How do you know what you're feeling?

How do you know when you’re feeling a particular emotion? Let’s take anger, for instance. What happens (in your mind, your body, your behavior, your perception of things) that signals to you that you’re feeling anger?

In some ways this question seems easy, right? I know what I’m feeling because… I’m feeling it. I know I’m feeling anger because, well, I’m angry.

But in a world where emotions are still quite taboo and the majority of us have been taught to feel ashamed or confused about having them, there can be times when we actually don’t know what we’re feeling. Maybe we know we feel ‘bad’ or that something isn’t right. But when it comes to actually naming the emotion that we’re feeling (and therefore understanding what we need) we can be at a loss.

What’s cool about the day and age we live in is that we have more and more tools to better answer this question.

For instance, we know that core emotions (anger, sadness, joy, excitement, disgust, sexual excitement, fear) live in the body. Meaning they don’t just happen in our minds. They are actually bundles of physiological responses that happen in our bodies, each one with its own unique pattern of sensations.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland produced maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique computer-based, topographical self-report method based on 700+ participants. Learn more here.

This means we can use our bodily sensations as clues to better understand what we’re feeling. Our ability to perceive sensations related to emotions from inside the body is called interoception. And it’s something we can practice!

When we gently focus our attention on our bodies and use resonant or felt sense guesses to put emotions to what we feel we fire up nerve cells in a way that leads to inner transformation and change.

This might look like tuning into a sensation in your body and asking yourself if it’s a particular emotion. For instance, if you’re feeling tightness in your chest you might ask yourself “Self, are you feeling fear?” “Are you feeling excitement?” Maybe you need to get more specific. “Are you feeling trepidation?” “Are you feeling anticipation?” Noticing how the sensation responds. If it shifts. If it feels heard. Always doing so with a stance of warmth and curiosity towards yourself.

This body-based understanding of emotions and the practice of placing emotions to sensations are tools we have at our disposal to better figure out what we’re feeling in any given moment. Why is this helpful? It first and foremost helps us feel better, which is no small gift or feat. It also gives us tools we can use to better support ourselves to be conduits for things in our system, like collective grief and ancestral trauma. Especially those of us who are naturally sensitive and empathic towards these things. We can use these tools to notice our own responses to world events and listen into what segments or threads of what we’re feeling may be tied to the larger systems we are part of. What we might be able to help process and heal on behalf of the whole.

Check out this clip from my new self-paced course Empower yourself, dear feeler. It’s from the section on anger and lays out the unconscious process that takes place between the body and brain when an emotion is activated.

Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation that’s needed in the world. Welcome 🌿