the whole mind-heart-body matrix. It’s easier to talk about it if we divide it into three; this helps us to understand what is going on, and, if we want to change anywhere, to discover and know the fulcrum points where it can be changed, where you can add pressure, adjust the leverage. This way of looking at it will help.
So, emotions are not thoughts, sometimes they are signals from the body. There are the obvious ones: pain when you stub your toe, which hurts – like f—k – a lot – and you yell, then you are angry or upset about it. Or you just miss something that almost fell, and your heart is racing as you clutch at it, and it is safe – the sense of relief, the ‘whew’ moment. Or when you shoot out of bed from deep sleep because a loud noise alerted you, and you look around wildly to find the source of the danger.
The body knows these things; it is built into self-preservation. The instant brain-hormonal system knows what to do – instantly the body is into fear or anger, or, as they say, fight or flight, and just as quickly back into relief or hyper-aware observation, all the senses heightened.
This mechanism also applies to sports and physical challenges. Great athletes know how to use this to improve performance exponentially: think fear, and the body can run faster; think anger, and the stamina improves impressively; think acute challenge, and strength becomes, sometimes, quite staggeringly accessible. There is that story of a mother who lifted a whole car to save her child, because of this very mechanism.
Other emotions are triggered by psychological or mental situations, such as intense study leading to sudden knowing, or systematic scrutiny leading to winning that chess tournament. WE apply long-term attention because it will lead to understanding. It’s called studying.
I can recall staring at books, at words, at letters, and one day they formed the shapes, and I suddenly understood how to read. The pattern formed. It became legible for me. I was about six or seven. After that I read everything I could lay my hands on – of course, this new skill was amazing!
This also applies to social situations, where watching other people’s inexplicable behaviour somehow clicks into place and you ‘get’ where they’re coming from, why they are doing this. And sometimes you don’t, as their behaviour is simply completely incoherent, so far removed from reality as to be on another planet, and we feel the puzzlement, the incomprehension – and also, sometimes, the sudden understanding. The compassion.
Then we have thought itself: the linear process of it, not visceral, not psychological, very far removed from emotion. A clear, calm place where the structure becomes elegant, and the construction of whole architectures of meaning becomes possible. Where the emotional becomes explicable. Where the psychological becomes coherent. Where understanding takes place. Not that it is emotionless, but it is instead ‘thought-full’ – full of thought itself.
And it is the place from which humour arises, as understanding begets humour every time. When you finally ‘get’ something, you always smile, you always laugh. It is always pleasant to be aware of knowing – a quiet, satisfying inner joy. No, emotions are not thoughts, however they are always there, as a balance, a counterweight that makes understanding pleasant. Smile.
Lizzy Agatha 