Many people think that Feelings and Emotions are the same. But that is not the case. By knowing the difference there is a lot to gain. A feeling is a physical experience and not spiritual. It contains emotional components, but it is much more comprehensive than emotions. You can face it and decide to resist or ignore it, but you cannot change or remove the feeling. It aims to identify lust and discontent, in terms of pleasant and unpleasant. In this sense, feelings do not have a direct connection with our actions, they are independent experiences. For example, We sometimes can express the feeling of “tension” or “gut feeling”. That can be the dominant emotion, but something big and vague is hidden behind it.
Within the context of emotions, feelings act as a warning system; Something has happened and we are insecure about it. The difference between feelings and emotions is that for emotions there is an urge for a direct response. With feelings, there is no urge for direct response, but a sense of discomfort. This difference is very important: A feeling can be expressed in a much more reasonable way than an emotion.
So emotions are strong and force a direct response, it’s Energy in Motion. Emotions are triggered by something that happens now and has a strong relationship with a similar event in the past. Recalling this memory puts us in a certain state of mind. This memory can be a personal experience, a belief or an event earlier that day. Important is that these events had such a big impact that our primary response system kicks in. The more often we experience this emotion, the stronger and more accessible the corresponding energetic pattern is stored. Within the emotional brain (see topic Our brain) we find the energetic pattern that actually triggers our nervous system to establish the necessary response.
Because the trigger is an event from our memory, including the necessary response, which gives us the opportunity to intervene and prevent an outburst of our emotions. We often do this by suppressing them in order to function well in social relationships. Especially negative emotions such as anger and fear. In the long term suppressing results often in physical and/or mental problems. If we had these problems instantly, we would have learned sooner how to deal with these emotions differently.
The best way to prevent unwanted emotions is by listening to our feelings and ask ourselves why they happened. Then change our behavior or circumstances to avoid them from happening again. Of course, this is sometimes not so clear and you have to deal with the emotion itself. Suppressing them is the worst choice, as we have learned. However, we can train ourselves to recognize them at an early stage. Seeing them from a different perspective, we can accept them and convert them into useful energy. This can help us to overcome difficulties and grow as a person. I like to think that the obstacles we face during our lifetime are opportunities to learn, grow and become wiser. Perception makes the difference! (See topic Perception)
As we have discussed, emotions are a powerful energy source. Recently is discovered that emotions are also capable of changing our DNA. They discovered this by comparing the DNA of separated identical twins. They were separated by circumstances as a babies. One grew up as more open, friendly and cheerful and the other as more closed, reserved and anxious. After about 20 years there were small differences in their DNA. DNA adapts to circumstances!