No aspect of our lives is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions.

You don’t need to fully understand the distinctions between thoughts, feelings, or emotions to benefit from this approach when it’s needed. However, if you strongly believe that feelings and emotions are just interchangeable mental concepts, then this therapy may not be your approach of choice.

By any linguistic or academic standards, the words "feelings" and "emotions" have different semantic and semiotic values, and they are certainly not random phenomena, purely philosophical concepts or intentional thoughts that cross your mind. Traditionally, (emotional) feelings, perceived as sensory experiences with an intrinsic mental, physiological and behavioral component, were seen as the voice of the soul! So, academically speaking, what is a feeling? What is an emotion?

The academic literature provides us with as many definitions as there are models and theories of behavior in the social sciences, and authors to promote these schools of thought. The lack of scientific consensus on the functioning of the human brain has fueled many controversies on the nature of emotions and, in particular, on the causal relationship between thoughts, cognition, perception, emotional feelings, emotions, state of mind, decision making, and behavior. A widely accepted academic view defines emotions as coherent, deeply rooted psycho-physiological experiences.

While thoughts are pure mental experiences and feelings are sensory experiences, emotions are defined as the result of a process of cognitive reading, or mental reflection (mirroring) of emotional feelings. Thus, animals do experience various feelings, including fear, joy, compassion, and more - and react accordingly without really thinking about it, therefore without (technically speaking) experiencing emotions as defined by human standards. Behavioral reaction patterns are deeply rooted psycho-physiological scripts (software) governed by the subconscious mind and appear to be determined by how we feel rather than what we think about our feelings.

However you define them, your emotions are the most significant aspect of your quality of life and the most undeniable proof that you are not a soulless, heartless, and purposeless biochemical machine but a sentient human being in search of meaning, purpose, and happiness! Of course, everyone wants to be happy. But since there are unhappy and sick people everywhere, life's reality does not seem to emerge from people's desires. Although you can eventually use your willpower to control an emotionally driven behavior (and therefore be held accountable for your actions), I wouldn't bet on willpower alone being able to suppress intense emotions. You can pretend, but I doubt that you can feel happy or end pain just by wishing for it!

Although emotions are mental experiences, it does not mean intentional thoughts can create emotional feelings out of sheer will. The belief that intentional thoughts could create or induce emotional feelings is nothing but a false popular belief. Of course, your thoughts can induce certain "states of mind" by selectively triggering or awakening emotional feelings related to your emotionally significant life experiences. However, of the 82 scientifically recognized models and theories of behavior, none claim that intentional thought could create or induce emotional feelings. The human brain is hardwired in such a way that sensory inputs always pass through the emotional centers of the brain before reaching the frontal cortex - the place where rational thought occurs. It is therefore physically impossible for intentional thoughts to create emotional feelings through willpower alone.

The mind is the immaterial set of faculties comprising various cognitive and non-cognitive aspects called consciousness and respectively the subconscious mind. Consciousness is the accessible part of the mind that governs rational thoughts, intelligence, factual memory, judgment, and coordinates thoughtful actions. The subconscious mind operates as an autopilot guided mainly by intuition, instincts, habits, and feelings. Although they work so differently, your consciousness and sub-consciousness work together as coherent software to help you face life's challenges, survive and thrive. However, although from an academic perspective, the concept of mindset has not changed over time, its popular perception has undergone several changes.

When Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism and the author of the famous "Tao Te Chin", assures us that "If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fallow", he refers to "the mind" and one should not wrongly assume that by "mind" he meant "brain" or "intellect". When it comes to brain and intellect, Lao Tzu is crystal clear on how to get the most out of it when he suggests that you should "Stop thinking and put an end to your problems". It seems that Einstein understood this message because on several occasions he declared: "I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me."

State of mind plays a major role in people's daily experiences as well as in their physical and mental well-being. In their constant quest for a better state of mind, people have always known that the best the brain can do to the mind is to read accurately its state, not determine it. Because if it were possible for the brain to determine the state of mind by inducing by pure will the desired emotional feelings, then everyone could have focused their brain on the self-induction of pleasure, serenity, well-being and happiness, and live a joyful life forever. However, in real life, whether we like it or not, "the heart" always has its reasons that reason does not understand!

Traditionally, the heart was seen as the seat of the soul and its state reverberated in the physical body in the form of sensory experiences, commonly known as "feelings". This traditional view of feelings was dominated by the belief that whatever feeling arises against your will, it will not succumb to your reason alone. During the 19th century, the concepts that harmful thoughts are not only induced by harmful feelings but can also generate undesirable states of mind, as well as the concept that states of mind have their distinct chemical (hormonal) footprint, have gained in popularity.

Meanwhile, under intense political pressure to secularize society, in informal discourse "feelings" have gradually become "emotional feelings," and nowadays, "emotions." The same forces have shifted the initial focus of Psychiatry and Psychology from the mind and soul to consciousness and the brain. At first, "psychiatry" was known as the medicine of the soul or spirit, etymologically evolving from the Greek words "psyche" - soul/spirit, and "iatry" - treatment. The concept of "psychology" has evolved from "psyche" - soul/spirit, and "logos", meaning speech or study in greek. Thus, until the end of the 19th century, "psychology" was known as a branch of "philosophy".

Thus, because of endless controversies regarding the nature of emotions, it was only after 1844 that psychiatrists gradually imposed their treatment as a first-line intervention, and psychologists after 1892. Moreover, the first DSM wasn't published until 1952. When cognitive-behavioral models were first launched, their enthusiastic proponents assumed that intentional thoughts alone could control emotions and behavior. These models ridicule the concepts of the soul, spirit, and emotionally sensitive heart while emphasizing the brain as the probable source of emotions. Although cognitive models are still popular, the main cognitive theories are only three of the 82 contemporary behavior theories.

After the enthusiastic wave of cognitive models, the traditional concept of feelings has restored its popularity in light of the scientific recognition of several contemporary models of emotional behavior, particularly the somatic marker behavioral model developed in the early '90s by the American neuroscientist Prof. Dr. Antonio Damasio and Prof. Dr. Joseph LeDoux. Today's view of emotions is that they are experienced at four different but closely interrelated levels: the mental or psychological level, the physiological level (the chemistry of your body / brain), the somatic level (bodily emotional feelings), and the behavioral level. These complementary aspects are coherent and present in all human emotions.

When present, emotions always include a bodily feeling called somatic component or morphic field, a chemical (hormonal) component, and a cognitive component - which is the meaning your mind makes of your emotional feelings. From a biological and neurophysiological perspective - whether they are genetically determined, or result from a chemical, physiological or cognitive process - feelings are at the heart of life's regulatory processes for all living creatures. It is good to know that any thought that crosses your mind without arousing any feeling is nothing but a thought, not an emotion.

As you already know, your state of mind has a strong grip on your thoughts, your behavior, and on the symptoms of your illnesses. When angry, people tend to think, say, and do silly things. Yet, most people who regularly say or do silly things are not necessarily angry. Indeed, intense emotional feelings control thoughts and behavior, not the other way around! Definitely, your thoughts have the power to awaken your emotions. However, even if you manage to control to a certain degree the behavior driven by emotions awakened by your thoughts, I would not count on reason alone to suppress powerful feelings which have become a constant presence in your life.

In real life, feelings that arise against your will are unlikely to succumb to your reason, for only that which is born of reason can be banished by reason alone. Yet, whether they arise from your reason or against your will, emotional feelings will always have cognitive meaning, in the sense that your brain will know that your butterflies or the knots in your belly are not real but are there to tell you when you are in love or when you are afraid. When you do crazy things against your rational will, it's not that you lack judgment but rather that your feelings have taken over your decision-making process.

Since there is a certain amount of feelings involved in each decision you make, it appears that living a fulfilled life is much more about emotions, feelings, and beliefs than about intellect or thinking. The quality of your daily life decisions does not depend upon your IQ or on the level and quality of your academic instruction. The quality of your life depends on the quality of your decisions that rely mainly on your education, beliefs, wisdom, values, and above all, on the quality of your emotions. This is good news actually because while your IQ is an inborn gift that declines with age, your emotional intelligence grows as you mature and deepen your spirituality.

Apart from your intentional thoughts, there isn't much that actually happens in the intentionally accessible part of your brain. Through your sensory perceptions, the brain takes note and makes sense of what is happening in your world. When your eyes see an image or your ears hear a sound, what gives meaning and aesthetic value to images and sounds is your brain. However, you understand that the images and sounds are in the environment, outside of you. Likewise, I hope you understand that emotional feelings do not happen outside of you and not in your brain either – but inside of you. They inhabit you and you have no doubts about it because you feel them.

Although your memories can arouse emotional feelings related to your past events, you cannot create new emotional feelings (feelings) out of thin air, by sheer will alone. You think in words, sentences, and images, but you experience your emotions as emotional feelings, which are a kind of physical sensations in your body, called "feelings," "somatic markers," or "morphic fields." Although conventional psychology, when analyzing the cognitive component of emotions, describes many distinct emotions when analyzing the cognitive component of emotions, the practice of Somatic Hypnotherapy focuses solely on the sensory experience of emotions, called emotional feelings or, simply, "feelings".

From a scientific perspective, the sensory experience of emotions, called “emotional feeling,” is a “complex interplay of neurophysiological, cognitive, and sensory processes”—which is a fancy way of saying that “science is completely ignorant of what an emotional feeling is.” This scientific gap in understanding the nature of emotional feelings opens the way for what are called scientific models of emotional feeling—or hypotheses about what forward-thinking scientists assume feelings to be—ideas that have not achieved scientific consensus, but are nonetheless absurd. The best-known models of emotional feeling are Dr. Antonio Damasio’s “Somatic Marker Hypothesis” and Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “Morphic Fields” and “Morphic Resonance.”

Dr. Antonio Damasio, a prominent neuroscientist, introduced the concept of somatic markers in his somatic marker hypothesis, detailed in his 1994 book Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Somatic markers are a mechanism by which emotional experiences, stored as bodily states, influence decision-making and reasoning, often unconsciously. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and author known for his unconventional theories, posits that emotional feelings and inheritance operate through mechanisms beyond traditional science, specifically via "morphic fields" and "morphic resonance." Which makes a lot of sense to those familiar with Dr. Bruce Lipton's theory of epigenetic inheritance and the "Human Genome Project" failure.

Dr. Antonio Damasio defines "somatic markers" as emotionally charged bodily signals (states) rooted in the body's visceral and sensory reactions. He posits that emotional experiences create somatic markers, like memories of events rooted in the body. These are physiological responses that occur when a person is faced with a decision or situation and act as a shortcut to guide choices based on previous experiences and outcomes, helping the brain effectively manage complex decisions. Somatic markers are not abstract thoughts or emotions, but emotionally charged physical sensations shaped by memory and learning. They bias decision-making by influencing decision choices, often even before any conscious deliberation.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake posits emotional feelings are manifestations of "morphic fields" which he describes as organizing structures carrying collective memory. Sheldrake's theory, first detailed in his 1981 book “A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance” posits that nature has an inherent memory, organized by morphic fields. These are fields non-physical, organizing structures that shape the form and behavior of self-organizing systems, such as crystals, organisms, and human societies. Morphic resonance is the process whereby these systems inherit a collective memory from past, similar systems, suggesting that the laws of nature are more like habits than fixed rules.

Contemporary theories of emotion converge around the key role of the limbic system (amygdala, thalamus, hypothalamus, insula), a subcortical brain structure that evaluates and integrates a variety of "bodi states" as sensory info rmation (feelings) and assigns them appropriate emotional values , such as valence (positive/negative or pleasant/unpleasantness), intensity (degree or strength of emotional response), and approachability (being easy to meet or deal with) - without defining, however,  the nature of those “feelings” or of the "bodily states". The amygdala regulates the autonomic and endocrine functions, decision-making, and adaptations of instinctive and motivational behaviors through learning, and activation of the fight-or-flight response.

Although emotional feelings are private and subjective experiences categorized by valence (positive or negative) and arousal (intensity of activation), they rely on material and measurable neural/physiological interactions between the brain and the body. Even though they are not "energy" in the strictly conventional physical sense, their substrates can be studied objectively. Regardless whether we perceive emotional feelings as biologically, chemically, or mentally determined bodily states, somatic markers, morphic fields, or simply energy; they are real, we can easily map, identify, categorize and describe them, but above all their manifestation and effects can be objectively measured.

The heart is much more than a hydraulic pump. Traditionally considered the seat of the soul, the heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field in the human body. The heart's electromagnetic field is about 5,000 times stronger than the brain's, radiates in a torus-shaped field extending up to several feet outward, influencing so the whole body at a cellular level. Emotional states directly modulate the heart’s electromagnetic field, which acts as a dynamic interface between subjective experience and measurable physiology. While the heart’s EMF is not a stand-alone “energy” in mystical terms, its coherence reflects and influences both individual health and interpersonal connections through scientifically validated mechanisms.

Robust evidence from HeartMath and psychophysiology confirms that the heart’s EMF is influenced by emotional states. Positive emotions like gratitude or love enhance its coherence and strength, while negative emotions like anger or fear disrupt it. This is grounded in measurable changes to HRV and autonomic activity, making it a widely studied and credible phenomenon in scientific literature.

Animals have an electrically active heart that generates measurable and externally detectable electromagnetic fields, just like humans. The animal heart field is dynamic and responds to psychological states, including stress, relaxation, fear, and security. These changes mirror human responses and indicate that the animal's emotional state directly influences its heart and resonates through the heart's electromagnetic field. Electromagnetic resonance could explain animal and interspecies emotional regulation, emotional contagion, or emotional imprinting—well-documented phenomena also observed in animal-assisted therapy.

Even though feelings trigger super-fast responses, often driving reactions before related conscious reasoning occurs, they don’t replace logic but guide it, especially when stakes are high or data is incomplete. Emotional feelings precede and shape emotional perception, blending material and subjective components. Unlike instinctive reflexes, emotional feelings are often unintentionally learned subconscious emotional cues shaped by personal and cultural experience. They can be felt overtly as a “gut instinct” or a strong emotional reaction or operate subtly, influencing decisions without full awareness.

Emotional feelings are physiological signals that act as a bridge between body, emotion, and reason. Therefore, in real life, what matters, what can control behavior and ultimately fulfill or make people's lives miserable, are feelings, not their cognitive reading or the meaning our mind gives to our feelings, which we call emotions. In real life, when we feel fear, we react with fear, whether we call this fearful feeling stress, anxiety, lack of confidence, low self-esteem, etc. When falling in love, a girl will pursue the subject of her love, regardless of whether she is intelligent and instantly understands that she is in love or whether she is mentally challenged and finds it difficult to grasp the meaning of her butterflies, her fast-pounding heart, and her waves of warmth.

Emotions as mental experiences are primarily the result of emotionally significant life experiences filtered through a belief system. This process of filtering reality and assigning an emotional meaning to the observed world is called perception. Through various spiritual teachings, we learn that there are only two basic emotional feelings, two primal roots of all emotions: love and fear - which are correlative concepts such as light and darkness. Every human thought, word, or deed is based in one feeling or the other. You  have free choice about which one you want to welcome in your life. Living in love or in fear is what makes the difference between success and failure in life.

Love is the most powerful force in the universe. Love is life’s most powerful healer. If science tells us how the world was created and how it works, the spiritual teachings tell us that love has been the driving force, the reason the world has been created. Using the same recipe, we can create happiness through the expression of our unconditional love, a love that transcends all cultures and understanding. Love is the energy that allows your mind to expand, open, shine, reveal, share and heal. Love gives everything, allows us to stand naked, lets us go.

Fear is an unpleasant feeling and it turns out to be the worst thing we should fear, because once installed in our life, fear rules over all our thoughts, decisions, and actions. Fear is the killer of human hearts, because it is impossible for you to be happy or to make those around you happy as long as you are afraid. Fear is the energy that constricts your mind, locks you up, makes you run away, hide, hoard, and harm. Fear clings to everything we have, wraps our bodies in clothes, and seizes us.

These fields influence biological systems, and he view feelings as dense energy morphic fields, shaped by past experiences.

When faced with a choice, the brain retrieves relevant somatic markers. These signals “mark” options—positive markers favor a choice, negative markers discourage it. This happens fast, often before conscious reasoning.

...to be continued.... :)

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Disclaimer: The content of this page reflects the opinion of its author, is provided for educational and general informational purposes only, and does not constitute medical, psychological, or professional advice. I do not make any diagnoses according to recognized classifications (DSM-5, ICD-10) and I do not interfere in any way with ongoing treatments.

If you are already under medical care or treatment, follow their advice and treatment. I am not a doctor or licensed psychologist in Quebec; therefore, I cannot establish or continue a treatment based on your diagnosis. If you decide to consult me, be prepared to tell me what is bothering you and how you feel about it. 

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